The Problem: You are unaware how to maximally lengthen and shorten your target muscle

Grab a protein shake and get ready to learn. I think I have said this before, but if you want FULLY developed muscles you must use a FULL range of motion. I know what you’re thinking, I already know that you dummy. Ok then, let’s see how many of you actually know. Let’s take a quiz here and see how many of you can pass it:

Quiz time

1. How do you ensure your hammies are fully shortened when doing lying leg curls?

2. How do you fully lengthen your bicep when doing incline curls?

3. And here is my favorite which everybody thinks they know. How do you fully shorten your triceps when doing triceps pressdowns?

It would be interesting to end it here and see how many of you could answer these questions correctly but I will forge on. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, that may be one reason why your results are lackluster in the gym, but we are here to fix that.

The solution: Learn your anatomy and proper anatomical muscle function

First, which I know you are all dying to see, let’s get to the answers of the above quiz:

1. If your butt is flying up in the air when doing lying leg curls you are wasting your time. Go home, you are not impressing anybody. As soon as your ass goes in the air, less tension is placed on the hammies. In order to maintain maximum tension and thus maximum shortening, the hip must be extended; which means your butt needs to stay locked down and NOT flying up in the air. So, next time you do your lying leg curls, try to do it with NO butt movement. Keep those hips locked down!! It will be difficult and you will have to reduce the weight if you can’t keep your butt/hips locked down. But we are here for growth, so once again put ego aside and experience maximum hypertrophy of the hammies. Do it right and you will probably never have felt the hammies contract like that before.

2. This one was probably pretty easy to. The best way to ensure your bicep is fully lengthened when doing incline curls is to contract the antagonistic muscle, which is the tricep. Flex your tricep at the bottom of the motion before engaging your bicep to curl the weight back up. This goes the other way too. Want to ensure your tricep is fully lengthened, flex your bicep.

3. Bear with me here on this one. You can only fully contract/shorten your triceps on your pressdowns when your elbows are behind you and your arms are slightly internally rotated (palm facing behind you), with your elbows fully extended. Try this if you don’t believe me. Do the pressdown motion and slowly move your hands so that they are behind your hips. You should be able to feel your triceps contracting more as your hands get further behind your hips.

Well, how many did you get right? I didn't get any of them right at first so don't feel bad if you didn't either.

So, the moral of the story here again is: If you’re not fully shortening and lengthening your muscles through their complete range of motion, you are not stimulating the maxim amount of muscle fiber and therefore you are not causing new growth. Pick up the anatomy book and learn the proper anatomical function of the major muscles so that you know how to fully shorten and lengthen the muscle and how to work it in its most optimum plane. Knowledge is power which equates to growth when we are talking muscle.

I’ll leave you with a couple things to ponder and do some research on since we don't like to spoonfeed everything here:)

1. How do you fully lengthen your pecs and
2. How do you fully contract your lats?

Grow Big
Makwa