If we’re completely honest, stretching is about as much fun as visiting a drunk dentist in a third world country. It’s often ignored and brushed off by many as something that’s just not important. Who has time to sit there and relax? You could be hitting supersets of bicep curls while balancing on a Bosu ball instead.
One thing you probably didn’t realize is that stretching, specifically anabolic stretching, can dramatically speed up muscle growth, strength, and recovery. Recent research has shown that this type of stretching can actually increase muscle growth by up to 318%!
Anabolic stretching may be the secret weapon to the world’s best physiques.
Check it out…
The Main Problem With Traditional Stretching
The main problem with conventional stretching programs is they often work against your body’s physiology rather than with it.
If you take a tight, cold muscle and expose it to prolonged “standard” stretching, you could incur scar tissue and micro-tearing, which could then lead to muscle weakness, inflexibility, and injury.
Furthermore, many professionals have prescribed stretching before exercise as a form of warm up. This is wrong.
A study published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research concluded if you stretch before you lift weights, you could find yourself weaker and “off balanced” in your workouts.
Not something we want when hoisting hundreds of pounds of metal.
Instead, the ideal time to stretch for overall health, performance, and increasing muscle mass is right after your workout. At this point, the connective tissues are already being stretched from the blood volume in the muscles. By manually stretching the muscles post workout, you get a double whammy effect; dramatically increasing the muscle fibers growth potential.
104 Studies Agree, Standard Stretching… Sucks
Researchers at the University of Zagre began combing through hundreds of earlier experiments in which volunteers stretched and then jumped, dunked, sprinted, lifted or otherwise had their muscular strength and power tested.
The scientists wound up with 104 past studies that met their criteria. The numbers, especially for competitive athletes, are sobering. According to their calculations, traditional stretching techniques reduce strength in the stretched muscles by almost 5.5%, with the impact increasing in people who hold individual stretches for 90 seconds or more.
Explosive muscular performance also drops off significantly, by as much as 2.8 %.
A similar conclusion was reached by the authors of another new study, in which young, fit men performed standard squats with barbells after either first stretching or not. The volunteers could manage 8.3 % less weight after traditional stretching. But even more interesting, they also reported that they felt less stable and more unbalanced after traditional stretching than when they didn’t stretch at all.
Turning Traditional Stretching Into Anabolic Stretching
Typical stretching has you maintaining a stretched positioned for a certain duration. Anabolic stretching takes this to the next level. And it’s gonna a hurt. Put simply, take a moderate weight, lower it into the maximum stretched position of a stretch-focused exercise and hold.
This is exactly the kind of thing that Arnold used to do in his workouts to build his incredible chest. He would hold the bottom position of a flye for 45-60 seconds (at the end of a chest workout when his pecs were pumped full of blood).
The key thing is that you’re not really “stretching” like in the way you do with most static stretching…you’re resisting the load in the stretched position.
There is a big difference.
And you will feel this difference the first time you try it.
The Science Of Hyperplasia
In the early 1990s, a study was done on birds that had nothing short of amazing results. In this study, Dr. Jose Antonio attached a weight to the wing of young quail, and over the course of a month, he progressively increased the weight.
After a month, the level of muscle hypertrophy (growth) was measured. The bird’s wing where the weight was attached had grown by over 300 percent (318 percent to be exact).
After studying the results more closely, Dr. Antonio discovered evidence of hyperplasia. A controversial topic in the strength and conditioning field, hyperplasia is the growth of muscles not through the increase in size of the fibers (hypertrophy) but through the increase in number.
10 Minutes Of Anabolic Stretching At The End Of Your Workout Has Shown To DOUBLE Muscle growth
Dr. Jacob Wilson and his team recently put the theory to the test in the lab, investigating the effects of anabolic stretching on skeletal muscle size and strength in human subjects.
Twenty-four recreationally trained subjects (around 20 years old) were randomly assigned to stretching and non-stretching conditions.
Both groups performed 4 sets of 12-rep calf raises on a leg press twice a week for 5 weeks. The first set was performed at 90% of subjects’ 1-rep max (1RM), followed by 3 sets in which the weight was decreased by 15% of subjects’ 1-RM per set.
One group added anabolic stretching to the routine, while the other didn’t.
The result?
Muscle effectively DOUBLED in the group that used anabolic stretching. Furthermore, the ligaments and tendons seem to both have been “bulletproofed”.
In short, the study suggested the optimal environment for results is a combination of mechanical tension and muscle damage. Tacking on some “Anabolic Stretching Sets” near the end of your regular-volume training workouts when you’re experiencing significant cell swelling should lead to additional hypertrophy.
Aggressively stretching a fully-pumped muscle is the perfect mechanism for growth. You increase overall muscular tension while also maximizing the cell swelling response for maximal muscle damage.
How Olympic Gymnasts Become So Strong And Flexible
Gymnasts by nature need to build massive strength, size and stability to do what they do.
Furthermore they cannot risk being weak or inflexible. Their body adapts, through anabolic stretching because it has too. The result is a jaw dropping physique combined with superhuman like strength, size and flexibility. The typical recommendations for increasing flexibility been to increase your range of motion in a static stretching position using only your bodyweight.
When you add load into the equation via anabolic stretching work, the entire scenario changes.
Anabolic stretching challenges your body to build both flexibility and strength in the positions you need it most. By anabolic stretching in the proper manner, you will be able to build strength into your flexibility.
Stretching the sheaths or layers that encapsulate the muscle bundles will elicit another anabolic effect. In protective response to this unstable change, the stretched muscle sheets trigger an increase in protein splitting, muscle cell division, and collagen breakdown and repair. The result is, again, hypertrophy for survival.physique combined with superhuman like strength, size and flexibility.
A Beginner’s Chest Anabolic Stretching Protocol To Use Next Workout
At the end of your next chest workout, add this anabolic stretching protocol for maximum gains.
- Get into the incline pec fly position
- Pick a weight you can do 12-15 curls with
- Perform incline pec flyes until complete failure
- instead of dropping the weight after, let the weight stretch your biceps out for 30 seconds
- Try not to cry while you engage in badass mental warfare
- Release the weights
- Rest 1-2 minutes and repeat the entire process 2 more times
Pour Conclure…
When performed correctly anabolic stretching techniques can help bulletproof the body and double muscle growth. Who knew stretching could be so amazing.
The best part?
It takes just 5-10 minutes at the end of your regular workout to implement. Anabolic stretching is a surefire way to force the body to supercharge your muscle gaining potential, double recovery and see noticeable improvements in your muscle fullness and separation within the next 6-8 weeks.
Yeah, it’s still going to hurt, but this time you’ll have a ton of extra head turning muscle to show for it!
To learn more about Anabolic Stretching – click here.
About the Author
Ambitious, challenging and unapologetic, Peter has committed his life to turning 1,000,000 deserving men worldwide into living superheroes. He lives by the code truth above all, always and forever. He also loves green juice, reading books about great men, engaging in all sorts of debauchery, long walks on the beach, Marathon Lego-building sessions, Pokemon, meditation, and defending his undefeated pushup contest. For more info, check out petertzemis.com
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