What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
So, I said it: full range of motion is killing your gains, and it actually is true.
There’s no bigger believer in the benefits of full range of motion on an exercise for
getting, not only maximum strength gains and size gains, but also for keeping you safe.
As a physical therapist it matters to me that you’re not just gaining, but that you’re
staying healthy in the process.
But if you’re confusing full range of motion of a joint with full range of motion of an
exercise I can promise you’re leaving gains on the table.
Here’s exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m going to demonstrate first and foremost with a pretty easy exercise to demonstrate
on.
It’s actually one of the better tricep exercises that people tend to skip.
It’s a tricep kickback.
Now the issue is, what is the range of motion of the joint that’s doing the work here?
The joint that’s doing the work now, is the elbow.
It can fully flex, and it can extend all the way back.
But that doesn’t mean that the tricep kickback requires that you go through full joint range
of motion to do it.
It requires that you go through full exercise range of motion on a tricep kickback, which
is a lot different.
Some people call this ‘half-repping’, but I’m telling you it’s a full rep.
You don’t want to go past here.
You start here, you go back into contraction here, and you come back to here again.
Where the dumbbell is parallel to gravity.
Then you go back up again.
Then you come down.
It’s a short range of motion.
This is a contracted position exercise where peak tension occurs here, in the contracted
position.
What most people do is keep going all the way to here, and then they go up.
Then they go here, and they go up because they think that full range of motion of the
elbow is what’s necessary.
But really, all I’m doing is a hammer curl from here, to here.
I’m not working my triceps.
But there are other places this rears its ugly head, too.
One of them is a surprise to a lot of people.
It’s a shoulder press.
When we shoulder press a lot of us will go like this.
First of all, don’t go with your elbows back, behind your head.
The elbows traveling behind your head, for a lot of reasons we already talked about on
this channel.
How that’s not the safest position by a long shot for your shoulders.
You always want your elbows in front of your body, but how low?
A lot of people will come all the way down, then press up, and all the way down, and press
up.
But what you’re doing by doing that is giving the muscles a break for the bottom 20, or
30 degrees of that press.
Where you really want to be is right here.
You can see from the back that middle delt doesn’t really kick in until I get to where
my elbows, and upper arms are pretty much perpendicular to the ground.
Down here they’re pretty much in a more relaxed position, and then they kick in right
here.
They’re relaxed at the bottom, they kick in right here.
So, what you want to do is start pressing from here, if you want to keep the tension
on that middle delt.
You can see it contracting every, single rep without taking a breather.
These are a lot harder, and you’ll probably have to decrease the amount of weight that
you’re using to accomplish this, but at the end of the day we’re not getting that
brief rest at the bottom every, single time.
Now I want to get a little trickier.
That is on a side dumbbell raise.
On a side dumbbell raise this shows you how, even the same exercise done with different
equipment, can have a different impact.
But full range of motion on this exercise is not this.
Why?
Because from here to here, the arm is pretty quiet.
If I want to keep the tension, have constant tension on the delts here, then what I want
to do is start here, and then come up to here.
Then back down to here and come up to here.
Instantly, why did this 15lb weight become that much more difficult?
Because I’m keeping constant tension on the muscles there in the shoulder.
Now if the purpose of your training is for overall strength, or power, even in the press
coming down, and using your legs, and using your upper chest to press off of, and recruited
more muscles is a different goal.
That’s a different purpose.
If hypertrophy and gains are what you’re after, then you need to start considering
that full range of motion of a joint is not always necessarily full range of motion.
What’s the twist here with this one?
Well, we know that the shoulder can go across the body.
We saw how once you get down the midline here you’re losing the tension on the bicep – on
the shoulder.
But not if I was doing it with a cable.
So now if I do it with a cable – come around this way, Jesse.
I’m over here.
Now there is tension and stretch on this muscle at the same time.
As long as I’m pulling in this direction a little bit I’ve got adduction, which is
stretching the shoulder here, but I’ve got tension, too.
So, the increased range of motion on a cable side lateral raise is here, to there, and
back down.
You can see all that tension down, down, still, still there, and lengthened.
And up, and then down, down, tension, tension, tension.
So, you can see that even something that’s supposed to be the same is different, in terms
of range of motion, and it always varies from exercise to exercise, in terms of what that
range of motion is with the actual joint’s range of motion.
So, don’t get confused.
Stop just doing everything through full range of motion.
Learn what the actual full range is on that exercise, and I promise you’re going to
get more out of it.
I say it all the time guys.
It’s not what exercises you do, it’s how you do them.
I’m happy to show you how to do all of it, step by step in our ATHLEANX training program.
Click over here, make sure you head over there and start training with me every, single day.
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I said it in the last video.
If you don’t do that you’re going to hate yourself, I promise you.
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that, too.
All right, guys.
See you soon.