More than any other training protocol, technique or exercise, Elite Fitness Systems’ Dave Tate credits accommodating resistance with having “the greatest impact on our training at Westside Barbell in the past five years.”  Whether you, like Dave, squat 900+ or if you’re just shaking the drops off your ears, fresh off completing your Starting Strength progression, accommodating resistance is a great tool for intermediate and advanced trainees who want to get bigger, stronger and faster while adding some fun into your training.

Accommodating resistance is actually a loading protocol that uses several tools to accomplish great things.  It’s also a polysyllabic mouthful that basically means the weight/tension in the lift is adjusted to challenge your stronger ROM more than the weaker parts.  For example, we can load chains on the end of a barbell so that when lowered in a bench press or squat, weight that was supported at the top of the lift is now on the floor, making the bar effectively weigh less at the bottom.

The three main tools that provide accommodating resistance are chains, bands and weight releasers.  Weight releasers have been around for a long time and basically amount to hooks that hang from barbell collars and disengage at the bottom of a lift, stripping the bar of a percentage of its load.  This means that you can go down with, say 405 in the squat, and explode out of the hole with only 315 on your back.  I mention weight releasers first and in brief because they aren’t as common today, they cannot provide accommodating resistance for more than one rep and they do not stress the strongest part of your concentric ROM.

Next up came chains.  I’m not claiming that chains came after weight releasers, though, just that they are from the same era of accommodating resistance.  Chains can be used for nearly every exercise you can think of, just be sure that you keep a couple of things in mind:

1. Be sure to load the chains evenly, not only side to side, but front to back.  Loading them asymmetrically can be used strategically in the squat or deadlift to change the emphasis of the lift, but this must be applied carefully, so that the asymmetry is ‘symmetrical’.  Then again, it’s very hard to set this up and no real track record of it being all that much better than regular chain loading, so for our purposes, let’s just make sure the chains are even
2. Hang the chains sufficiently low.  If you just hook one end of a chain to a bar in a squat rack, so little of it will be resting on the ground that you’re not getting the full advantage of deloading at the bottom.  It’s better to use larger chains that are already partially resting on the floor, hooked to the bar by a thinner ‘feeder’ chain.  For example, the chains that EFS sells are 20lbs each, so you set the feeder such that the entire large chain is deloaded at the bottom of the lift.  This leaves several links of heavy chain on the floor at the top, but you can still record the entire weight of chain as a benchmark so long as you load it the same way every time.

You can also suspend heavy barbells from chains in a sturdy power rack.  Guys do this with good mornings and it's another way to accomplish the bottom position squat (though, why you'd trouble yourself with that, given that your rack has pins, is beyond me).  The thing about reversing chains is that you're not going to get nearly as much out of it as you can with reversing your band setup.

Bands are cool because they’re colourful and they inject a space aged element to our brutal training.  Bands pull the bar down faster on your eccentric and add tension as you lift the bar back through the concentric phase of the lift.  They feel different than chains and seem to be very hard on the joints.  We typically wouldn’t use accommodating resistance for more then 6-8 weeks in a row on any exercise and keep band work to half of that.  Squatting with bands 12 weeks in a row is a good way to learn how to hate having hips.

The last word on chains and bands is a short one: FUN.  It’s hard to grind against weights week after week, trying to beat records.  That’s part of why the Westside template works so well: you get a good amount of variety in the training, not to mention the speed work is actually *useful*.  The same can be said of accommodating resistance.  You can use bands and/or chains for all of your assistance work too.  A good example is the ‘haunted houses’ or lateral raises I used to do with 20lb chains.  My girlfriend remarked that I look like a cartoon ghost, which is awesome because an exercise that makes my shoulders bigger, stronger and more stable than using a simple dumbbell and also makes people watching me want to laugh . . . that’s a good exercise.  In all seriousness, those 20lbs work great for high rep shoulder raises.  I’ve also choked mini bands to a rack and done raises from there.  You can use these on everything from chins to curls to crunches.  Just make sure to cycle off of them pretty regularly to reap the best results.  I follow a Westside-based template with 3 week mini-cycles so I never use them for more than one cycle.

Like I mentioned above, you can invert the bands and use them to pull the weight up out of the bottom.  It's as simple as choking bands to the top of a good power rack and then looping them over the collars of your barbell.  For bench pressing and squatting, the feeling is something like the boost you get from powerlifting gear.  It's really springy at the bottom and you should take care not to use bands too heavy so that the weight is nearly nothing on your chest.  With a deadlift, it helps you get a weight up that normally would be hard to break from the ground, effectively overloading the top part of the lift.

And that's the name of the game with accommodating resistance: make the lockout harder.  Any more questions about why this is going to help you get stronger?  (In all seriousness, though, feel free to ask any questions in a comment )

A friend of mine asked me a little while back about which gym he should join. He lives amidst an uncontrollable suburban sprawl, and though there are a ton of gyms in the metro area, they all seem somehow compromised. He narrowed his choices to two options, but one is relatively expensive and the other only has one power rack (but it does have three smith machines ). I told him to move, find a home near a gym of a harder core (my recent cross-country move was heavily weighted by the search for a well-equipped powerlifter-friendly gym), but instead he joined the expensive health club.

If you don’t want to be stuck in a place that threatens to kick you out for doing anything resembling getting really strong and muscular, then it might be time to consider equipping the garage or basement with your home gym. In this multipart series starting today, you’ll learn the ins and outs of the dos and don’ts of buying home gym equipment.

When starting from scratch, the first choice for strength training is an easy one: barbells. Barbells allow incremental loading, so you can lift as a beginner and steadily increase the resistance as you move toward mastering the iron sport. A good beginner set should have the following:

One (1) Olympic barbell, 20kg/44lbs (some are 45lbs, and these are fine. In fact, there are some that weigh more than the standard ~45lbs, but we’ll discuss those in the future)

Two (2) spring clips. You need these to keep the plates balanced on the bar (*though home training can present situations where it’s CRITICAL that you DON’T use the clips whilst bench pressing. More on this in next week’s installment). In the absence of weight clips, or if yours break, you can use any kind of clamps that will fit securely on the 2” diameter collars. Just make sure that whatever clips you use, they’re symmetrical.

Four to forty (4-40) 45lb plates. You probably won’t need to load your bar with upwards of 1000 lbs. (and when you do, you’ll probably be using 100lb plates), but you should start with at least four. Four 45s gives you 225lbs including the barbell, which is the bare minimum smaller trainers will need for their novice training programs. Most people should probably get six or eight to start with (always buy weight plates in pairs of identical brand plates), but four can be a good start, especially when you also get:

Two (2) 25lb plates. Most gyms have 35s, but you don’t really need those when you get:

Four (4) 10lb plates. Getting four 10s will save you money by alleviating the need for 35s, plus it allows you to add 20lbs on each side, rather than 25 (10 extra pounds can be a big difference once you start working your way up the strength ladder).

Two (2) 5lb plates. Same as the 10s, but sometimes they’re too heavy.

Two (2) 2.5lb plates. Again, very useful for gradual increases.

Fractional plates. Now, you can buy these, and companies like Iron Woody make very high quality plates in weights as low as a quarter pound. What I did when I trained on the Starting Strength template is buy six (6) 2” internal diameter washers. I read this somewhere online and took my kitchen scale to the local Fastenal. As it turns out, the washers weigh around 10oz each. This is perfect, since adding one on each side allows you to add 1.25lbs. When you’re reaching the limit of your newbie gains on lifts like the overhead press, the ability to add weights as small as 1.25lbs helps you to continue making linear progress. In short: buying fractional plates makes you bigger and stronger, faster. The six washers plus tax only cost me about $12. They might look at you strange at the store, but since you’re confident, it won’t matter. It’s important to weigh them there before you buy, because they can be off by several grams. It’s critical to load barbells symmetrically, so make sure all of them weigh the same amount. I had to go through an entire bin (about 50 washers) to find the 6 that all weighed out identically, but knowing that I was helping to build a balanced, powerful physique made it well worth the effort.

Next week, we’ll discuss the other necessary tools for basic barbell training, plus tips on how to make the most of what you’ve got.