Does stretching your muscles while lifting make them grow longer?
Does longer-muscle length resistance training cause greater longitudinal growth in humans? A systematic review
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Some studies suggest lifting with your muscles stretched out (like deep squats) might make them grow a bit bigger than lifting with them bent, but we’re not sure why or how much.
No biological mechanisms were identified in this study. This may be an epidemiological, observational, or survey-based study that reports associations rather than proposing causal biological pathways.
Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
Max 100Randomized Controlled Trials
Max 90Cohort Studies
Max 72Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional Studies
Max 44Case Reports & Case Series
Max 30Expert Opinion & Narrative Reviews
Max 528 / 100
Evidence Score
The highest quality evidence. These studies systematically search, appraise, and synthesize results from multiple individual studies, providing the most reliable summary of current knowledge.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Some studies suggest lifting with your muscles stretched out (like deep squats) might make them grow a bit bigger than lifting with them bent, but we’re not sure why or how much.
No biological mechanisms were identified in this study. This may be an epidemiological, observational, or survey-based study that reports associations rather than proposing causal biological pathways.
Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
Max 100Randomized Controlled Trials
Max 90Cohort Studies
Max 72Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional Studies
Max 44Case Reports & Case Series
Max 30Expert Opinion & Narrative Reviews
Max 528 / 100
Evidence Score
The highest quality evidence. These studies systematically search, appraise, and synthesize results from multiple individual studies, providing the most reliable summary of current knowledge.
Publication
Authors
Wolf M, Korakakis PA, Roberts MD, Plotkin DL, Franchi MV, Contreras B, Henselmans M, Larsen S, Schoenfeld BJ
Related Content
Claims (5)
The hypertrophic response to training at longer muscle lengths may differ between untrained and trained individuals, but current evidence is insufficient to determine this due to limited data in trained populations.
Working your muscles through a fuller range of motion during weight training might make them grow a little bigger than training with a shorter range, but it’s not always clear or the same for every muscle.
Some studies say full-range lifting makes muscle fibers longer, but the tools used to measure this might be inaccurate, so we can’t be sure it’s really happening.
No one has actually counted the tiny units inside muscle fibers to see if full-range lifting adds more of them—so we don’t know if that’s really what’s happening.
Most of the studies on this topic are not very well done—they often don’t report enough details, have small sample sizes, or use shaky methods, so we can’t trust their results fully.