Half reps

I remember back in the day, I bought a book whose entire principle was to use partial reps to build muscle and power as safely and as quickly possible.

The theory was that as you only engage the exercise in it’s strongest range of motion, you can add more weight and therefore create more overload for the muscle. For example, when squatting instead of going all the way down you would only go down a few inches which in effect changes the exercise from a squat to a knee bend or only going half way down on a benchpress.

I trained like this for 3 months, really piling on the weight on benches, squats and rack pulls but I didn’t seem to get much bigger.
Then I decided to see what my lifts were like using a full range of motion, with squats and deadlifts it actually went down and bench was the same.

Basically this partial repping business did not work for me at all, it was a total waste of time and you also look like a dick in the gym i.e. loading a bar with far too much weight and then doing these half reps – people must think this guy is a fool (not that I care much about what people think). In fact I was lucky enough to do it when I was training in my home gym.

When I see guys doing half reps in the gym now, I see others looking at them thinking this dude is a proper dumbo. However some of these guys doing the partial movements actually think people are looking at them as they are impressed by the weight they are lifting (deluded comes to mind).

This brings me to another type of half rep, where the lifter doesn’t go back all the way up i.e. when benching they only the lift weight half way up.

The argument here is that you are never taking the load off the muscle and it is harder. I would agree if you were specifically to train chest and only went half way up, you are concentrating more on chest. As for it being harder I would disagree. Watch the battle of the benches in one of the Olympio expo’s, there is a 225lb bench press challenge. Nasser El-Sonbaty does full range reps with perfect form and only does like 15 reps and Phil Heath does 47 with half reps. I’m not saying Phil Heath isn’t stronger in bench press but if he was to do full ROM reps as well then the gap I am sure would have been closer.

I done a 100kg benchpress experiment myself:
1st week I done as many reps with half reps, bar to chest but not to lock out.
2nd week I done full range of motion (ROM)
3rd week bar was only lowered half way down.
I managed to do most reps in 3rd week, followed by 1st week and least reps in week 2 proving that going through a full range of motion is hardest.

Basically reduce the range of motion to make the lift easier, that is why powerlifters arch their backs so much and hence reduce ROM as much as possible (by the way, is it just me but I find it more impressive for someone who can bench 220kg raw with a small arch, than someone with a massive arch coupled with a big gut and a bench shirt benching 450kg with tiny range of motion, saying that MAJOR respect is still due as I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be able to lift that in a billion years!)