One of the biggest challenges facing bodybuilders is ensuring that all muscle fibers have been recruited and exhausted during an exercise so muscle gains can be maximized during each and every workout.
Let's face it, our time is precious and the time we spend in the gym should be as effective and as productive as possible.
Bottom line we want results from the efforts we put into the gym.
In order to achieve this you have to work beyond failure and experience a higher level of training intensity than before. This also ensures that your workouts remain challenging and continue to produce progress over time.
If you find yourself going through the motions during a workout it's time to introduce new ways of raising your level of intensity.
But how do you go about increasing your workout intensity?
Unfortunately, the more is better approach is not the right answer. One of the biggest dangers confronting serious bodybuilders is the tendency to over train.
You have to resist the temptation to seek improvement by simply adding more exercises or extra workouts to an already demanding training regimen.
While there are many different techniques for increasing training intensity, here we'll focus on the role that partial reps play.
Partial reps allow the introduction of additional intensity to your exercise without adding significantly to the duration of your training.
Partial rep training, in a nutshell, involves only moving the weight in a shortened range of motion. The key is to always use the strongest portion of the rep. For example, for the bench press; this would be lowering the bar halfway down and then powering it back up.
It can be anywhere in the range of motion of an exercise whether its bench press, curls, shoulder press, squats, etc.
To get the most out of partial repetitions you should follow these five simple steps:
1. Use a much heavier weight than you would for the full range version of the same exercise.
2. Perform partial reps only from the halfway stage or mid-point of the exercise.
3. Use this method primarily on lagging body parts.
4. Perform only one exercise for one set per body part.
5. Use only as a supplement to full range movement exercises, not instead of.
Bodybuilders often reach a plateau which is difficult to break, by introducing techniques such as partial reps; you can significantly raise your workout intensity and stimulate further muscle growth quickly.
Once you have added this technique to your training regimen you'll know you've done your best to maximize muscle growth.
How Partial Reps Increase Training Intensity
