Adam C. Stewart
Learn how to gain more strength and build more muscle by paying attention to your range of motion and the lengths of muscle you are going through. This article also explores possible mechanisms that could explain why exercising with longer muscle lengths can help you build more muscle.
Note: This article was the cover of MASS Research Review for November 2022.si want more content like this, subscribe to MASS.
If you go to a commercial gym, you will see people doing repetitions with any technique under the sun. Some people raise each repetition explosively, and others move the bar at a Snail’s pace. Some people pause and squeeze at the bottom and top of each repetition, and others treat the bicep curls as if they were plyometric. And especially for our purposes Here, some people move each repetition to a maximum range of motion, while others stick to partial repetitions.
When it comes to freedom of movement, who is right? Do you need to train through a full range of movements? Do you leave gains on the table when you do partial repetitions? If you do partial repetitions, does it matter what kind of partial repetitions you do?
This article will try to answer all these questions and more.
Sports science is experiencing a small Renaissance around the theme of freedom of movement. Almost half of the research on the impact of range of motion on strength gains and/or muscle growth has been published in the last five years, and almost all of the research has been published in the last decade. So we are finally getting to the point where we can start to provide relatively solid answers about the effects of range of motion on strength and hypertrophy adjustments, with a reasonable degree of detail and nuance.
With this in mind, my co-authors (Milos) and I recently performed a meta-analysis examining the effects of range of motion on strength, hypertrophy, strength, body composition and sports performance results (1). We started with a systematic review of the literature to identify all the studies meeting these three criteria:
The study had to be a peer-reviewed full-text study or a thesis or dissertation in English.
The study had to include a longitudinal training intervention with at least two groups or conditions involving training through different ranges of movements.
The study had to provide at least one criterion for evaluating strength, Hypertrophy, strength, body composition or sports performance with sufficient detail for Statistical Analysis.
In the end, 23 studies met these criteria and were included in our meta-analysis. The data on the results were extracted from each study and the effect sizes were calculated in the form of Hedges-g values interpreted in the same way as the Cohen-D values.
Our first analyses were “Big Picture” analyses. We generally wanted to see if training with a full range of movements led to greater positive results than training with a partial range of movements. We found that when summarizing all the results of all the studies, Training with a full range of movements was generally preferable to training with a partial range of movements, although the overall difference between full and partial training was trivial (g = 0.12; Figure 1).
When separating different results (strength, Hypertrophy, strength, body composition and sports performance), a similar picture arises: Full range of motion training usually leads to greater adjustments than partial range of motion training, but the grouped effects are once again trivial in magnitude (Figure 2).
