“You will always regret not training the position you got injured.”

– Dr. Andreo Spina

Some injuries are just unavoidable. I do believe a lot of wear-and-tear injuries or under-recovered injuries are avoidable, but the tripping over a weight, slipping on some ice, and stepping off of something and rolling your ankle types of injuries will happen. Now, how you bounce back from them depends on your training.

“You will always regret not training the position you got injured.”

– Dr. Andreo Spina

Some injuries are just unavoidable. I do believe a lot of wear-and-tear injuries or under-recovered injuries are avoidable, but the tripping over a weight, slipping on some ice, and stepping off of something and rolling your ankle types of injuries will happen. Now, how you bounce back from them depends on your training.

Proper dosages of “improper” alignment can help prevent injury when doing athletic movement. You are being optimistic if you believe you will prevent injury by only training “proper” form. Of course I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive for proper form but if you are truly doing athletic movements, playing, or in a sport, then you will not always have the luxury of being in the “perfect” position. Watch a tennis match and tell me the players don’t go into a valgus knee position (where the knee caves inwards). My point is, if you avoid awkward positions then you are more likely to injure yourself if you are exposed to them in normal living situations.

Full Range of Motion Training

Progressive exposure to your body’s natural range of motion is fine, and is actually good for you. However, it is still crucial that this is done with correct loading and duration of recovery. Full range of motion training can expose us to “awkward positions” that are more injury-prone, hence the reason we should train them. But if overdone or trained without control in the beginning (e.g. kipping pull ups prior to hanging, swinging, and strict pull up training), then we run the risk of causing more damage than growth. So, don’t go out and load up a heavy sissy squat or jefferson curl but do expose yourself to these exercises that your body is, or once was, capable of. If you don’t move your body in as many different positions as you can as often as possible, then you will eventually lose the ability to move in those positions. As another example, if you can’t take your knee through a good range of flexion then you risk getting stuck on the ground later in life. Try getting up off of the floor naturally (don’t try an awkward “prove-you-wrong” approach) with little to no knee flexion (and back flexion).

Uncover Your Range of Motion

So let’s talk about exposure. This should be very progressive, over a long period of time and practiced regularly. You are safer going too light or less frequent in the beginning rather than the reverse. My approach is to start light and increase about every 8-12 weeks. This is because we are working a lot of connective tissue which takes much longer to fully heal than muscle. If there is pain, stop, wait, and start over with little to no weight until you get back the range of motion and strength.

Let me give you a few exercises to try for the shoulders, back, and knees—areas that tend to commonly get injured.

Shoulders : Weighted Pass-Throughs

By using the weighted pass-through we are taking the shoulders through their full range of motion. Start by gripping a dowel with your hands as wide as necessary so that your arms remain straight throughout the entire movement and so that there is no “clicking” or “catching” during the movement. Pass the dowel (or pvc, band, etc.) overhead and around to your back. Then reverse directions bringing your arms back to start all the while keeping your arms straight. This can and should be done both standing and lying prone (face down). Progressively work your hands closer and increase the weight about every 8-12 weeks by a few pounds.

Back: Jefferson Curls

For Jefferson Curls, begin by standing on a box with your legs together and straight. With your hips tucked into posterior pelvic tilt, slowly round off your back one vertebrae at a time from the top down by first dropping your chin to your chest and gradually curling over into flexion. Continue to flex the spine one vertebrae at a time until you reach the end range of your flexibility. Your first goal should be to get your wrists past your feet. Once achieved, progressively increase the weight in your hands every 8-12 weeks by about 2-5 pounds. Most people need to start with weights between 5 and 20 pounds.

Knees: Crossover Squats

From a standing position, cross your legs and roll to the outside of your feet while descending into a cross-legged seated position. Once seated at the bottom, push yourself back up to a standing position and repeat, making sure to switch the leg that is in front as you go. This will slightly load your ankles and knees laterally. A good starting point for these would be to do them with a post or rope in front of you to hang on to so that you can safely assist yourself down and back up.

Train to Play

There are many other exercises I use for injury prevention but these are a safe start. These examples can be a little more risky than your traditional press, deadlift, and squat. In addition, these exercises shouldn’t be loaded the same as those exercises (or at all in the beginning), but keep an open mind that your body shouldn’t be limited to “neutral, square, stacked, etc.” This prevents freedom to move—instead, train to play.

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Note: In this discussion I will concern myself mostly with presses, squats, and deadlifts as used by general strength trainees and powerlifters. Weightlifters are excluded here. They indeed use partials but they do so in a somewhat different manner so I will not direct this discussion to them at this time.

How NOT to Do Partials

Let’s talk about why we are told by well-meaning coaches that we should not do partial lifts. We have all seen the globo-gym trainee (using the term “trainee” quite loosely) doing partial movements, all the while self-satisfied that he is really working out. He takes a weight off the bench rack and then lowers it, just like the book says. But instead of making a beeline from lockout down to his chest, he only lowers the bar a few inches – say, eight inches. Then he presses back to lockout, and repeats this for the required number of reps. Again, he is very satisfied. Then he decides he needs a more weight so he throws on another ten to twenty pounds. He un-racks the bar, lowers it, and then realizes, “Omigawd, this is getting heavy!” So this time the bar is only lowered about six inches and then returned to lockout. I have even seen some lifts made in such a manner counted as personal records by their exponents. Who’s kidding whom?

Pressing off the chest or squatting out of the hole is why you work out. That is where the progress happens, whether you’re working for strength, power, or size. You cannot develop pecs with bench press lockouts. You don’t build massive strong thighs with quarter squats alone. You are only fooling yourselves if you think that’s possible. It certainly makes for an easier workout and it might even be great for the ego, but you are only taking up valuable space in the gym. Are there any legitimate reasons to do partial movements?

How and Why You Should Do Partials

Despite the advice serious and experienced trainees learn in their salad days, they eventually learn that partials can be effective in certain circumstances. The most obvious reason is that partial movement can be used to increase strength within a specific phase of a movement. As we all know, we are not equally strong throughout our full range of motion. Our strength curve when graphed is somewhat U-shaped. This is normal. You’ll never see a straight horizontal strength curve. However, you want to make sure that your “U” is not too deep in the bottom portion. Partials can be done to work on the sticking points of a lift so that the bottom of the “U” does not go so deep. In short, creating a more balanced strength curve.

Another benefit of partials is to strengthen the joint infrastructure, namely the tendons and ligaments around those joints. It is easy to get muscles stronger, but it takes longer to get the related infrastructure stronger. You have to be careful to not get these related parts out of harmony. If some portions of your lifts feel a little shakier than they should, then you probably need work on those shaky parts only for a bit.

Finally heavy partials, if they do nothing else, are good for your volitional strength. If you lock out weights that are much heavier than your full range personal records, then you will find your full range lifts feel a lot lighter and that your fear of the heavier weight is alleviated. Partials help you psychologically break through sticking points and plateaus, but they are all about overload. You have to do partials with weights that are heavier than your normal. Do not bother doing partial with light weights or you’re only wasting your time.

How to Do Partials Properly

There are two ways to do partials. If you’re training the start and middle portions of the lift, you can use a power rack with the bar positioned between two pins set at the appropriate heights. Then simply move the bar from the lower pin to the higher one. Make sure to touch the underside of the higher pin to ensure the full range of the partial movement is exercised. (Got that? The full range of partial? It’s a bit contradictory, I know) If you want to make the lift a bit more difficult, then hold the bar against the pin for an eight-second count. This will add some isometric work to the mix, which is always good for your infrastructure and volitional strength.

If you are training the top portion of the lift, you only need to set up one set of pins, or even blocks, since you will always lift to lockout. Watch this video of champion deadlifter Andy Bolton for an example:

A few caveats are in order. With increased intensity it is good to keep the number of reps and sets down to avoid overtraining. Heavy partials can be hard on the nerves and the infrastructure, especially if combined with full range of motion movements in the same session. So, be sure not to overwork yourself. It will take too much out of you and be counterproductive. That said, it is good to remember that full ROM versions of the exercise are not neglected. It will do you little good to gain strength in one of the partial ranges only to have it detrained in the others.

All in all, it is one thing to intentionally restrict the range of motion of an exercise for a specific purpose. It is quite another to add too much weight to handle properly and then to restrict your range of motion because of your mistake. That is a very disingenuous way to inflate the ego and surreptitiously decrease your workload. It will only get guffaws from the more committed serious trainees. But that is not the worst that can happen. If you don’t have a great backlog of full-range training you will also stress the spine and shoulder girdle if the weights are too heavy. And if they aren’t too heavy, why were you training so lazily in the first place?

Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock.

Photo 2 by Kilho Park [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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But as we have seen, science doesn’t always agree with our common sense, so it’s worth studying. In fact, in this case, it might make some sense. There is value to doing isometrics and full-range isotonics, so perhaps partial range work has some merit. Indeed, many successful athletes regularly employ partial range work. The board press is a great example, regularly performed by powerlifters. In a recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning, researchers sought to explain where we would draw the line on range of motion.

The study was 12 weeks long, and during that time the participants did leg work 3 days per week. One group did their leg work from 0 to 50 degrees, where the other did the same work from 0 to 90 degrees. The work out was pretty rugged with various forms of squats and other leg exercises taking place on all 3 days.

As it turns out, our common sense is correct. After the 12 weeks the strength and size of the muscle was greater in the group with the longer range of motion. Researchers also measured fat stores within the affected muscle and they were reduced more in the group with the longer range of motion.

Pretty cut and dry, but wait, there’s more. The clever critic will point out that shorter ranges of motion allow for greater loads, and perhaps that could actually make them superior. The researchers anticipated this, though, and those results where the shorter range of motion performed poorly did utilize heavier weights. In fact, the shorter range of motion group used 10-25% greater weight than the longer-range group and still didn’t do as well in the end results.

It doesn’t end there either. The researchers analyzed the internal loading directly on the muscle itself. As biomechanics change throughout a single rep of an exercise, so does the internal load, even when the weight you’re lifting doesn’t change. Well it’s good researchers did this because they discovered that the load on the muscle in the longer range of motion was actually greater even though participants were lifting less weight. You didn’t read that wrong. Less weight and greater load. Given the results it makes sense, but now you know why.

I’d like to see a study in which an actual full range of motion is examined. 90 degrees isn’t exactly ass-to-grass squatting. Do the results continue as the range of motion goes further? The greatest intensity would be at about 90 degrees theoretically, so perhaps the results would be less.

For those of us who raised our hands at the start of this article, we have an even greater reason to scoff than we thought. It’s not just common sense. We should strive for good form and full range of motion in our exercises for the best results.

References:

1. Gerard Eugene McMahon, et. al., “Impact of range-of-motion during ecologically valid resistance training 2 protocols, on muscle size, subcutaneous fat and strength,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning, DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0b013e318297143a

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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