Helping lanky athletes avoid hazards and inconveniences is not an easy task. The proposed measures will simplify the solution of this task and help tall guys become strong and muscular!

Author: Todd Boomgardner

The gym is a real torture chamber for tall guys. Lanky athletes often have to twist and position their levers at an uncomfortable angle to get the correct starting position and perform the exercise correctly, which increases the risk of injury and increases the distance of the working weight.

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

If you are not sure if you need to adjust your work in the gym, let’s first decide who is considered “high” in relation to strength training.

In this situation, we’re not talking about guys with a 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 it is difficult for you to cope with your long legs, then you need to somehow deal with it. I am ready to offer you simple solutions that will help you fix technical errors and eliminate long-legged and long-armed obstacles.

1. Basic isometric exercises

Long legs and arms make it 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 to start and finish correctly.

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

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

Stay in a static position until you feel decent fatigue, but not long enough for your posture to begin to resemble a deformed garden chair. Start with 10-15 sets of 10-15 seconds, work your way forward, increasing the length of the set, decreasing the total number of sets, and gradually moving into the correct position.

2. Leave only the concentric phase

Guys who constantly bump their heads against the 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 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 placing emphasis on the concentric phase (the contraction phase), for example, 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 your range of motion, stabilize your starting position, and perform the exercise with enough force and vigor 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 repetitions in concentric exercises. If you do fewer reps, you turn the exercise into a quasi-maximum, an unproductive movement.

3. Loose negatives

Once you’ve mastered the concentric exercises, add loosening movements that involve using the shoulder straps to ease the eccentric phase of the bar movement — mainly when doing bench presses and squats.

For loose negatives, tie one piece of webbing to the top of the squat rack and wrap the other around the bar. As the projectile is lowered, the strap will stretch, which will reduce stress during the eccentric phase and help initiate the concentric phase of the movement.

This strategy is designed to help the athlete move from concentric exercise to full movement. 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 how to cleanly overcome all phases of the movement.

4. Medium repetitions

Tall athletes have long levers that interfere with proprioception and movement control. Excessively intense exercise with high weight and low reps is tantamount to a dangerous, painful and potentially traumatic approach. Get hung up on extreme weights and one-rep sets and your performance will drop much faster than normal arm length athletes. Quality reps and a long athletic career are built on medium reps.

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

Training program

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

Training program for tall

Being tall shouldn’t hinder your strength training success. Success depends on many factors. Learn to hold the position with isometric movements, develop starting strength with concentric movements, and learn to deal with the eccentric phase with relaxed negatives.

Master these techniques with medium repetitions and you will solve all the problems of the lanky athlete.

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