When you go to the gym, you want to get the most from every rep, set and exercise. That means working not just harder, but smarter.
That’s when considerations such as biomechanics, physics and anatomy come into play, says Justin Kompf, a strength and conditioning specialist at Clientel3 fitness studio in Boston. “Small adjustments to form and technique allow you to overload the muscles and increase the amount of work you do during a given amount of time,” he explains. “This can result in greater hypertrophy, or muscle size gains, neural adaptations or just more efficient workouts.”
[See: The 10 Best Exercise You Can Do for the Rest of Your Life.]
Fortunately, even if you didn’t major in exercise physiology, you can still train like an expert. Below, trainers share 11 easy ways to get greater benefits from your favorite exercises.
1. Use your full range of motion. During each strength training exercise, prioritizing moving through a full range of motion is crucial. For example, lower all the way to the floor when performing pushups, and when performing rows, don’t stop until you’ve pulled as far as you can. There are specific instances in which someone might want to add some partial range of motion exercises to their routine. However, performing an exercise with a full range of motion trains a greater percentage of a given muscle’s fibers compared to performing the same exercise with a partial range of motion. That means more calories burned and muscle gained, Komf says.
For example, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that while men could move more weight when performing biceps curls with a partial range of motion, they triggered more muscle damage (a catalyst for repair and growth) by using a full range of motion. If you are having trouble hitting a full range of motion during any given exercise, Kompf recommends lightening the load by 10 percent and trying again.
2. Lean forward during lunges. By taking a larger step, and leaning your torso slightly angled forward so that your shoulders are directly above your front foot, you take much of the weight off of your quads and knees and put it on your glutes and hips, Kompf says. That’s ideal for anyone trying to strengthen their glutes or keep cranky knees from flaring up.
3. Hold something under your armpits during deadlifts. When you’re forced to keep something in place under your armpits — like a balled-up mini resistance band or a towel — you automatically tighten your lats, the large muscles in your mid back, says Baltimore-based strength and conditioning specialist Erica Suter. “That’s key to maximizing how much weight you can deadlift while also protecting your back,” she says. “It’s so easy for backs to round during deadlifts, but by introducing a simple tactile cue [like a resistance band between the arms and torso], exercisers learn how to keep their back flat and chest out.”
But before you employ this strategy, keep in mind that it works best with conventional lifts rather than sumo deadlifts, as the latter involves a wider grip that keeps the arms away from the body’s sides.
4. Use an offset grip for all dumbbell biceps curls. The biceps don’t just bend your elbows, they also twist your forearms so that your palms face up, rather than down. That’s important because when you perform dumbbell curls with an offset grip, in which your thumbs are pressed against the heads of the dumbbells, the weights pull your forearms out of their palms-up position, Kompf says. And to keep the dumbbells parallel to the floor, your biceps have to work harder.
5. Add a squeeze to your bench presses. When performing dumbbell bench presses, try holding the weights with a neutral palms-in grip. Then, press both weights together and keep them touching throughout the entire exercise, lowering the dumbbells to the bottom of your sternum and then pressing straight up, Kompf says. Doing so combines the pressing movement of a bench press with the horizontal shoulder adduction (the hugging movement) of a chest fly, in which you repeatedly cross your arms in front of your chest, keeping your elbows just slightly bent.
When performing this variation, use roughly two-thirds the weight you usually do during dumbbell bench presses, Kompf says.
6. Slow down the eccentric phase. Concentric movements are those in which the muscle contracts, or shortens, while eccentric movements are those in which the muscle lengthens. Examples of eccentric motions include lowering into a squat or raising a lat pulldown bar back to start. A simple way to identify the eccentric phase of an exercise is to ask yourself: “Which half of the exercise feels easiest?”
By slowing down an exercise’s eccentric phase, performing it over the count of three, four or even five, you can increase the amount of microscopic damage inflicted on the worked muscles. The result: more muscle adaptation, Suter explains. For instance, in a 2015 review published in BioMed Research International, researchers concluded that a single rep of an eccentric exercise spurred greater muscle growth than a single rep of a concentric exercise.
[See: 5 Strength Machines You Should Start Using ASAP.]
7. For pullups, switch your leg positioning. More often than not, exercisers perform pullups with their knees bent and their feet behind them. Assisted pullup machines are even designed to keep you in this bent-knee position.
However, Suter recommends performing pullups (as well as chin-ups) with a hollow-body position in which your knees are straight and your feet are slightly in front of your torso. “A hollow-body position allows you to better activate your glutes and core throughout the entire movement,” she says.
You don’t have to be able to perform unassisted pullups in order to take advantage of a hollow-body position. If you’re performing assisted pullups with a resistance band looped around the bar, set your feet in the bottom of the sling created by the band. Or, depending on your height, you can place your feet, rather than knees, on your gym’s assisted pullup machine knee pad.
8. Change your barbell squat positioning. The best strategy here depends on your goals: The farther forward you hold the barbell during a squat, the greater your quadriceps’ responsibility to move the weight. However, the farther back you hold the barbell, the more onus is placed on your gluteal muscles, Kompf explains.
Front squats, in which the bar rests on the front of the shoulders, requires an upright torso position and places the greatest emphasis on the quads. Back squats, in which the bar sits behind the neck on the tops of the traps in the upper back, demands a slight forward lean and more glute involvement. Low-bar back squats, in which the bar runs across the upper back and requires a large forward lean, places the greatest amount of work on the glutes and the least amount of pressure on the quads.
9. During hip thrusts, keep a mini band around your knees. Hip thrusts are among the best exercises for targeting the glute muscles. But to optimally recruit all of your glutes — including your gluteus medius, the muscle fibers in the sides of your hips that often go undertrained — it helps to perform all of your reps with a mini looped resistance band around your thighs, located just above your knees, Suter says.
That’s because the band will pull your knees in toward each other. To resist that force, your glute meds, which function to move your thighs out and away from your body, will automatically engage, she says.
10. Shorten your planks. It turns out holding a plank for a long time isn’t always better. “Most people hang, rather than actively hold, their planks, reducing how hard the core muscles are actually working while increasing stress on the low back,” Suter says. To increase the effectiveness of planks, she recommends shortening each hold to focus on creating tension throughout the entire body. “When performing planks correctly, most people are shaking all over after 5 or 10 seconds,” she says.
Get on the floor in a traditional plank position, with your weight balanced in your forearms and feet. Your shoulders should be directly above your elbows. From here, brace your core and squeeze your glutes as tight as possible. You will feel your buttocks tuck down. Then, without actually moving your feet or elbows, try to pull them toward each other. Your entire body should feel like it is as tight as possible. Hold for a maximum of 10 seconds, rest your knees on the floor and repeat.
11. Pause at the bottom of each rep. “Pause movements work with anything — bench presses, squats, curls — anything,” Suter says. That’s because, when you quickly move from the lowering to raising phase of an exercise, you are literally bouncing. Your muscles contain elastic components that store energy and act like a spring, she explains. However, when you pause for a couple of seconds at the bottom of an exercise, you eliminate any elastic forces, meaning your muscles’ contractile units have to work that much harder during each rep.
[See: 8 Common Form Mistakes That Are Wrecking Your Workout.]
Keep in mind that, when performing pause reps, you won’t be able to move as much weight as you can when taking advantage of your muscles’ elastic capabilities. Try selecting weights that are slightly lighter or performing fewer reps for the best results.
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11 Simple Hacks to Get More From Every Workout originally appeared on usnews.com
