You don’t need to be Sir Isaac Newton to know that when you accidentally drop a weight, you should watch out for your feet! But, that same rule of gravity changes when you’re training on cables. Drop the handle and it immediately snaps back – to the position where you set the pulley (while the stack of plates comes crashing straight down).
That, in effect, means that gravity is coming from the side! Sure, the weight stack goes straight down. But, the position of the pulley determines the angle of pull on your muscles in relation to your body position next to – or away from – the cable, whatever exercise you’re doing. It can come from a high angle, low angle or moderate angle, or any number of angles in between – which is an altogether different stimulus on the muscle from what you get with free weights, when the direction of the pull always comes straight down.
Remember, the idea of building the fullest muscle possible is to hit it from different angles, which is why you do bench presses from flat bench, incline and decline positions. With free weights, you must manipulate the bench angle to change how the pectoralis is targeted. But, with cables, you can instead change the pulley position and how close you stand from the pulley to make changes in the angles.
The sharp trainer knows that by using multiple pulley positions, you introduce different training stimuli on the target muscle, offering slight changes in the muscle recruitment pattern. That’s essential for building a muscle to its fullest potential.
