If you want to improve your strength, knowing what the “strength curve” is will help you to plan fitness activities that will improve muscular mobility or maximize the full potential of your muscles. Your strength curve is how much weight/force, from the starting position of a movement to ending position, you are able to push/pull or lift up and down
Your natural strength curve can be measured down to a science. There are articles all around the web that attempt to explain the technical details for you, so I’ll attempt to translate some of that technicality into practical and more simplified understanding.
Improve Push Strength
With pushing, naturally it’s less strenuous to descend with a weight at the beginning than it is to push it back up at the end. For example, it’s easier to hold a push up at the top with arms extended, than it is to hold it at the bottom with your arms contracted.
Exercises that require strength to push are traditional squats, pushups, pressing exercises, raises, dips, and incline flys. To improve your push strength curve our resident CPTs from Custom Fitness Douglasville & Focus Fitness 7 recommend these two options:
- option a: perform the full range of an exercise motion with a resistance band
- option b: perform only half of the exercise motion range starting from the downward position
In Practice Example: If you want to develop a deeper squat and/or squat more weight, train your muscles by doing either of these:
- option a: start the exercise from your deep, parallel squat position and move upward halfway and return back to the deep squatting position with manageable weight (nothing heavy).
- option b: Complete the full range squat with moderate resistance band(s)