Power Partials

 

Partial Rep and Power Rack Training for Added Strength and Power

Pointers, Tips, Programs

     After some time spent under the bar, a lifter will often hit a wall when it comes to strength gains.  It can happen to any lift or to all of one’s lifts.  Oftentimes, the lifter will try new training programs, additional work, or less work.  Sometimes, they may attempt to alter their nutritional regimens, increasing calories and/or protein, all in a hope to get their strength moving again.  But one of the best techniques for increasing strength once more is the time-tested method of partial reps, often performed in the rack but also with the help of boards or blocks.  In this essay, I want to look at the various ways that partials can be utilized, especially for the three powerlifts, the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift, although it can be used for other lifts, such as overhead movements and even curls.

     One word of note—I suppose caution might be more like it—before we get this thing started.  Sometimes lifters use partials for the wrong reason.  They like to do them for the simple fact that they are capable of lifting heavier weights with them.  These lifters often do them in place of full-range movements, and this is never a good plan.  The thinking sometimes goes that if they can use more weight, they’ll be able to build muscle.  But strength, and muscle growth in particular, just doesn’t work this way.  When hypertrophy is your goal, especially your primary goal, then you need full range of motion, not less.  You need to use partials in addition to, and as a supplement for, your lifts at full range of motion.  When used correctly, however, they can make a most valuable addition to your strength training arsenal.

     We will look at different lifts one-by-one, and different ways that partials can be incorporated for each one.  We’ll also look at the various ways that you can integrate them into different workout routines, whether you train the lifts separately, as part of a full-body routine, or in a multi-lift session.

Bench Presses

     If for no other reason than it’s probably the world’s most popular lift, at least among men, we’ll start with the bench press.  The bench press is also a movement that can be trained with relative simplicity.  You need little outside of the actual bench press and partial variations of it to achieve good results.

     The best partial movement for the bench press is the board press.  I prefer it over rack presses.  The issue with doing partials in the rack is that they often don’t carry over to the bench press.  The reason for this is that you need to be in the exact same body position when starting the partial as you would be in your regular bench press.  If your sticking point is the last ⅓ of the rep, and so you set the pins at this height, doing presses from that position, your body is often out of position compared to that point when on the bench and not in the rack.  Board presses take care of this.  The exception to this is—and one of my favorite movements for building your bench—the bottom-position bench press.  When starting from the bottom position in the rack, you can position your chest, your shoulders, and just your upper body in general at the same position it will be in when training outside of the rack.

     Use various board heights when doing board presses.  You want to use single board, double board, and triple board presses.  You need to use a board that is right at your weak point, or as close to it as you can get.  Often, when you hit a sticking point in your bench press—this goes for all of your other lifts, as well—your weak point is right below your sticking point.  To know exactly where your sticking point is located, it’s helpful to have a discerning training partner who can see it.  You can also take a video of your lift so you can personally see it—this is one of the advantages of modern smart phones.  When I was competing in powerlifting, that wasn’t an option.  At least, not until the end of my lifting career.

     You will always have a sticking point.  It will simply change over time, sometime from month-to-month.  This is one of the other advantages to using different size boards or to press from different pins in the rack on a regular basis.  It makes you strong on all of the various points of your lift.

     When doing partials—whether it’s board or pin presses—use varying grips.  When specializing on your bench press, your program should consist of multiple sets of low reps on regular bench presses, pin presses, board presses, all done with an assortment of grips.  Add in some speed work, a tricep exercise or two, a lat exercise, and a movement for your front delts and you have a complete bench program.

     Here’s an example bench press program that will work wonders for your strength.  This is a 2-days-per-week routine.  Take 2 days off after the first workout and 3 days after the second.  You could train on Monday and Thursday, for instance.

Workout One - Speed Day

• Bench presses: 10 sets of 3 reps, using 60-70% of your one rep maximum.  Do these using the dynamic effort method.  If you’re unfamiliar with how to do speed work, click on the link and read my article just on that subject.  Vary your grips throughout the sets, using a close-grip, a medium-grip, and a wide-grip.

• Skull crushers or J.M. presses: 3-4 sets of 10-12 reps

• Wide-grip chins or lat pulldowns: 3-4 sets of 6-8 reps

• Lying barbell front delt raises: 3-4 sets of 10-12 reps.  On the bench press, use your “competition” grip—or the grip you use when going for a PR—and lower the bar down to your waist/upper legs, keeping your arms straight.

Workout Two - Maximal Strength Day

• Bench presses: ramps of 5, 3, and 2 reps.  Do progressively heavier 5s until you hit a near max.  Go to triples and do the same thing.  Then, go to doubles until you hit a near max for 2.

• Two-board presses: double ramps of 2 reps.  After hitting your 2-rep near-max on regular bench presses, start doing double ramps with two-board presses, doing progressively heavier doubles.  For your first 2 sets, use the same weight as your double-max on regular benches.  With double ramps, you do 2 sets with the same weight before adding weight and continuing.  When you hit your near-max on these, go to…

• Three-board presses: double ramps of 2 reps.  Use the same method as the 2-board presses.

     On each maximal strength day, use a different grip from workout-to-workout.  The first week, you might do close grip benches.  The 2nd week, use a medium grip.  On the 3rd week, use a grip wider than your competition grip.  On the 4th week, start back over with close grips.

     Stick with the above program for 8 weeks.  At that point, you can continue with it, assuming you’re still making gains or you can change to something completely different.  If you do stick with it, then start making some changes to the program.  You can change your set/rep sequence or you can change exercises.  You can substitute the conventional bench presses on your maximal effort day with bottom-position bench presses in the rack.  You can also substitute pin presses for the board presses.

Squats

     Squats can be trained in a similar fashion to the bench press.  However, I think partials in the power rack work better for squats than they do for bench presses.  You can use box squats, also, in a similar manner as to how board presses are used for the bench.

     As much as I like bottom-position bench presses, I like bottom-position squats even more.  The first time that I squatted over 500 pounds in a powerlifting meet, raw, in the 165-pound class, I did so using nothing but bottom-position squats to prepare for it.  I worked up to a 420 pound bottom-position squat for a max.  At the meet, I squatted 510, a 90-pound difference between my bottom-position squat and my regular one.  For one, this tells you just how strong you can get using rack training only for the squat.  Second, it tells you how much harder bottom-position squats are—how much less you can lift on them—compared to the “regular” full squat.  When you start from the bottom position, you don’t have the “coil” power that is gained by doing the negative portion of the lift first.

     When using the rack for partials, it’s easier to get “set up” in the same position you use for your regular squat, unlike with the bench presses done in the rack.

     As with the bench presses, you should do your partials from different heights to get past your various sticking points.

     One good technique you can use is to not begin your squat from the starting position.  Instead, walk the squat off the “starting pins,” lower down to wherever you have the pins set in the rack, pause for a second or two on the pins, and then explode back to lockout.  One of the benefits with this method is that you can relax your muscles momentarily, then tense them again as you execute the positive portion of the squat.

     You can also do this when you squat onto a box.  This is the technique that Westside Barbell uses for box squats, and one of the reasons that Louie Simmons was a fan of the movement in general.  When doing box squats, it’s best to do them just below parallel, at parallel, and just above parallel.

     Before we look at an example program, I want to discuss deadlifts.  If you’re a powerlifting competitor, or you just want to build a big squat and a powerful deadlift, I suggest training the two together.  After we talk about deadlifts, I’ll give you another 2-day-a-week program that combines the squat and the deadlift.

Deadlifts

     I have to get something out of the way before we can continue.  I’m, overall, not a fan of partials in the rack for deadlifts.  Why?  They simply don’t carry over that much to your standard deadlift, conventional or sumo.  It’s not that partial rep training for the deadlift doesn’t have its place.  Just don’t expect your increased partial rep strength to equal a bigger regular deadlift.

     When I first started powerlifting almost 30 years ago—I did a lot of bodybuilding and “power-building” before that—I utilized quite a bit of deadlift partials, hoping that it would equate to a bigger deadlift in competition.  I stopped after a couple of realizations.  First, as mentioned, I noticed it didn’t help my competition deadlift.  Second, I started reading a lot of Louie Simmons’s material in Powerlifting USA and he wrote that partial deadlifts in the rack didn’t equate to a bigger deadlift.

     All of this is not to say that you shouldn’t do some partial rep training for your pulls.  If you have a sticking point anywhere between your shins and your knees, it does help to include some partial rep training, starting the lift just below your sticking point.  Actually, what aided my deadlift more than anything, however, was doing deficit deadlifts, both conventional and sumo style.  The same goes for all the powerlifters that I have trained over the years.  You should train them heavily and use speed work.  Starting from a deficit helps your sticking point, even if it’s at the knee level, by making that point in your lift harder.  Doing deficits for speed, especially, will help you to “blast” past your sticking point, wherever it is.

     If you’re just after a bigger back, partials are probably more beneficial.  Taking away the bottom portion of the movement also takes away tension on your legs and hips.  If you’re a bodybuilder seeking hypertrophy above all else, you may want to do deadlifts but don’t know where to include them.  Back day?  Leg day?  Doing rack pulls, you can include them on your back day without interfering with an upcoming leg workout.

     Don Reinhoundt—IPF superheavyweight world powerlifting champ from ‘73 to ‘76 and World’s Strongest Man champion in ‘79—had a method of training the deadlift in the rack where he would do rack pulls with the weight he was going to pull in an upcoming meet, say 850.  8 weeks away from a meet, he would do this 8 inches from the floor.  Each week, he would lower the bar by 1 inch.  At the meet, he had no problem pulling the weight from the floor.  I’ve had success using this method while also including deficit deadlifts in my program.

     Let’s look at a sample workout that combines what we’ve discussed for both squats and deadlifts.  Do the following program 2 days a week.  You could combine it with the bench program that I’ve already outlined.  If you do the bench workout on Monday and Thursday, do the following on either Tuesday and Friday or Tuesday and Saturday.

Workout One - Speed Day

• Box squats: 8-10 sets of 2 reps, using 60-70% of your one rep maximum.  Do these using the dynamic effort method.

• Deficit deadlifts: 6-8 sets of 1 rep, using 60-70% of your one rep maximum.  Once again, do these with the dynamic effort method.  Rotate each week between conventional and sumo pulls.

• Squat lockouts: double ramps of singles.  Get in the rack, and do a ¾ squat.  Do progressively heavier singles, doing 2 sets at each weight before moving up.  Do not go all-out.  Stop once the sets get tough, but know that you still have plenty of strength left in you.  This will make sure that you have plenty of strength for your 2nd session of the week.

• Weighted incline situps: 1-2 sets of 6-8 reps

• Hyperextensions or reverse hypers: 2-3 sets of 12-15 reps.  These should be relatively easy.  Just get some blood flow into your lower back.

• Farmer walks: 1-2 sets, hard but not all-out.

Workout Two - Maximal Strength Day

• Bottom-position squats: ramps of 5, 3, and 2 reps

• Rack pulls: ramps of 5, 3, and 2 reps.  Use the “Reinhoundt method,” as described above.

• Weighted incline situps: 1-2 sets of 6-8 reps

• Hyperextensions or reverse hypers: 2-3 sets of 12-15 reps

• Sled drags: 2-3 sets, hard but not all-out.  Rotate between pulling the sled forward and backward.  You can do this from set to set or from workout to workout.

     Do the above program for 8 weeks straight.  If you want to continue after that, then make some changes to your routine.  Change the exercises you use on Workout Two.  You can use a different squatting movement and a different deadlift.  If you're advanced, you will want to make regular changes to Workout Two, anyway.  Replace the bottom-position squats every other week with regular squats, front squats, or box squats.  Replace the rack pulls with deficit deadlifts, rotating between both sumo and conventional, the same as with the speed day.

Other Lifts

     Partial rep training can also work well on some of your other lifts or as a way to boost muscle growth at the end of training a full-range movement.

     They work really well for the overhead press.  Everything we discussed in the above lifts works when applied to the overhead press—with the exception of board presses, of course.  One benefit of doing pin presses for your military press is you don’t have to unrack it or clean it from the floor or a hang position.  Of course, if you’re after overall mass, you do want to include some cleans.  It stimulates more muscle mass by doing the clean first.  But sometimes you don’t want to do that in order to preserve your nervous system.

     Bottom-position presses are great for the military press.  You can even do bottom-position push presses by setting the pins low enough that you have to squat under it slightly.  Starting your press from this position is good for athletes, as it gives your quads, hips, and “core” a good “explosive” workout.

     As I mentioned at the start of this article, when hypertrophy is your goal, the fuller range of motion the better.  But doing partial reps, particularly at the end of a set, is a great way to increase the “intensity” of a set, allowing you to continue once you can no longer do a full range of motion rep.  In this case, you’re often better doing the partial rep for the bottom half of the rep.  For example, once you can no longer do a full range bench press, you can continue by doing reps at the bottom, repping out “mini-reps” of the bottom quarter of the bench press, or whatever chest exercise you’re utilizing.  You can use the same technique for all of your other muscle groups, as well.

     You can also use them for “mechanical drop sets.”  On the bench press, for instance, as soon as you reach failure, go immediately to 2-board presses.  Rep out on these and then continue with 3-board presses in the same manner.

Closing Thoughts

     As with most of my articles, I’m sure that, once I’ve posted this and “stepped away” from it for a little while, I’ll realize that I forgot one or two tidbits that I should have included.  I think, however, that I’ve included enough to suffice for an informational training piece.

     Please understand, too, that the example programs I’ve included are just that, examples.  You can include partials in a full-body program or even a one-lift-a-day routine.  They will work on a Bill Starr-style heavy-light-medium program or a “bro split” regimen.  Experiment with some of my tips and find what works for you.  Partials are a good supplement to your regular movements and a great way for more advanced strength athletes to get even stronger.  Use them well and more strength is yours for the taking.