PAVEL YTHJALL

WE THINK OF MUSCLES as parts. But skeletal muscles themselves consist of many thousands of tiny parts called fibres. Crucially, fibres— which are one to four inches long— rarely run the length of any muscle you train. Therefore, an exercise that stresses fibres near a muscle’ s top won’ t activate fibres near the bottom. Diverse angles of attack are necessary to stimulate as many fibres as possible and goad them toward growth, and no

methodology hits your muscles in more ways each workout than small-angle training.

SMALL-ANGLE TRAINING Over the past four decades, Charles Glass has established himself as bodybuilding’ s preeminent trainer with what is popularly called angle training. This is a constantly morphing assault using subtle changes in the positioning of bodies and equipment. But what if you took that and cranked it up

to 11? What if no two sequential sets were ever alike, and your overriding mission was to hit fibres from as many angles as possible? Welcome to small-angle training.

With small-angle training, each set of an exercise is performed differently in a sequence of typically four to six sets. You might change the grip, the stance, the angle of a bench, or the positioning of equipment, like the height of a cable pulley. Ideally,

JANUARY 2018 | FLEX 27