By Leo Ussulman
Jeff Nippard is a famous YouTuber known for being a science-based lifter. He creates gym content teaching the next generation of lifters the secrets to building massive muscles. Nippard explains all kinds of different concepts and all the best exercises to stimulate hypertrophy (muscle growth) to the maximum extent possible. Jeff Nippard is known for being short and not huge, but he is natural, which means he is massive.
Jeff Nippard is infamous for being known to be against stability exercises. One example of this is he prefers machine rows or leaning-against a bench lateral raises (just to get a little bit more stability). This is insanity because of his opinions on what the bench press is.
The bench press is a lift where you lay on a bench, pick up a bar and let it down and push it up. Most powerlifters raise their chest a lot, reducing its range of motion. Not only that, but science based lifters typically do not recommend the bench press. But Nippard does. This completely shocked the lifting community to its core, and it will never be the same again. This is very serious too, because it breaks the nonstop search for the best stability exercise and brings us back to the basics.
Nippard sees the lift as a very easy lift to progressive overload. Not only that, he sees it as optimal. The lifting community will most likely change forever after Nippard said this, and return to its roots: something called mechanical tension. Mechanical tension is the number one factor for muscular development, which basically means the intensity and muscular failure to perform a rep. This is typically best performed in the 5-12 rep range, although the opinions very much vary.
Mechanical tension is performed best when the reps are slow, but many bodybuilders do not attest to this. One reason Nippard shocked the community with this is also because of the insanely irrational lifts he recommended in his videos, but as soon as he brought us back to the roots of bench press, people started to remember his rationality. But even this seemed irrational in the opposing direction. A lot of people now are left wondering if stability is even a factor in muscle growth, and Nippard takes note of most of the professional bodybuilders, notably Arnold Schwarzenegger, who grew a massive chest from exercises like the bench press. Nippard did later on mention that Arnold Schwarzenegger did have very good genetics, and that is truly the only reason he did grow a huge chest. But then Nippard also took note of one other thing about Arnold’s insane training because it did seek a lot of mechanical tension from the sheer amount of intensity he trained with.
Other science-based lifters, like Joel Nutrition Fitness and Ryan Jewers completely disagree with Nippard on this opinion, which is what is causing this insane war in the science based lifting community. Joel Nutrition Fitness is still clinging to the idea that stability is the number one factor in building muscle and claimed he did bench press back in the day, and his chest didn’t grow that much. But it does seem that he has poor genetics, so it might be a better idea to listen to someone with good genetics like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Nippard stands firm, and strong on this opinion, and so this article is very important for addressing the driving factor that maybe mechanical tension is what separates a good lifter from an advanced or even a science based lifter. Many studies have covered stability, but they seem to be inaccurate because they seem to be choosing bad contestants for it, for example choosing lifters that are not very advanced, leaving the study more relying on who has the best chest genetics rather than what truly matters.
Jeff Nippard has shaken the science based lifting stability community, and with this news people will forever see Nippard differently, perhaps agreeing with him that mechanical tension is the number one factor of muscle growth and progressive overload. The truth is, the bench press is a good exercise for progressive overload, so Nippard’s opinion isn’t invalid, just unheard of for a very long time. But this article summarizes how Nippard is bringing lifting back to its roots once and for all.
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