If there's one thing a lot of fitness experts agree on, it's that choosing a weight to work out with that's light enough to use throughout as much of your full range of motion as possible is the best thing to do. At the same time, it's important to lift heavy enough to properly work your muscles to the point of failure by the end of each set that you do.

If you're reading this, you probably have enough of an interest in fitness to already understand all of this, and it's a very good guideline to follow for people that are just starting out. It's a safe method that simultaneously promotes the greatest possible gains in the shortest possible time.

Still, you might be someone who's looking for something that's a bit more advanced. Or it might be the case that you're looking for something to help you get through a weak point in your regular routine. If so, one way of shocking your muscles into growth might be to do partial reps for a while. To get the most out of doing partial reps, you're going to want to choose an extra heavy weight. One that's heavy enough that you could only do perhaps one or two reps with it under normal circumstances.

Let's say you're doing this with squats for example. The whole point of this exercise is that you're only going to lower the weight through part of the squatting motion, perhaps only the top third or so. While you might be saying to yourself that this is a complete waste of time, and only serves as an ego booster, there's more to it than that. As you work these partial sets into your routine, the "lockout" portion of your regular squats are going to get much stronger.

In that narrow range of motion, you'll have renewed power when you go back to squatting with a regular weight. Using this, you can iron out all of the weak points you might have for any compound exercise, simply by focusing on putting as much strain as you can on that one, narrow movement. This is also much less strenuous on your joints than other types of nontraditional routines. Obviously, this isn't something you'll want to do exclusively, but throwing in a surprise for your muscles every now and then is a good way to stimulate progress.