To break through any progress barriers, incorporate extreme stretching into your routine moving forward, and watch your progress skyrocket!
What is Fascia?
Fascia is a layer of fibrous tissue that encapsulates your muscle tissue. There are three types of fascia:
- Superficial Fascia is found just beneath the skin in the subcutis of most regions of the body.
- Deep Fascia surrounds the muscles, bones, nerves, and blood vessels.
- Visceral Fascia suspends organs in their cavities.
Deep Fascia is the one we will be concentrating on. Muscle fascia or myofascia, is a type of deep fascia that can determine the flexibility or muscle growth of an individual.
This deep fascia tissue that encapsulates your muscle can keep you from achieving the size you are after when trying to pack on muscle.
Some individuals are genetically predisposed to having weaker fascia, which I call ‘genetically gifted’ in the context of bodybuilding and easy muscle gain.
Conversely, others are unfortunately predisposed to very strong fascia, making them less advantaged, or ‘ungifted’, for bodybuilding and easy muscle gain.
What you can do to combat this is to use extreme deep fascia stretching to your routines on every body part.
How to Apply Extreme Fascial Stretching for Maximum Muscle Gain
We could go into a ton of science behind fascia stretching and why it works however we want to get straight to the point and give you some overview of how to apply this method for maximum results.
First, always stretch between each set. This doesn’t have to be long stretches. This can be done with a 10 to 15-second stretch in between each set performed.
So if you are doing chest presses or flys, you can just use a rack or even the wall and stretch each side of your chest using your arms against the wall to add some stretch to each pec, or just lean into a rack using your arms to brace and stretch for 10 to 15 seconds.
The Final Extreme Stretch
Chest example
Now that you have completed your chest routine with stretching in-between, we will do your final extreme stretch.
– Grab a pair of dumbbells. These can be as light as you need since everyone’s strength level will differ. I remember when I started, I was using 25 lbs, which was more than enough.
– Lay flat on the bench as if you were going to do a dumbbell fly, and bring the dumbbells back, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Hold this position for one minute. You should feel an extreme stretch during this time.
– It’s always best to use a stopwatch or have a training partner time you.
– If you are doing this correctly, your hands will shake, and you’ll feel a strong urge to drop the weights.
Calf example
– Using a standing calf raise machine or an elevated platform with a weight belt around your waist, load the amount of weight you would typically use for 8 reps.
– Raise your heels until you are at the “top” of the movement.
– Now, lower your heels until you are in the extreme stretch position and hold that position for one minute.
This might sound very easy until you try it.
If you find this to be very easy, you might not be performing it correctly, or you may need to increase the weight.
Check out this video taken from DC Training to demonstrate extreme stretching:
Conclusion
Extreme stretching will bring your game to a whole new level. Used as described above you will see massive gains in a short amount of time.
Be very careful with the amount of weight used in these stretching exercises, you can easily tear tendons and ligaments if you become too overzealous with the amount of weight you are using.
Incorporate this technique into your workouts and break through any progress barriers!
