4 Benefits Of Chains For Resistance Training (Kinetic Nutrition Fitness)

Building muscle and increasing your overall strength in the gym requires you to put an extreme amount of stress on your neuromusculoskeletal system and after a while your body will adapt to the stress by creating new neurons in your brain increasing your mind/muscle connection, your muscles cells or myocytes will enlarge, and your tendons/ligaments will also become denser. After this happens from your basic movements and resistance load we need to introduce another type of stimulus to a certain exercise or movement to further increase the stress on the body and using chains on certain barbell movements like the bench press, military press, or squat is a great way to do so. Here are 4 reasons why you should start training with chains to increase your ability to build more muscle and overall strength on these lifts.

1. Stabilization - By adding the chains on your barbell this is going to cause the bar to be less stable, which in return will activate all of your deep stabilization muscles to support your primary moving muscles more on your lift increasing neuron production and overall caloric burn.

2. Muscle Confusion - By having chains on your barbell the exact amount of weight during each portion of your repetition will be different. As you perform the lowering or eccentric portion of the lift the chains will become shorter and most of the weight will be on the ground causing a reduction in resistance on the way down, but on the raising phase of the lift or the concentric portion the chains will lengthen and rise off the ground causing and increase in resistance as you reach the top of the movement. This will trick your mind and muscles and be another added stimulus causing your body to grow and adapt further.

3. Power - Training with chains will have an increase in your power vs. just strength, which has to deal with not just how much you can lift, but how fast. With the increase in resistance on the concentric phase of your lift will require a faster speed at which you lift the weight causing you to have to be more explosive on your lift. Try performing a nice controlled slower eccentric portion of your rep and as you reach the bottom of the rep be as explosive as you can on the way up to combat the shift in resistance load and this will not only make your lifts stronger, but way more explosive.

4. Aesthetics - This benefit is for a little bit more for humor, but everyone knows that by training with chains you just look like that much more of a beast when your in the gym. Believe it or not this can have a psychological effect on you causing an increase in serotonin and dopamine leading to an even better workout than normal and an increase in your overall mood, haha =]

- Adam Kalina