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What’s the best way to build muscle? Can “bad form” help you build muscle fast? We all know that guy who says he can do 30 pull-ups, and then they’re just half reps. But what if he’s onto a secret about muscle growth? Today, I’ll show you why new research suggests using “bad form” can help you gain muscle almost twice as fast. And it’s actually pretty simple: it’s all about the stretch. Here’s everything to know about the fastest way to build muscle.
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“Taking your current training and focusing more on the stretch could take some of your lagging muscles to be a lot bigger and take some of your currently-pretty-good muscles and take them to the next level.” That’s Dr. Milo Wolf. The world’s leading expert on this new area of research and how to build muscle fast by using this technique.
“There are about 10 to 12 studies, and in many of these studies, you see around double the muscle growth by focusing on the stretch versus missing out on the stretch.”But here’s the problem. Often, the stronger you get, the easier it is to neglect it. “It’s because the body wants to avoid the most painful part of the exercise.” There’s also rushing out of the stretch position. So lowering the weight to get deeper and controlling that bottom position is definitely one way to improve the stretch and get more growth from your workouts.
But there’s more. To get the best results so you gain muscle faster, you should also
choose exercises that stretch your muscles the most. Example: switching from the barbell bench press to a dumbbell bench press or even something like a deficit push-up where there is no longer a restriction on when the ground touches your torso, so you can get as deep as you want. There’s a second way to use “the stretch” that’s less obvious but might be even more effective: pick exercises that are most challenging in the stretched position. Example: the preacher curls over the incline curls. Other exercises that do a great job of challenging your muscles in the stretch include dumbbell flyes, overhead extensions, reverse cable flyes, and behind-the-body lateral raise, with the cable set at wrist height.
Unfortunately, there’s no really good back or calves exercise that challenges the “stretch” and we’ll talk about the “fix” for this in a minute. But basically, the best way to build muscle is to think about this anytime you try an exercise: “If the stretch position feels really easy like there’s barely any weight there, that’s not going to be the best movement for hypertrophy.”
“If, on the other hand, the stretch position feels very difficult, something like a dumbbell fly where it’s really challenging in that stretch position, that is going to be a better exercise in all likelihood for hypertrophy.“
What I really want to focus on now is the counterintuitive lesson you can take away from all this “stretch” research: how you can use “bad form” for faster muscle growth. Remember the pull-up guy? Well, he was actually onto the fastest way to build muscle. “If you’re doing the wrong type of half reps, you are hurting your muscle building. However, we do have research on the opposite of that. Where you do half reps in the stretched position of a movement. And across around 5 studies now, 4 studies have found more muscle growth with half reps in the stretch position compared to a full range of motion.”
In other words, some reps that look “bad” might actually be good. Think about it. When you train certain muscles like the back or calves, where does it feel the hardest? It’s usually at the end of the movement when your muscles are fully contracted. But it’s really the beginning when the muscle is most stretched that’s most important for muscle growth. “We have research, for example, in the calves. When we compare it doing just the bottom half of the movement to doing a full range of motion in a study by Kassiano and colleagues, for example, we observed around twice the growth at both sites measured.”
For certain exercises, replacing full reps with half reps has the potential to double your muscle growth. But there’s another option that’s also been shown to be extremely effective. It’s quite simple. After you can’t do any more full range of motion reps, keep pushing past failure by doing as many half reps as you can in that stretched position. As for what exercises benefit the most from this, it’s any exercise that’s hardest in the contracted position. This includes pretty much all calves exercises, most back exercises (e.g., lat pulldowns and rows), chest flyes, reverse flyes, dumbbell lateral raises, and leg extensions.
