06 Jul Just The Tip: Twin Tips For Hypertrophy Training

Lets face it... Training just ain't that complicated. 90% of the results truly do come from picking the (heavy ass) weights up and putting them down. Having said that, there ARE things you can do to make training more effective for your chosen goal and body part. Hypertrophy training has some unique caveats to it that you don't have to worry about with pure strength training. Here are some tips I've picked up along the way, and I'm confident they can help you too.

This article series is designed to give you quick tips that you can go and use in the gym today. So check these out and then go out and get that EASY MONEY!

• A Tip For Lat Pull Down Mind-Muscle Engagement
  

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If you are having trouble getting your back to grow, A tip I have found to work rather well for engaging the lats is to "Pull with the pinky" when you are doing lat pull downs, and even some machine based rows. I'm not entirely sure of the neurological reasons this works, but truly when you do this you can just feel the lats working more.

Now, when I said "pull with the pinky" I don't literally mean only hook your pinky around the bar and pull. You will have your hand just like normal, but focus the downward force you are using the pull on the outside of the hand where the pinky is. You can actually test this just as you are sitting in your chair and do an "air lat pull down," you will feel your lats.

So for those of you seeking hypertrophy and want to make sure the pull downs are really hitting your lats, keep this tip in mind next Back Day.

• Turn A Negative Into A Positive

This is a "Just the Tip" kind of article so I'm not going to go deep into the physiology or mechanics here, but suffice it to say that lowering the weight is quite important to the hypertrophy process. Some experts online consider it actually quite a bit more important. The venerable (and huge) Dante Trudel from DoggCrapp training fame, a system which incorporates controlled 3-5 second lowering phases, has even stated that the whole point of lifting a weight is so that you get another opportunity to lower it again (paraphrased).

To incorporate this into your training easily, you can simply take your 2nd or 3rd exercise of the day and count an honest 1 - 2 - 3 while you are lowering every single rep. I don't necessarily like this on the main movements like Bench Press or Squat (and certainly NOT regular dead lifts) because, while it can definitely work on these movements, we tend to like to use those are a heavier weight movement and this technique limits the amount of weight you can use quite severely in some cases. Another reason is because these are often the exercises we use for our fatality sets, which require a bit more "shut the mind off and just grind" and this technique requires you be quite focused on every rep.

Open The Book, Shut The Mind Off... And Grind it Out

There you have it, two battle tested tips to get you growing. Now get out there and try these out this week and let us know how they work for you in the comments.