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Power Partials are another extremely effective training toolfor building muscle and gaining strength. It's also anothertraining tool, like single rep training, or the 20 rep squatroutine, that you rarely see used. Why is that? Because,despite the effectiveness of power partials in building muscle,they require a lot of hard work. Brutally hard. And most people don't want to pay that price. But if you're willing towork this routine, it will work for you.

In order to train effectively with power partials, you'll needaccess to a power rack. Hopefully, your gym will have one. Ifyou work out at home, I highly recommend you purchase a powerrack. It will last a lifetime and allow you to do almost anyfree weight exercise without the need for a spotter.

There are many ways you can incorporate power partials intoyour weight training routine. Let's take a look at threevariations of this technique.

1) Perform power partials at the end of your full range set.Let's use the bench press as an example. Perform your normalset to failure and then continue the set by cranking out twoor three partials at the top of your range of motion. Forexercises like squats, bench press, and the seated press, youneed to perform these in a power rack. Partials are quite easy to perform in safety on exercises like the lat pulldown.

2) Perform a set of heavy partials after your full range set.We'll use squats as the example this time. Do a couple of setsof 8 - 10 reps using your normal full range of motion. Then pileon 30 to 40 percent more weight on the bar. After a few minutesof rest, perofrm a set of top range partials, doing only the topone third to one quarter of the movement.

3) Do a set of heavy partials before your full range sets. Thisversion allows you to use the most weight on your power partials.This version can do a great job of building muscle and strengthat a fast rate. You'll want to build up with a couple of weeksof submaximum workouts. The reasoning is that by performing yourpartials before your full range sets you'll be using a lot moreweight than you are used to. You don't want to risk injuringtendons and ligaments by using such extremely heavy weights withoutbuilding up to them.

You can also progress by training with partials in all three ways,in the order in which I've described them. This will give youa natural progression from the least to the most intense andthe lightest to the heaviest weights.

You need to be cautious. Big weights can mean big results butalso big trouble if you don't pay attention to safety and goodform. You can't go from using 150 pounds on the bench pressone workout to using 250 pounds on the bench press the next workout.You need to build up to these weights. Done properly, power partialscan be your ticket to bigger muscles and more strength.