Long Muscle Length Training

Long muscle length training is a training technique to maximise muscle growth that focuses on loading a muscle (or muscle group) in its fully stretched position.

But what are its benefits, and how can you implement it into your own training.

By Coach Hunter Bennett

Benefits of long muscle length training

Long muscle length training involves weight training using exercises that specifically target muscles in their fully stretched position.

For example, a more traditional approach to training the chest would be using a barbell bench press. While there is nothing wrong with this exercise, the bar stops once it hits your chest. As a result, the ability to load your pecs in a stretched position is limited.

On the other hand, if you were performing a dumbbell bench press, your hands could go below the height of your chest, allowing you to load the pecs in a much more stretched position (i.e., at a long muscle length)

While we don’t know the exact reason, it seems that loading this stretch position provides a unique stimulus that drives muscle growth.

In fact, we have a fairly large body of research indicating that long muscle training consistently increases muscles growth to greater extent than both short muscle length training and full range of motion training.

How can you implement long muscle length training?

There are a few ways you can perform long muscle length training to maximise muscle growth:

Long length partials: long length partials describe performing partial reps when a muscle is loaded in its lengthened position. For example, rather than completing a full range of motion dumbbell bench press, you would only perform the bottom half of the movement (i.e., coming down into a deep stretch, then bringing it up ~halfway, before starting to descend a gain).
Long length drop set: Performing a long length drop set involves performing a normal set using a full range of motion until you reach, or get 1-2 reps shy of, failure. Then, you perform as many long length partial reps as you can in the lengthened position. For example, you might be able to perform 8 full range of motion dumbbell curls. Then you could perform another 3-4 long length partials at the bottom to finish off the set.
Emphasize the lengthen position: lastly, you can simply perform full range of motion reps that emphasize the lengthened position by pausing for 2-3 seconds when your muscles are at their most stretched. For example, performing a Romanian deadlift with a 2 second pause at the bottom.

Each of these methods offer an effective way to integrate long muscle length training int your program.

What are the best long muscle length exercises?

As you might have guessed, the best long muscle length exercises are those that promote a huge stretch through the target muscle. These include:

Quads: deep squats, deep smith machine squats, deep hack squats, deep leg press, front foot elevated split squats and lunges.
Hamstrings: deficit stiff leg deadlifts, deficit Romanian deadlifts, seated hamstring curls, single leg Romanian deadlifts.
Glutes: deep squats, front foot elevated split squats and lunges, cable abductions (with the foot travelling a long way across the front of the body), deep straddle lifts.
Lats: chin ups, pull ups, cable rows, machine rows, lat pull downs (all performed with a full range of motion and letting your arms get long at the top of the movement)
Pecs: dumbbell presses, deficit push ups, incline press, smith machine press, cable fly’s, dumbbell fly’s.
Delts: Arnold presses, seated shoulder presses, cable lateral raises, barbell overhead press.
Biceps: incline DB curl, lean away concentration curl, standing cable bicep curl (facing away from the cable stack)
Triceps: overhead cable tricep extension, overhead DB triceps extension, behind the head skull crushers, DB tricep rollbacks.