Shock Ya Body, MIC Check 1,2
Yeah, I know it’s “roc” rather than “shock”, but the latter suits the purposes of this post much better – and makes me look like one smart geezer too, I hope…
Anyway, recently I received a comment on an article I wrote on building biceps in which the commenter mentioned “static contraction training”.
I had an incline about what it might be – well, the clue is in the name – but I looked it up anyway. This led me to an e-book written by a man named Pete Sisco. Although I’ve not gone through the entire book yet – I will, once I’ve got the time – I do understand the gist of it, and, it’s very, very good stuff.
In a nutshell, the premise is, full range of motion isn’t needed to build muscle, and partial repetitions (movement of 2-8 inches at the strongest point of the rep) or even static holds (counted in seconds obviously, and not reps) can build great amounts of muscle – under certain conditions.
Those conditions (in order of importance) are…
• If the weight is consistently increased (just like normal training)
• If the number of reps are increased
• If the number of sets are increased
• If the total time to perform all sets of an exercise is decreased
And, it’s all done scientifically, with formulas (I’ll explain another time), which basically amount to being able to calculate each factor every workout to know if you made progress or not, and what you have to do to make progress.
For instance, you could make progress by lifting 200lb for 5 reps and 3 sets one week, and 200lb for 5 reps and 3 sets the next week – simply by taking less rest time between sets, which is one of the 4 ways mentioned above of increasing the intensity.
So, what’s this got to do with me and what I’m doing?
Well, after my warm up sets – which I think should always be full range of motion – I’m either performing my normal sets, and then performing partials at the end of them, or I’m performing partials as my working sets for some exercises. I’m just keen to see what happens with this…
One thing is, while performing partial reps, the amount of weight which can be used is far more than performing full reps, so, it’ll be a very interesting month, and I’ve a feeling I’ll be writing much more about this very soon.
