What's up, guys? Jake Hutton from Fitness Culture. We've got a new film guy, Parker
behind the camera today, so I set up in my power stance. He's a little bit shorter,
so we don't have to have an upward angle. Anyway, today we're gonna be going over
mechanical advantage extended sets. So unlike a traditional drop set where
you'd maybe hit some reps, drop the weight, and then continue to push out
some more reps, mechanical advantage is gonna allow you to use the exact
same weight and you can either change your grip, change the angle of the
movement, or even change the movement completely, and extend the set that way.
So we're gonna be going over a few different variations today. So let's get into it.
When you use these mechanical advantage sets in your training,
just like any other training protocol, you can use them for strength, hypertrophy,
or muscle endurance. It just depends on the rep range. So right now I'm gonna be showing
you how we would utilize this for a bench press. So on a mechanical advantage
set for bench press we're gonna be changing our grip.
What we're gonna do is start with our weakest grip on the bench, which for me is gonna
be a close grip. It's gonna be a little bit different for everybody, the way that
you train your bench, but typically for someone that has a big bench press or
is training to get a big bench press, usually that wider grip or your
best mechanical advantage on the bar for your body type
is gonna be where you're the strongest. So the way that we usually utilize this on the
bench press is we start, let's say we're doing strength protocol we
would go 85 to 90 percent of your one rep max for 4 to 6 reps on a close grip,
and then we would take a 10 second break, rack the weight, keep the exact
same weight on, and then we'd widen our grip a little bit and that would allow
us to have a stronger pressing position and allow us to bang out a couple more reps.
So it's gonna look like this. You set up in your close grip setup.
We'll say I've come almost to failure right here, 5 reps, then I'm gonna shake
it out ten seconds, then I'm gonna widen my grip to my stronger bench grip,
and then bang out 2 to 3 more reps. So that's an example of how we would use this on
the bench press. Now we're gonna show you how we would use the same type of
concept for a pull-up or chin up. All right, so now we're gonna be showing you
how we would use this on the pull-up. This one's a combination of changing
your grip, but also changing the exercise a little bit. But really,
you're just changing your grip on the pull-up bar. So we would
start with a wide grip pull up, and then move to a chin up, and then finish with
our strongest pull, which is going to be a neutral grip chin up. For someone that's
better at pull-ups we like to use this kind of more for hypertrophy or muscular
endurance, so we would hit basically 5 at each grip. So we'd go 5 wide grip.
Then you rest for about ten seconds, you can go a little bit less rest depending
on how good you are at pull ups, then we'd switch to a chin up grip,
so palms facing our face. Bang out another 5.
Then rest for another ten seconds. And then we'll finish with our strongest grip,
which is going to be the neutral grip.
So the next variation we'll be showing you guys is basically changing
the angle of the movement to give yourself a mechanical advantage. So we're
gonna be using the incline dumbbell bench as an example. So we're gonna be
starting with a high incline, and let's say we're doing a set of 6 in each
movement, so we're gonna do 3 total, total of 18 reps. We're gonna go
6 at the high incline, then we're gonna drop it to a mid incline, and then
we're gonna finish 6 with just a flat bench. So you're gonna be a little bit
stronger in every movement obviously, and that's gonna allow you to bang out more
reps that way. You start at high incline. The goal is to go almost all the way to
failure on this. 6 reps, obviously this is light for me just for the demo,
let's just say that I hit failure close to those 6 right there. Our rest is gonna
be just changing the bench angle, and we're gonna get back to this mid angle,
hit another 6.
Drop the weights and then finish it off with the flat bench.
So these sets are really good for muscular endurance, but hypertrophy as well.
All right, the last one we're going to talk
about is just changing the movement to give yourself a mechanical advantage.
Basically you're just moving from your weakest, the same thing I'm just
repeating myself, weakest to your strongest movement, but we're gonna stay
in the same family of movements. So today we're gonna be showing you a barbell
overhead press variation. We'll start with behind the neck press, rack the weight,
change this to an in front of the neck standard military press, and then from
there we'll rack it, shake it out, and then finish with a push press. Or if you
still have enough in the tank, you don't have to rack, you can just go
straight into it. So in our example today we'll just do sets of 6 again.
So we'll go 6 behind the neck press.
Rack the weight, give yourself a couple seconds, then we're gonna move into
a standard overhead press from front of the neck.
And the last ones gonna be a push press. With the push press we're just gonna dip
straight down, use our legs, explode with our hips, and use the momentum from our
lower body to help us bang out those few extra reps.
Alright guys, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to use some
different variations of mechanical advantage extended sets in your training.
I hope that it gave you some ideas of some things to mix up your training a
little bit. When your training gets stale, it's always good to
have new variations to, number one, make the gym more exciting and
number two, just to give you that extra stimulus that you may need to get those
muscles to grow or bust through that strength plateau. So mechanical advantage sets are
a great way to do that, they're super fun, they challenge you a ton, and we really have
seen huge increases in strength and hypertrophy, just busting through
plateaus using these techniques. If you like this content please subscribe to
the channel, leave me a comment on what you want me to talk about next. Thank you.