By: Tim Rigby (courtesy of Inside Fitness)
Sometimes when you’re training, you have to think beyond your fingertips and realize that there’s a lot to your anatomy that you can’t actually see or feel. It’s noteworthy that your muscle fibres do not actually run the full length of your muscles; they are each, in fact, only about one to four inches in length, and they link up with other fibres to make the bulk of your muscles. When you perform an exercise with weights, you’re activating only certain fibres within the specific muscle groups; many other fibres contained in the same groups actually go unused. This illustrates the importance of hitting your target muscles from a variety of angles. So, in the same way that you perform different exercises to build a target muscle group, you can benefit from using a variety of angles for the same exercise. Simply focus on one or two moves per muscle group, per workout, and perform them for multiple sets at different angles. This methodology is often known as “climbing the ladder.” For a large muscle group like your chest, it is recommended you perform the cable crossover exercise by positioning the pulleys at a variety of heights.
