Tall Training Program

Helping lanky athletes avoid danger and inconvenience is no easy task. The proposed measures will make this task easier and help tall guys become strong and muscular!

Author: Todd Bumgardner

The gym is a real torture chamber for tall guys. In order to get into the right starting position and perform the exercise correctly, lanky athletes often have to dodge and place their levers at an awkward angle, and this increases the risk of injury and increases the distance of the working weight.

A daunting problem for the tall gym occupants who constantly have to adapt basic movements to their anatomical and biomechanical features.

If you're not sure if you need to adjust your work in the gym, let's first decide who counts as "tall" in relation to strength training.

In this situation, we are not talking about guys with slightly above average height. We are talking about men who are over 192 cm and women over 178 cm. We are talking about real skyscrapers.

If you calmly look down on a professional basketball player, and in the gym you find it difficult to cope with your long legs, then you need to deal with it somehow. I am ready to offer you simple solutions that will help correct technical errors and eliminate long-legged and long-armed interference.

Due to the long legs and arms, it is extremely difficult for you to take the correct starting position, and this leads to poor performance of the entire exercise. Isometric exercises, in which you hold a static contraction, provide an opportunity to develop the correct position. They teach lanky athletes how to start and finish the exercise correctly.

Over time, isometric exercises will help the athlete feel the correct range of motion. If you're having trouble doing half squats but can easily do quarter squats, then start with a quarter squat and gradually work your way down and deeper. So you will systematically improve the technique of deep squats and increase the overall range of motion without experiencing physical discomfort.

Do not miss the very essence of isometric movements: this is not a long and tedious waiting for the weather by the sea, this is active work, albeit in a static mode. Whatever position you take, you must hold it with the help of the whole body.

Stay in a static position until you feel fairly tired, but not so long that your posture begins to resemble a deformed garden chair. Start with 10-15 sets of 10-15 seconds, move forward, increasing the duration of the set, decreasing the total number of sets, and gradually moving to the correct position.

Guys who constantly bang their head against a doorway have some difficulty with proprioceptive sensitivity and motor innervation. As if the signal from the muscles to the brain and back goes a little longer than usual. As a result, the eccentric, or negative, phase of the movement, or rather, its outcome, becomes a matter of chance: either the fixation of the body is lost, or the arms are crooked. In a word, the whole exercise is down the drain.

By emphasizing the concentric (contraction) phase, such as doing the bench press in the squat rack or squatting in the same manner, lanky athletes will get at least some relief, because the basis of these exercises will be isometric movements. They will improve the range of motion, stabilize the starting position, and perform the exercise with enough vigor and energy to develop strength and volume. And you don’t have to worry about the forced reduction in working weight.

The success of a concentric exercise depends on acceleration. Even with a lot of weight, you need to focus on moving the projectile from start to finish as quickly as possible. Stick to 3-8 reps for concentric exercises. If you do fewer reps, you turn the exercise into a quasi-maximum, into a non-productive movement.

Once you've mastered the concentric exercises, add movements with relaxed negatives that involve the use of straps to facilitate the eccentric phase of the bar movement - mainly when doing the bench press and squats.

For weakened negatives, tie one piece of webbing to the top of the squat rack and wrap the other around the bar. As the projectile descends, the strap will stretch, which will reduce the load during the eccentric phase and help start the concentric stage of movement.

This strategy is designed to help the athlete transition from concentric exercises to full range movements. Isometric exercises teach you to take and hold the correct position, concentric presses teach you to develop maximum effort from the starting position, and weakened negatives teach you to cleanly overcome all phases of the movement.

Tall athletes have long leverage that interferes with proprioception and movement control. An overly intense load with high weights and low reps amounts to a dangerous, painful, and potentially traumatic set. Fixate on extreme weights and one-rep sets and your performance will drop much faster than in the case of athletes with normal leverage. Quality reps and a long sports career are built on medium reps.

Embrace this strategy and do sets of 5-8 reps. If you want to gain mass, increase the volume of the load by increasing the number of sets in the training session or in the training cycle. To increase strength, carefully focus on the starting position and perform quality repetitions that develop frenetic tension.

Here's a sample program that I recommend real giants use. It includes a set of concentric exercises and weakened negatives.