out of all the intensity techniques in the world one has by far the most science behind it and it's not drop sets it's not for reps or super sets or cheat reps it's actually a technique called long length partials and a lot of new evidence suggests that not only do long length partials beat out all those other techniques they may also be even better than a standard full range of motion that's why you've probably seen so many people in the fitness Bas doing them lately so in this video I want to explain why I think
they work so well how to use them and some common mistakes I see people making first what exactly are long length partials well they're pretty simple let's say you're doing a bicep curl a full range of motion would be when you go all the way up and all the way down taking the elbow from about 0° at the bottom to about 150° at the top but we can split that full range of motion up into two halves doing curls in the top half would be short length partials because the biceps are more contracted and doing
curls in the bottom half would be long length partials because the biceps are more stretched and as you stretch a muscle it gets longer hence the name long length partials so to figure out if a muscle muscle is at a long length or not just think about which half of the range of motion stretches the muscle the most and that's the half you want so on squats you can see what a short length partial looks like here on the left and you can see what a long length partial looks like on the right and notice
that with the long length partials I'm still getting a deep stretch on my quads and glutes in the bottom but then I'm only going about halfway up to the top so I'm cutting out the squeezed part by contrast with short length partials you only go halfway down so you're completely cutting out the Deep stretch and I wouldn't recommend doing these onlap pull Downs along l partial would look like this where you only go about halfway down to your chest and again that's because the lats are more stretched at the top with the arms up overhead
and while most serious lifters still assume that a full range of motion is always best over the last few years a growing pile of research has shown that it is in fact the stretched part of the range that triggers the most muscle growth not full range of motion per se just consider this as of now there are eight studies comparing long length partials to short length partials and seven of those eight studies found that long length partials were better for muscle growth one study found found no difference and no studies favored short length partials but
it gets even better because we now also have five studies comparing a full range of motion to long length partials and four of those five studies found that long length partials were better for muscle growth than a full range of motion just one study found no difference and no studies favored full ROM but the thing is even in the study that found no difference it only used 10% of full range for the partial group so half the subjects in this study were only doing one0 reps again in the stretch part and still saw equal growth
to the group doing full ROM so not only are long length partials clearly better than short length partials they might be better than full range of motion at least in some cases now in case it seems like I'm overstating the evidence here I spoke with the world's leading researcher in this area Dr Milo wolf and he seemed just as excited about long length partials as me personally I'm own training for about 9 or 10 months now I've been doing exclusively lengthened partials for all of my hypertrophy work what I've noticed when I I speak about
Len and partials or anything that's like new and exciting in bodybuilding there's a camp of people who are like oh this is the new sexy thing that everyone's talking about and I'm sure the hype will die down and this kind of thing I should reiterate that neither you nor I are advertising this as like a really really groundbreaking thing it's just like hey if you're not trying this like it really does seem to work 100% on your note of not being groundbreaking we're expecting an improvement in your growth of maybe 5 or 10% using length
in partials versus for motion so if you're all about maximizing your hypertrophy that's meaningful at this point I'm pretty confident that lengthen partials are something that should be included in your training if you're after hypertrophy but it also shouldn't be super surprising that training in the stretched aspect of a lift is good for muscle growth for years we've had a pretty good idea that stretch mediated hypertrophy is a thing remember this classic bird study where researchers saw crazy gains in the wing of a quail when it was stretched under load and then in human studies
we've known for years that lifting at long muscle lengths is effective so there are two ways I use long length partials in my current training the first is as an intensity technique to extend the last set I do for a muscle beyond the typical failure point I mainly Reserve this method for two muscles my hamstrings and my back that's because on pretty much every back exercise you'll reach a point where you can't get the weight all the way down but you could still crank out another five or six partial reps in the top half if
you really went for it now most science-based lifters will stop the set once they can no longer get the bar all the way down to their chest but your back actually has quite a bit of gas left in the tank if you were to keep going with partial reps so on select sets of pull Downs usually the last set once I hit that point where I can't touch the bar to my chest instead of stopping I'll keep going with partial reps trying to get the bar down as far as I can without breaking technique and
then I'll terminate the set once I can only get the bar about halfway down you could also do these on your last set of Pull-Ups so once you can no longer touch your chest to the bar keep going with long length partials on your last set the same thing goes for rows once you can no longer get that full squeeze keep going in the stretched part until you can no longer get the weight about halfway up usually this will allow me to get another 3 to six partial reps I also do the same thing for
hamstrings that's because they're another unique muscle where you can always crank a whole lot more reps after you've exhausted the full range of motion once you can no longer get that full squeeze at the top your hamstrings still have a lot more juice left so after I reach that usual stopping point I just keep going with another five or six partials until I can't get the weight at least halfway up and then I'll terminate the set now in theory you could keep going with quarter reps and eighth reps until you literally just can't budge the
weight but that might be Overkill in my opinion regardless I say the most important thing is standardizing your range of motion so that you pick the same endpoint from week to week that way you can be consistent with tracking your progress and again I'm not doing this level of intensity for every set of every exercise if you were to do that you'd most likely see a dramatic fallof in your performance toward the end of the workout and your volume would most likely take a hit as a result you could also run into recovery issues especially
if your diet and sleep aren't optimized now the second way I use length in partials is not as an end of set intensity technique but rather on every single rep of a set this this is actually how I use them in my new pure bodybuilding program on the last set of several exercises we do long length partials on every rep of that set this is how Dr Wolf recommended that I do them since you get to spend more total time in the most anabolic part of the range of motion why water the set down with
time spent in the less anabolic part of the range was what he said so for example on week one day one we're doing all long length partials on the last set of Chess supported machine rows so on rep one we only go halfway up and then we continue with half rep in the lengthened aspect until we get to rep 10 which should have us right at failure if we selected the appropriate weight and it's worth noting that you may need to go a bit heavier when doing partials it also makes a lot of sense to
do lengthen partials on dumbbell flies that's because with dumbbell flies you already have this very sided resistance curve where there's tons of tension in the bottom and virtually zero tension at the top but maybe that's not such a bad thing because we now know that the lengthened part of the range is the most important part and dumbbell flies naturally emphasize the lengthened part so I've recently rethought how I feel about dumbbell flies in the past I've argued that they're most likely inferior to Cable flies because with cables you get much more continuous resistance throughout the
range of motion which is true but in light of all this new evidence I'd say dumbbell flies aren't a bad option at all especially if you lean into their inherent stretch bias further by cutting out the top half of the movement and just hitting them all as partial reps now I still do cable flies because I think variety is important but whenever I do dumbbell flies these days I pretty much always do them as long length partials a also been playing around with lengthened partials on the Smith machine press and man the pump you feel
from these and the Deep stretch you get is just fantastic and I've been experimenting with them on leg presses too and so far I do find the partial reps more enjoyable there's something nice about only having to do half the ROM and still reaping all the gains it's not that they're easier if anything I'd say they're harder because you don't get that tiny mini rest at full lockout but I still think they're super fun now has a slightly different technique you can try something called integrated partials where rather than leaving all your lengthened partials until
the the end of the set you can sprinkle them in throughout the set I've been doing these on the pec deck where I'll alternate full range of motion reps with long length partial reps so I'll do one full rep one half rep one full rep one half rep and so on until I reach failure and I think they're a solid option because they allow you to spend more total time in the most anabolic part of the range of motion without completely emitting the contracted part and I also find they keep the set more engaging and
cause a crazy pump okay so when it comes to mistakes I'd say the biggest one I see is people just losing control when they start doing partial Reps for whatever reason a lot of people have it in their heads that partial reps are cheat reps and so they just let their form completely go loose once they start doing partials but this is a mistake because a partial rep should still be treated like any other rep meaning you still control the negative you still minimize momentum and you still feel that deep stretch at the bottom the
second most common mistake I see is people not limiting the range of motion enough on the partials people like myself who are accustomed to using a full range of motion are really often shy to cut the range of motion short and end up just skipping the lockout so they're still actually doing 90% of the full range of motion this is fine enough but it isn't a true long length partial at least that's not how they're done in the studies in the research the subjects are doing half reps so don't be scared to cut the range
of motion significantly down and as long as you still maintain good control you still push the set just as hard as you normally would you don't need to worry about missing out on any gains and if you buy into the research you should actually make better gains a mistake I'm seeing mostly online is overhyping long length partials for example I recently uploaded a YouTube short explaining why I'm still a fan of the cable triceps Kickback and a lot of people were quick to point out that the kickback overloads the triceps in the more shortened position
not the stretch position so wouldn't that mean it's worse for muscle growth I do get the argument but I personally think this is overe extrapolating the current evidence while I do find the new research convincing and I have been applying long length partials to my own training I also don't think there's enough evidence to completely throw out all exercises that buy us a more shortened position especially if it's an exercise that we've been doing for decades with good results I also don't think that the evidence is strong enough at least not yet to completely cut
out the top half and only do partial reps on every exercise I think that as of now using a combination of full range of motion and long length partials is still best and in general I still lean toward people using a full range of motion most of the time with long length partials having those specific applications that we talked about and that's because even though long length partials are gaining momentum in the research full range of motion has Decades of empirical support and when you zoom out and look at the literature as a whole long
length partials really aren't miles ahead I think that at this point the best you can say is that long length partials clearly work better than short-length partials and at least work as well as full range of motion and maybe even better in some cases now if you'd like to listen to my full discussion with Dr Wolf about this topic I'll put a link to that podcast in the description box down below and if you're looking to put all this information together into an actionable program that you can just go to the gym and execute without
having to overthink anything you can pick up my new pure bodybuilding program over on Jeff ner.me dedicated toward pure hypertrophy and that uses not only long length partials but a bunch of other really fun exercises and techniques that I haven't seen many people doing yet the program also comes with a free nutrition guide so you can get your diet in check whether your main goal is Fat Loss muscle gain or both and it's 20% off for launch week so I'll put a link to that over here next to my head if you'd like to check
it out and thanks guys so much for watching don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one
