Tips of the week Partial repeats

Use partial repetitions to improve your pull-up performance

Are you bad at pull-ups? Avoid machines and use this technique instead.

Exercisers who can't do many pull-ups usually use some kind of machine for assisted pull-ups. However, most of these machines won't get you far enough up that you can move your chin over the bar and none of these machines will work on your capacity to move your body in space as the body is fixed (meaning no three-dimensional movement is possible). Is there a better method? Yes, partial repetitions.

How to perform partial repetitions for pull-ups

1. Move your body into the top position of a pull-up by stepping onto a bench. Then lift your feet so that you are hanging freely from the pull-up bar and perform partial repetitions at the top of the pull-up range of motion. Only go down far enough so that you can pull yourself back up again afterwards. Perform 3 to 5 partial repetitions.
2. Then lower yourself to the lower position in a controlled manner and perform partial repetitions from the lowest point of the movement. Pull yourself up as far as possible and then lower your body again in a controlled manner. Perform as many repetitions as possible.

Over time, the length of each of these two phases will increase and you will soon be able to perform pull-ups across the entire range of motion.

Bonus method: horizontal rowing

Although this movement doesn't involve the same movement pattern as pull-ups, it can still help you practice lifting your own body. There will be some carryover for pull-ups. While this is not my primary strategy, it can be added to the workout as it is not too taxing on the body.

Don't fight insomnia - get up

There's a reason you wake up in the middle of the night. Don't fight it.

By TC Luoma

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/living/tip-dont-fight-insomnia-get-up

First and second stages of sleep

It's a long-forgotten part of human physiology, but until a few hundred years ago, people slept in two separate sleep stages called "first sleep" and "second sleep". When it got dark, they went to bed, but then they woke up sometime after midnight, got out of bed, ate, socialized with other people, or did whatever they wanted before going back to bed and sleeping until the sun came up.

As electricity and artificial lighting became more widespread, this behavior was forgotten, as lightness and darkness were no longer determined by the sun, but by who turned the lamp on and off. Nevertheless, people still wake up at night. And as much as they try to go back to sleep, their genetic memory remembers the first and second sleep.

To this day, people still wake up in the middle of the night and blame insomnia for this, even though it is instead a completely normal and perhaps even desirable behavior. In fact, sleep researchers who recreated the "first sleep/second sleep" behavior in modern subjects () found that the time before the first sleep and the second sleep was the most relaxing time of the day, almost reminiscent of yoga meditation in this respect. Biochemically speaking, the test subjects released large amounts of prolactin between the sleep phases - the hormone that is also released after an orgasm and produces a feeling of well-being.

Of course, modern people find this phase anything but relaxing. They try to force themselves to fall asleep or even use pharmaceutical sleep aids.

Do the following instead

If you habitually wake up in the middle of the night, consider the following options:

1. Get up instead of lying in bed desperately trying to fall back asleep. Do something pleasant that relaxes you instead of stimulating you. If you're reading, use a Kindle or one of those old-fashioned book things (the blue light from electric screens affects your sleep hormones in undesirable ways). Go back to bed after about half an hour. Instead of consciously trying to fall asleep, wait patiently, because the more desperately you try to fall asleep, the harder it will be.
2. If you really can't get back to sleep, consider nutritional interventions instead of potentially addictive medications. Magnesium plays a crucial role in regulating sleep patterns and magnesium deficiency is widespread in our society. 400 to 500 mg before bedtime can often have an immediate effect.

Don't try to train your triceps with dips

Changing the form of performing dips to train your triceps will ruin your joints. Here's a better method that works great

By Joel Seedman, PhD

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-dont-try-to-hit-the-triceps-with-dips

A common trend seen with dips is to change the angles and mechanics to target the triceps more. Unfortunately, this change in body mechanics is a great way to promote dysfunctional movement patterns that can damage the joints. This is what I call incorrect targeting of specific muscle activation, as the exerciser neglects the correct activation patterns in the hope of activating specific muscles.

Proper execution of dips should involve centering the upper body with load distributed evenly across the joints and muscles involved rather than isolating a specific area. Aside from saving your joints, this type of execution places you in the strongest position to move the most weight and maximize muscle growth.

Do the following instead

If your goal is to target your triceps, then there is a more efficient method. Instead of sacrificing your natural body mechanics, you can try using pre-fatigue while using ideal mechanics and technique during dips.

To load your triceps more effectively during dips and minimize the use of the chest and shoulder muscles, you can perform an isolation exercise for the triceps such as cable tricep presses or lying tricep presses (skullcrusgers) directly before performing dips. This will fatigue the triceps and cause your triceps to give up before your chest and shoulder muscles during the subsequent dips.

More importantly, train your triceps with emphasis while keeping your movement pattern intact, rather than ruining your natural body mechanics with a mutated version of the exercise.

Avoid non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and ice treatments to treat muscle soreness

If you're using ice or painkillers after brutal workouts, you're stunting your muscle growth

By TC Luoma

Source:https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-avoid-nsaids-and-icing-sore-muscles

The truth about inflammation

Without inflammation, injuries wouldn't heal...ever. Any disease would last for years. Even the muscles you want to strengthen and build would probably never get stronger or bigger if inflammation didn't exist. The whole battle that takes place after an injury or hard training sessions is a strictly choreographed offense designed to heal the body. The swelling that occurs with inflammation allows the "superhero proteins" - white blood cells and antibodies - to enter the arena.

However, when you treat an injury with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aspririn, ibuprofen, etc.), you prevent all of this. You stop the healing process. Although ice treatment or painkillers may be fine for treating long-lasting chronic pain, you should think twice about using them to treat acute, short-term pain.

Recommendations:

1. Don't cool your muscles with ice or ice spray after exercise. Ice does not contribute to healing, it only relieves pain.
2. Do not use non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs after training or for minor injuries unless absolutely necessary.
3. To treat daily, non-exercise related inflammation and increase the chances of good overall health, avoid pro-inflammatory practices (not enough sleep, alcohol consumption, poor diet, etc.) and use anti-inflammatory nutrients such as curcumin and/or concentrated fish oil.
4. To treat chronic inflammation or severe pain, use non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs as directed on the package insert or take two capsules of curcumin twice daily and/or 4 to 8 capsules of fish oil per day.
5. If you push yourself to your limits in the gym and this pushes your inflammation levels up to an alarming level, then some light exercise such as walking the following day can reduce inflammation to a non-damaging, muscle-building level.
6. If extreme training in the gym day after day is your status quo, then you should use appropriate supplementation around your training to keep your inflammation levels in the green zone. This will prevent your inflammatory processes from running amok and your muscle soreness from becoming unbearable, so that you are able to give it your all day after day in training and make maximum progress.

Take on the Farmers Walk challenge

Improve your conditioning, grip strength, trapezius and just about everything else with this tough test.

By Dan John | 12/29/15

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-do-the-farmers-walk-challenge

Simple but brutal

Grab a pair of 40 kilo dumbbells or kettlebells. That's the weight my former high school football players used. Of course, you can adjust the weight, but 40 kilos is the right choice for most adults.

The challenge is simple: go as far as you can in 5 minutes. It works best if you walk away from the starting point so that the rest of the training session makes more sense.

The rest of the workout is easy: bring the weights back to the starting point.

Obviously, the hard part of the challenge is getting the dumbbells back to the starting point. If it took you 5 minutes to carry them away, then it can take a long time to get back to the starting point. Just maintain your posture and discover your trapezius for the first time.

If you are doing this exercise in a gym, run circles around any equipment or run back and forth. (Don't use a treadmill for this, or film it if you're doing the exercise on a treadmill, so we can laugh if you fall). An unpopular variation on this challenge is to do a 15 minute walk and then come back - but that's probably more for the crazy ones.

Perform floor presses

Here's why you should occasionally bench press without a bench

By Christian Thibaudeau

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-do-the-floor-press

Floor presses - barbell bench presses performed lying on the floor without a bench - have become a staple exercise for many top powerlifters, but basically anyone who wants to get stronger and build muscle can benefit from this exercise.

Interestingly, this is not a new exercise, but the rediscovery of a very old exercise. Long ago, before exercisers had weight benches, floor presses were the only chest exercise these exercisers could perform. This exercise has been around for over 100 years.

It is a very effective exercise for building compressive strength and muscle mass in the chest, shoulders and triceps. To understand why this exercise is effective, it is important to understand the force production when you move a weight.

3 factors that contribute to force production:

1. The actual contraction of the muscle.
2. The elasticity of the muscle tissue and tendons. A muscle is naturally elastic. Like a rubber band, it will return to its normal length with force after it has been stretched. This pre-stretch contributes to force production when you move a weight and the muscle returns to its normal length.
3. The myostatic stretch reflex. A muscle has receptors called muscle spindles. When this muscle is stretched, the spindles activate the stretch reflex, which shortens the muscle to prevent it from tearing. This contribution to force production works in conjunction with the elasticity of the muscle.

Pushing on the floor reduces the contribution of elasticity and the stretch reflex. If you pause with your upper arms on the floor for a second or two at the start of each repetition, you can reduce the contribution of the stretch reflex by around 90%. This is the reason why most of us will be weaker on floor presses than bench presses, even though the range of motion is significantly shorter.

By inhibiting the stretch reflex, you rely almost entirely on the actual contraction of the muscles during floor presses. This results in a more powerful contraction and a lot of gains in mass and strength. In this sense, floor presses are the upper body counterpart to deadlifts.

This does not mean that you should forgo regular bench presses in favor of floor presses. If you do, you will lose your ability to use the stretch reflex to your advantage, which will reduce your performance and increase your risk of injury.

Train the top and bottom of the deadlift

By John Gaglione

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-work-the-top-and-bottom-range-of-the-deadlift

Once you've learned the basics of the deadlift and you have weak points in the movement, it's important to use specific exercises to increase strength in the lower and upper range of motion.

Deadlift from blocks(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRcIKKQInAc)

To increase strength in the upper part of the movement, there is nothing better than deadlifts from blocks. This exercise is better than rack pulls because the bar bends in the same way as if you were pulling from the floor. Instead of blocks, you can also place the barbell on another elevation such as weight plates. There are simply too many ways to cheat when you lift the weight from a rack and you can only mimic the correct deadlift position when you pull from blocks.

Deadlift deficit(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HquEKxHeNo)

Deficit deadlifts are excellent for strength in the lower range of motion. Standing on an elevation will make the beginning of the movement much harder. This is extremely important if you have problems lifting the weight from the floor. It is not necessary to overdo it with the height of the elevation - a few centimeters is sufficient.

When should you do these exercises

These supporting exercises should be performed after your work sets. In general, sets of 5 to 8 repetitions work best, but occasionally you can perform heavier sets of 3 repetitions or heavy single repetitions instead of the traditional deadlift.

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-do-stage-reps-to-improve-your-pull-ups

By Christian Thibaudeau