Philip Pape 0:00

Lots of training concepts come and go. A lot of bro science lore tends to persist and then fade out. There is one concept called long length partials that I also was not really convinced about until I saw Jeff Nippard bring it up recently and convinced me pretty clearly that it could be an effective training technique, and we're going to get into that on today's QuickWits. Welcome to the Whits and Weights podcast. I'm your host, phillip Pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition. We'll uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset, with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry, so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in. Today I want to talk about Jeff Nippard's approach to something called long length partial reps. This is a strategy for I'm going to call it advanced trainees to focus on maximizing hypertrophy, and I would put it in a category along with rest, pause sets, myoreps, drop sets, things like that, where you should really only include them once you've got some of the foundational strength and hypertrophy type movements built into your programming. This technique is very simple. It centers on the first half of a rep where the muscle is at its longest. So that's why it's called long length partials. This part of the exercise, which is the stretch, is based on what we know about hypertrophy. It is a crucial part of muscle adaptation. So now imagine doing a bicep curl, but you only go up halfway. That is the long length partial. That is, you're in the long length regime there and it's only that part of the movement. So it's a long length partial. Now why would you focus on this part, the stretch? Research shows that this phase of your movements stimulates more muscle growth compared to the contraction phase, and so the idea is now, if you can spend more time in that phase, maybe you can get even more growth. And Jeff Nippard recommends using this technique in different ways, like extending an existing set with some partials at the end, doing a final set or two with just partials, or just mixing them into your regular sets. I've also used them as a warm up to kind of quickly warm up the muscle.

Philip Pape 2:41

Now, like any of these techniques, it sounds all promising and amazing, like, oh, that's going to be the big thing, I'm going to do everything with long length partials, kind of like when blood flow restriction came on the scene. It's like well, let's just do that, we don't even have to leave the table anymore. Remember, this is not one of those one size fits all, we're just going to replace everything. It should compliment your full range of movements, because we do believe and Jeff talks about this that there are still massive benefits to the other part of the movement and there's not enough long term data to show whether, like exclusive, long length partial training would be superior. So why risk it? Why not do what's tried and true and include them as a compliment?

Philip Pape 3:23

See how you grow, see how you respond. Don't just replace everything entirely. And next time you go to the gym, think about integrating long length partial reps into your routine as the final few reps or an extra set on the end. Do it with something with that more of a direct isolation movement and see if it starts to grow your muscles. I mean, you can objectively measure that. You can look at your bicep diameter with your circumference measurements and see is it growing faster than you would have otherwise without them? All right, that's it for today. Keep pushing those limits in the gym and experimenting and having fun, getting big, getting strong. Talk to you next time.