The power of one-and-a-half reps
If you’re keeping up with the latest in weight training trends you may be seeing some things on partial reps.
Some reputable sources, which I follow, have some good things to say about incorporating partial length and reps into your workouts. But that’s not what this blog is about. Here we talk about what to do, and one of the best ways to add partial reps to your workouts is with one-and-a-half reps, which will be referred to as 1.5 reps for short.
What are 1.5 reps???
Come on, they are ecactmy what they sound like -performing one rep, then a half rep, then back to a full rep, followed by a half rep, and so on.
That’s fairly easy to follow. The slightly harder part is when to do that half-rep. At the “top” of the lift or at the “bottom”???
Well, it depends on the lift and what you mean by top and bottom. The easiest example is the standing biceps curl. You could perform a full curl down to fully lengthened and then up to the top fully contracted and then down halfway and then up to fully contracted. This is actually not the best way to perform the one and a half reps. It’s better to perform one and a half reps with the muscle fully lengthened, so you would be doing the half wrap with the arm, extended halfway up back down to fully extended, and then back all the way up to flexed.
This is similar with the squat squat down into a fully squatted position with your quadriceps and glutes fully lengthened then come up halfway then back down, then fully up .
For the benchpress you want to lower the bar to your chest push halfway up lower back to your chest push up again. It’s usually the hardest part of the lift that is the length and phase. For a lap pull down, your lats, are fully lengthened when you were at the top of the pole down , and then you pull halfway down, back to full length, then fully down.
I know with all of these examples it sounds like half and then a full rep, but that’s even harder to say than 1.5 reps.
Bottom line: You can add 1.5 reps to any almost any lift and you will see them in many of my programs. Remember to perform the half rep when the muscle is fully lengthened which is usually the hardest part of the movement.
This is a great way to overload the muscles and break through plateaus where you can’t seem to go up in weight like bench press or squat. The bottom portion of both of these lifts is the hardest so training in this area can get you ready for heavier lifts in the future.
