yOU’VE PROBABLY DONE biceps curls and triceps pressdowns before. But what if you’ve been doing them all wrong?
Those on the quest for bigger biceps and triceps need to ask this question as more and more research surfaces in support of the “lengthened partial.” What is a lengthened partial? When you do any standard strength exercise, there’s a point where the muscle fully contracts, where you’re often told to squeeze that muscle extra hard—say, when your biceps are contracted at the top of a dumbbell curl. As you lower the weight, though, the muscle gradually stretches out; it’s this portion of the rep that study after study (and there were three recent ones) correlates with growth. This part of the rep is the lengthened partial. “These little pulsing reps [in the lengthened range of motion] emphasize the portion of the lift most associated with growth,” says bodybuilding competitor and coach Jeff Nippard, creator of the Pure Bodybuilding Program. Indeed, a recent study of 44 resistance-trained men found that those who did partial range-of-motion skull crushers experienced more arm growth than those who did reps in the full range of motion.
It’s no wonder Reddit muscleheads debate whether you even need to use a complete range of motion to go from Bruce Banner arms to Hulk arms. Nippard, however, stops short of that. “I don’t think we have enough research to say that, across the board, the lengthened part is definitely better than the squeezed part on every exercise,” he says. “So I’m not gonna throw out exercises I’ve been doing for more than a decade.”
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