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Pausing For Effect


New quick and interesting fact that came to me originally courtesy of Alwyn Cosgrove but also shows up in this Nate Green article via Christian Thibaudeau:  pausing at the bottom of a rep makes the muscles work harder.  Thibaudeau makes the point in regards to squatting, but it actually works across the exercise spectrum.

Why is this? 

Picture yourself doing squats, or, even better, curls:  when it gets heavy, your tendency is to keep the muscle taut at the bottom of the movement and go right into the lift portion of the move after you've lowered it.  What you're trying to do there, Cheater-Head, is lean on the stretch-shortening cycle--the tendency of tendons, fascia, and other connective tissue, to snap back to a shortened state after being stretched. 

Thing is, when you relax, or even just pause, in the lengthened position--at the bottom of a curl or a squat, for instance--the stretch-shortening reflex can't do as much to help you.  In fact, after you've spent about two seconds in the stretched state, the elastic component is taken out of the movement.  Now the muscles have to do 100% of the work to get the weight up. 

"Bouncing" out of the bottom of a movement is always easier than pausing before you lift, but it's not without its uses:  athletes in many sports have to learn to decelerate a load and then rapidly accelerate it up again in an instant, so the quick-turnaround style of training can be useful to people in athletics.  It's also a good calorie-burner because you're going and going with almost no rest.

Taking the pause in the "down" position of a lift, however--along with lowering the weight under control--stresses the muscles almost exclusively.  Even without using more weight, you're going to stress the muscles harder if you take the pause. 

Bench-press-735968_medium

(As far as anyone knows, this guy's still stuck under his massive weight, and his partner's waiting for the signal.)

 

Once you get around to actually lifting the weight, though, it's best to lift as fast as you can.  More on that on a later post--but unless you're injured, lifting fast (or at least trying to lift fast--if you're using close to a maximal weight, you might wind up grinding out a rep anyway) is a good idea.

So if muscle-building--and, indeed, strength-building--is your focus, it's probably worth it to take that pause for effect.

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re: Pausing For Effect

Stretch-pause training is a form of rest-pause training, as you probably guessed, only you’re switching between a couple of different exercises instead of just one as you do with regular rest-pause training.
The idea with this type of training is based on giving your muscles room to grow by stretching the fascia that surrounds your muscles.
Fascia is the tough connective tissue that wraps around your muscles to basically keep them in place on your skeleton.
Here’s the problem, when your fascia is tight and you’re trying to build muscle, that fascia can limit your muscle growth by not giving it anywhere to expand to. If you’ve ever stopped training for an extended period (or know someone who has), you’ll notice when you start back in, you see very fast muscle growth, this is often known as muscle memory. Some people think this is because the muscles remember the stimulus and respond better to it.
I believe it’s because the fascia has already been stretched from your previous training and your muscles are actually growing at the rate they should be growing at! There is no memory involve, it’s just there isn’t as much resistance in your body to the expansion of the muscle tissue.
Fascial stretching is recommended for this…basically, you work the muscle to fill it full of blood then stretch that muscle HARD. The blood-filled muscle gives the fascia something to stretch against and helps to expand it, little by little.
Instead of stretching after the set is done, why not stretch during the set when you can use resistance to really maximize that fascial stretch.
That is what Stretch-Pause Training is all about without using any fast cash. You’re going to fill the muscle up with blood, stretch the hell out of it, then finish with high rep partials to further fill the muscles up with blood to help push the fascia even more.

by CliffordG on Aug 24, 2009 11:48 PM EDT reply actions   0 recs

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