Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher discuss the importance of range of motion in strength training and how it impacts performance, injury prevention, and long-term joint health. They cover why strength varies throughout a movement, the dangers of locking out your joints, and the myths about extreme ranges of motion. Tune in to hear expert insights on training smarter, maximizing muscle engagement, and protecting your body for the long run.

• Dr. Fisher starts by defining range of motion and why it’s important for strength training. 
• He explains that range of motion isn’t just about flexibility or stretching. It’s about how far and in what direction you can move a joint or muscle, which directly impacts strength, performance, and injury prevention.
• Dr. Fisher explains how strength varies throughout a movement and why it matters. 
• Muscles aren’t equally strong at all points in a movement. They are weaker in the fully-lengthened and fully-shortened positions, but much stronger in the middle. Understanding this helps you train smarter and avoid injury.
• Amy highlights the strength curve and why you’re stronger in some positions more than others.
• How to avoid injury by understanding weak points in your range of motion.
• According to Dr. Fisher, every movement has points where your muscles are naturally weaker. Loading too much weight in these positions increases the risk of strain or injury.
• Dr. Fisher on the most important habit for protecting your joints–never lock them out during lifts. When you fully extend your joints under load, you shift stress from your muscles to your bones and ligaments. Keeping a slight bend in your knees and elbows ensures that your muscles, not your joints, handle the weight.
• Amy explains how keeping muscles loaded every second of an exercise maximizes gains. 
• Understand that pausing or locking out during a lift gives your muscles a break and shifts the load away from them. Keeping tension on the muscle throughout the movement ensures continuous engagement, leading to better strength and muscle development.
• Dr. Fisher explains how rushing through reps reduces their effectiveness. Moving in a slow, controlled manner keeps the muscles engaged and working harder, leading to better strength and endurance over time.
• According to Dr. Fisher, younger people may get away with using extreme ranges of motion, but over time, this can wear down joints and connective tissues. Training with a more controlled range of motion helps maintain joint health for the long run.
• Amy explains how going too far back in a lift weakens tendons and ligaments. When you move too far into a stretch during a lift, you stop effectively working the targeted muscle and instead place excessive stress on tendons and ligaments. This weakens them over time and increases the risk of injury.
• Many people assume soreness means a workout was effective, but that’s not necessarily true. Soreness can indicate muscle fatigue or even joint stress, so it’s not the best way to measure progress.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher agree that a well-designed workout should challenge your muscles, not leave you in pain for days. Your personal trainer’s role is to design a program that helps you get stronger while keeping your joints safe and your body functional.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher discuss how training with joint health in mind ensures you stay strong, mobile, and pain-free as you get older.
• Dr. Fisher debunks the myth that you need extreme motion to build muscle.
• Some bodybuilders and personal trainers believe that using a larger range of motion leads to more muscle growth, but research shows that safer, controlled ranges are just as effective. You don’t need extreme movement to see results. The key is maintaining proper muscle tension and control.
• Dr. Fisher’s top tip for rehab and preventing muscle loss. If you’re recovering from an injury, immobilizing the joint completely can lead to muscle loss. Even small muscle contractions help maintain strength and promote healing.
• Amy’s advice for gym-goers and fitness trainers: When working out, make sure your movement stays within a safe and effective range. 
• Proper guidance helps prevent injury and ensures that your muscles—not your joints—are doing the work.

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Joint-Friendly Fitness: Your Guide to the Optimal Exercise by Bill DeSimone

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We want our muscles working against that load every second of every exercise, and we want to reduce the risk of injury.

All of the neurological and physiological adaptations that we want from strength training can occur even from very, very limited range of motion.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and wellbeing. I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co-hosts are Brian Saigon, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training. And now for today’s episode.

Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are talking about range of motion and why this is important. So Dr. Fisher is with me today and we’re going to start off by talking about really what we mean by range of motion. So, Dr. Fisher, you know, what does range of motion refer to and why are we talking about this topic today?

Dr. Fisher Yeah, so this is a really important topic to talk about in context of physical exercise in general, but specifically in strength training when we load a muscle. Range of motion actually makes reference to the degree of sort of flexion or extension that we might move through at a certain joint. One of the easiest examples to give is at the elbow.

When my elbow is completely straight, my arm is completely straight, my elbow is in extension. When I flex my bicep or I bend my elbow, then my arm moves into flexion. And the elbow is pretty straightforward actually, we can’t move it beyond that 180 degree extension. Some people are slightly hypermobile and they can move it slightly beyond that.

Whether they should and whether it’s safe to do so is potentially questionable and certainly whether it’s safe to do so under load and hence this conversation but we can only really move it so far into flexion. So that’s what we’re really talking about it’s it’s it’s the movement pattern from the joint as a product of the muscle lengthening and shortening to produce that movement. This is not about flexibility and about stretching a muscle which is a slightly different topic. So it’s important to sort of dissociate those two points. Okay great. So why is this an important topic to talk about when it comes to exercising? Yeah so our body moves really well within quite a controlled and to some extent limited range of motion. And it’s kind of a predetermined biomechanical range of motion based on our own physiology. So some people’s physical mechanics won’t permit a joint to flex or extend beyond a certain point. And then of course, there’s potential lengthening and shortening of the muscle that might inhibit or preclude movement into a certain range of motion as well, in addition to other structures like tendons and ligaments and so on and so forth. So for example, many people will experience shoulder problems in their life, and that’s partly because the shoulder is a relatively unstable joint. It’s typically described as a ball and socket joint. It’s not really a good example of a ball and socket joint and the shoulder itself can move in a number of ways. So we can move into flexion when our arm comes forward. Anybody watching on YouTube will get this straight away because I’m going to give the examples. Anybody listening on the podcast, I will try and describe as well as I can. So if my arm comes out in front of me, that’s flexion. If my arm rotates back behind me, that’s extension. I can also move into abduction away from the body. So away from the midline of the body, adduction towards the midline of the body.

And then the shoulder girdle also allows elevation, which is like a shrug movement, depression where my arm is pulled down, retraction where my shoulder blades pull together and my shoulders pull back, or protraction where my shoulder blades pull forward. And I almost form a bit of a kyphosis if I’m not careful with that. So there’s a lot kind of happening there. But if we think in context of the shoulder, even just doing a chest press exercise, if somebody puts their fingertips on their shoulder joint, the head of their humerus, then as they pull their elbow back as if they’re going to begin a chest press, they’ll feel the head of their humerus push forward. And that shows just how unstable that joint actually is, that the humerus can actually push forward and that sort of shows just how unstable that joint actually is, that the humerus can actually push forward. So you can imagine if you are going too far into that range of motion in a chest press, what you’re actually potentially doing at the shoulder joint when you do that.

Yes, and I would imagine that there are certain points in everybody’s range of motion depending on which movement we’re doing where we’re pretty weak and then other points in that movement where we’re stronger. Would that be accurate? So that’s a hundred percent accurate. So we typically have kind of an inverted U or a mountain top of a strength curve throughout a range of motion. So when the muscle is in a lengthened position, it’s relatively weak. And when the muscle is in a maximally shortened position, again, it’s relatively weak. But somewhere in the middle there, it’s much, much stronger. And it’s quite an extreme curve. So it can be quite a drastic drop-off in flexion, full flexion or full extension.

And so the key thing really is to work in that kind of optimal point. We always want, our body will always want to work within that range of motion because that’s where we’re strongest. So if we’re doing things away from the gym, if we’re, I don’t know, picking up a bag of, you know, cat food or dog food or, I don’t know, whatever it might be, something heavy, then we will typically try to work within the range of motion where we’re strongest.

Whereas in the gym, of course, when we’re sat down on a machine, we might be more prone to use more extreme ranges of motion and therefore, the weight that we lift might only be efficacious in kind of a midpoint through that exercise. And we might find that other points in the range of motion we either can’t even lift the weight or, you know, it just doesn’t feel comfortable and so forth.

Yeah, if you were to imagine a strength curve, it’s not a flat line. If you were to draw a picture of somebody’s ability on average throughout a range of motion on a chest press for example, when my elbows are the furthest back, more close to my my torso, I’m going to be a little bit weaker. But as I press forward and as I get to the furthest point away from me and then I and then I resist back It’s a curved line. I’m stronger in some points and i’m weaker at other points and so

It’s important to keep that in mind because there are some points in a range of motion Where we’re weak and so if we’re not careful on how far back we’re going or what we’re How much load we’re giving ourselves throughout those weak points? That’s where we have some issues to worry about. Would that be a fair statement?

Yeah, that’s exactly a fair statement. And in actual fact, the chest press is actually more of a straight line than a curve. And we increase in strength as our hands move away from our body effectively. So we are at our weakest when our hands are closest to our body and we’re at our strongest when our hands are furthest from our body. And that’s typical of many multi-joint exercises. So when we talk about a strength curve, we talk about the strength curve of an individual muscle, but a chest press is of course a multi-joint exercise. So there’s multiple joints moving and therefore there’s multiple muscles at play. So in the chest press, there’s obviously the pectorals, the anterior deltoid plays a big role and the triceps play a big role. And in combination through that biomechanics, we’re actually stronger as we get further and further away. Now this raises something interesting because in all exercises we have this position of extension and one of the key things that we should think about is when we get into extension which would be my arms as far away from my body as they can be or in a leg press my feet as far away from my body as they can be, we want to be very clear not to move too far into extension and certainly not far enough that we lock out the joint by effectively kind of locking the elbow into place. You know, we kind of, our body can do this thing, our skeletal structure can do this thing where when we get to that final end point, we can kind of physically lock the bones into place. And as soon as we do that, we actually transfer the load from the muscular system onto the skeletal system and not in a good way.

Many people will hear that think, oh we’re trying to load the bones because we want them to get stronger and we want to improve bone mineral density. That’s completely true but not in this way. In this way we’re actually far more likely to do harm to our joints and unload the muscle. So we’re actually losing the benefit of training the muscle and potentially harming the joint. So you’ll find specifically in the exercise coach, if you do a leg press or a chest press or an overhead press, any pressing movement as you move into extension, you should never get to a point where your knees don’t have a bend in them or your elbows don’t have a bend in them. You should always maintain some flexion at the joint.

Yeah, I think that’s a very important point to educate people on. I picture sort of videos that you might come across where a person might be doing a bench press and you see them pressing that dumbbell up in the air and then their elbows get locked out straight, right? That’s what we want to avoid because that’s when our bones are bearing the load and not our muscles. So if we’re trying to optimize an exercise session, we don’t want to cheat in that sense, right? Where our bones get to bear all of those pounds. We want our muscles working against that load every second of every exercise and we want to reduce the risk of injury or surprising those muscles with that load after being in a locked out position. And so this is something we educate our clients on is that we’re keeping the muscles loaded in this slow and controlled way in order to maximize what they are doing versus allowing the bones to bear that load.

Right, right. And when we use the exobotics devices, of course, the computer can control the load. It can give us the appropriate load based on our muscles capacity at that position in the range of motion. So as we get stronger in the range of motion, so the computer will give us more resistance and the curve will increase and so forth. But if you can imagine somebody lifting a dumbbell, like you said, if I lift a 30 pound dumbbell, then it’s 30 pounds when I’m in a position of flexion, when I’m at my weakest, but it’s also only 30 pounds when I’m in my strongest. So actually, you could argue that the top, potentially even the top third range of motion is not really doing a lot for me because I’m stronger than the resistance I’ve given myself.

Now in the same sense, if I come too far into flexion, and we’ll talk about flexion in just a second, if I come too far into flexion, and we’ll talk about flexion in just a second, if I come too far into flexion, I’m actually so weak that instead of it being a 30-pound dumbbell, it might only be a 20-pound dumbbell, just purely because that range of motion, I’m so much weaker. So we really should be working within that kind of optimal range of motion, somewhere that’s not too far into flexion and not too far into extension to to optimize adaptations and maximize our gains from strength training from safe strength training. Well and that’s what we all want right we don’t want to get to that point of vulnerability there where we’re opening up the door to outcomes you may not be wanting. Yeah and this is one of the things that Matt

Breschke talked about in the previous podcast he talked about safe training and he talked about longevity. It should be a training that we can do over time, not a training that you can only do in your younger years. You know, I think many people in their 20s, maybe even in their 30s, will use more extreme ranges of motion and their body might be more capable of managing that in the short term, but it’s not sustainable over the long term. And certainly if they think more practically that they want their joints to last a lifetime. So what’s the point in putting the joint at risk for the twenties through that decade of life and then paying for it in your 40s and 50s. Look after those joints as much as we can. Okay. So then the second position is of course, flexion. And we started to talk about this. So our flexion would be, so if you can imagine a leg press when our knee is as bent as far as it will go, and even at coming back as far into our chest as it can go. So this would be our extreme of flexion. If you imagine someone on a leg press, the knees are coming right back to the chest. But what’s actually happening here is two things. First of all, our hamstrings and our gluteals can only stretch so much as we move into this position of flexion. And so one of the things that happens is our pelvis actually will rotate. And of course our body works as a unit, it doesn’t work as in individual muscles. So it will always make accommodations at other joints or at other muscles. So we do this extreme leg press, our pelvis will rotate underneath and as our pelvis rotates what happens is we lose our neutral lumbar curve. So my lower back now will completely straighten out as my pelvis rotates and so we think this is good because we’ve got more range of motion in our leg press but the next day we don’t feel it in our legs we feel it in our low back because we’ve applied that strain or we’ve really reapplied that strain to a different joint or a different anatomical structure within our body.

So again, we want to be really careful. Another great example is our chest press. A biomechanist once said to me, the safest upper body exercises, you can always see your hands. And if we think that when we do a chest press exercise, our hands typically stay in a position where we can see them, they’re in front of us. If we come too far back into a position where we can’t see them, well, I would challenge anybody, if you can bring your hands far enough back that you can put kind of your thumbs on your shoulders, just imagine what your scapula are doing behind you. They’re retracting.

They have to do that to allow our shoulders to move in that position. But if you think about doing this with a resistance where you’re now maybe laying on a bench doing a bench press or if you are on a seated chest press where your back is against the pad, well now your scapula are not able to move into that position. So you’ve still moved into that extreme reflection in the chest press, but actually our other structures haven’t allowed that to happen. So what has happened is we’ve had a stretch response in kind of our tendons and ligaments around our shoulder joint, not a scapular response in our back that’s allowed that movement to occur. And of course the more that we do this kind of movement at our shoulder without allowing our scapula or not back to move accordingly, we create a laxity in those tendons, those ligaments, and we create an unstable joint, which then will lead to further problems and potential tendon inflammation, or potentially even unstable shoulder joints, you know, going forward, which can obviously inhibit, you know, strength training in the future. So there’s a lot of sort of potential pitfalls. And the idea, again, that we only move within a safe range of motion is really important.

CM Thank you for spelling that out. I think that’s important to know. It becomes counterproductive in some ways and we’re no longer working the muscle groups that we’re trying to work if we’re going too far back. We’re in fact weakening in some ways the tendons and ligaments and that’s not what we want because it’s going to be, it’s very counterproductive. We don’t want to become more vulnerable in that area as a result of trying to gain strength.

So that’s really helpful to understand.

The other thing that we often talk about with range of motion is that people might feel more prone to feeling a soreness from following a workout where there’s been a more extreme range of motion. And it’s often difficult to think about whether there’s a difference between, okay, my shoulder muscles are sore or my shoulder joint is sore. Now, first of all, it’s worth clarifying that soreness is not an indicator for adaptation. If you feel sore after a workout, you know, after in the successive days after a workout, that’s not an indicator that you’ve had a good workout. It’s certainly an indicator that you’ve done a workout, but it’s typically an indicator of it being quite a novel stimulus. So, you know, those people that are accustomed to strength training might not feel that soreness anymore, but if you went and ran a marathon, you’d definitely feel that soreness for a few days afterwards. And it’s purely because it’s a novel stimulus. But it’s difficult to identify he difference between soreness in a joint and soreness in a muscle. And in that sense, it’s almost worth saying, if you feel soreness, go back and now limit the range of motion a little bit more or go back to speak to your coach or your personal trainer and just double-check that range of motion is in the right place. Because if it’s soreness in the joint, then you know you’ll pay for it over the long haul. Yeah, that’s really helpful.

Sometimes we do have clients that ask us, should I be feeling sore after every workout? But you just have answered that question.

And I think people will feel some muscular soreness after a workout. It’s not a problem at all. The idea that the muscle has worked and that they’ve worked hard. Some people will really kind of embrace that soreness and that to them is a marker of a good workout. And other people will resent it.

And it can be to some extent, it can be quite debilitating. I often think in, in some clients, the last thing that you want is to make them feel so sore the next day or two that they can’t form their kind of daily functions, uh, you know, without soreness, without that discomfort. That’s not kind of motivating to go back and do the next workout.

But certainly if it’s from an extreme range of motion, then it’s likely going to produce wear and tear. And there’s a great quote by Bill DeSimone, and I often joke about this. Bill DeSimone has written a number of books that really are geared around, uh, joint health and good biomechanics and strength training. Um, one of the most recent ones was, was, was called joint friendly fitness.

And that’s available on Amazon and so forth. And, um, Bill, Bill’s quote, which I will butcher, I’m sure goes something like the things we do in our twenties, we pay for in our 40s, the things we do in our 50s we pay for later that day. So we have got to think about long-term joint health and welding.

Yeah, well, so it sounds like you’re an advocate for a controlled range of motion.

I certainly am. And so really that takes us to another point that says, okay, if we limit the range of motion. Matthew Feeney I certainly am. And so really that takes us to another point that says, okay, if we limit the range of motion, what are we losing? Are we losing anything? You know, are we leaving anything on the table as far as adaptations? Now for some time in the last few years, there’s been talk that you need to use more extreme ranges of motion to optimize muscle hypertrophy. And that’s simply not the case. There’s more and more research coming out. There’s many, many research papers that have been published or that are impressed, meaning they’re in review or that they are in the process of being published. That simply shows there’s no difference between extreme ranges of motion and much, much safer ranges of motion. And then the other thing we can think about from a strength point of view is our body. We often think, well, we only get stronger in the area we train within. Actually, some of the greatest studies on range of motion have talked about isometric training, and that’s only training at a specific joint angle. So you can imagine if I only did a bicep contraction with my arm at 90 degrees, would my bicep only get stronger when my arm is at 90 degrees? Well, that’s simply not the case. And in fact, what we know now is that we get stronger probably about 20 degrees either side of the range of motion that we train within. So we don’t need to move into an extreme range of motion to even get stronger in that range of motion. The stimulus is still there and still extends to about 20 degrees either side of the area that we move within. So, uh, so we’re certainly not leaving anything on that table at all. As far as strength or muscle hypertrophy and so forth. And we are maintaining that joint health, uh, that tendon health, not ligament health and so forth.

That there’s a lot there to kind of clarify for, for the listeners. Hopefully.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s almost fair to say, you know, you don’t have to press very far out. Like again, talking about a chest press, I could press with all my might against a wall and get an amazing workout, even though I’m not moving anywhere.

Right. There’ve been some unbelievable studies, really fascinating from my point of view as an exercise physiologist. There was a study back in 2011 or 2012 and it had a number of participants just simply stand and perform a co-contraction of their biceps and triceps with their arm at a 90 degree angle. And over a 12, they did I think five or six maximal contractions for sort of five or six seconds and they did that a five or six maximal contractions for five or six seconds, and they did that a couple times per week. And they found that after 12 weeks of training, their biceps had got bigger and their triceps had got bigger. They found that their dynamic strength, their ability to lift a barbell in a bicep curl had gone up, and their ability to recruit muscle fibers had also improved. So all of the neurological and physiological adaptations that we want from strength training can occur even from very, very limited range of motion. And in fact, many physiotherapists, I’ve done a lot of work with physiotherapists, one of the first things that you do when rehabilitating a joint is to work isometrically. Okay, can we contract the muscles around that joint? Yes, let’s contract them. Okay, then we can start to extend that range of motion to try and mobilize the joint that bit more and so forth. So isometric training can be absolutely great.

And of course, one of the protocols on the Exerbotics devices, Accommodate, is so good working within that limited range of motion, which can be great for things like lumbar extension, or I’ve used it with overhead press and pull down, and it’s a really tough workout.

Yes, it’s really awesome. Our exercise coach studios have this technology with the click of a button a trainer can accommodate somebody’s workout to adjust automatically that range of motion um to lower the goal that we’re targeting that day in real time based on how somebody’s body is doing and so it’s fantastic technology

But overall to dr. Fisher, I mean, how would you say this? this research and and this understanding of controlling range of motion should apply to anybody working with clients, to trainers, to coaches, to anybody who is delivering exercise to clients?

Yeah, so actually we can take it a step further and say one of the key things for me is that anybody that’s in kind of a residential care home or in a hospitalized situation, maybe because of age or medical conditions or so forth, especially if it’s musculoskeletal, can still make adaptations in strength by simply contracting their muscles. We know that if you immobilize a joint, there will be muscle wastage. So we still want to see that muscle contraction. So even if somebody is sat and they contract their muscles, that’s a good thing. Muscles were meant to be there to be used, let’s use them. Now if you’re a coach or a trainer or if you’re training at home or training yourself in a normal commercial gym and don’t attend the exercise coach, then the key thing that I would say is always set the range of motion on the machine so you’re not moving into an extreme of flexion where you have to start the exercise from a position that you’re uncomfortable to get into and always control that range of motion. So you’re never moving too far into extension. But you’re either unloading the muscle either because you’re so strong in that position that the muscle doesn’t, that the weight is so light, or especially that you’re transferring the load onto the skeletal system. Now, I think many, many trainers and coaches will be aware of this. They’ll have, they’ll have kind of understood this through their education and certifications. Although this is hopefully a nice reminder.

But if you’re a trainee, just training on your own, going to a gym, then just bear in mind you don’t need to do these extreme ranges of motion. Your adaptations will occur pretty similar irrespective of the range of motion that you used and your capacity to maintain training by avoiding injury will be enhanced some.

Well, this is really helpful information. You know, I’ve taken away from this conversation a lot of things. Most importantly, the benefits of controlling somebody’s range of motion throughout a movement and the incredible upside to doing so, you know, among other things. But is there anything more that you’d like to leave our listeners with here from this topic today?

Dr. Fischer No, I think we’ve covered everything, Amy.

Thanks so much.

Amy Quinton Thanks, Dr. Fischer. We will see you next time.

And remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for much. Thanks, Dr. Fisher. We will see you next time. And remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening.

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