When most people think about strength and hypertrophy training, they picture barbells, dumbbells, or resistance machines. While these tools are effective, suspension training offers a unique and highly adaptable way to build strength and muscle.
By using body weight against gravity, suspension exercises challenge stabilising muscles, improve control, and create progressive overload. These are all key components of strength and hypertrophy programming. For fitness professionals, learning how to use suspension training in this way adds another dimension to your coaching toolbox.
Here are five ways suspension training plays a role in strength and hypertrophy development:
1. Utilises Body Weight as Progressive Resistance
Suspension training allows you to adjust the resistance simply by changing body angle or foot placement. This means you can progressively overload muscles in the same way you would with free weights. By gradually increasing difficulty, clients can develop strength and stimulate muscle growth over time.
2. Enhances Stabiliser Muscle Recruitment
Unlike machines that guide movement, suspension training requires constant engagement of stabiliser muscles. This not only improves joint stability but also supports hypertrophy by increasing the total muscular demand. The more muscles working together, the greater the adaptation.
3. Promotes Full Range of Motion
Suspension straps allow unrestricted movement through multiple planes of motion, ensuring clients work muscles through their full range. Training through full ranges creates greater muscle activation and can support improved flexibility alongside hypertrophy gains.
4. Supports Strength-Endurance Development
Suspension training can be programmed for higher volume and time-under-tension, which is ideal for clients aiming to improve muscular endurance as well as hypertrophy. Circuit-style set-ups, isometric holds, or tempo-based drills can all create a powerful training stimulus.
5. Complements Traditional Strength Training
Suspension training doesn’t have to replace barbells or dumbbells; it works brilliantly alongside them. For example, you can use suspension training as accessory work to improve weak points, add variety, and reduce overuse injuries, all while keeping sessions fresh and engaging. You may add specific suspension training biceps curl as part of a superset or a suspended lunge whilst holding a dumbbell inside a triset.
To truly understand how suspension training contributes to strength and hypertrophy, practical learning is essential. Experiencing the challenge of unstable resistance, learning how to adjust body position, and programming effective progressions requires hands-on practice.
This cannot be fully replicated by watching tutorials or reading theory online.
Suspension training is a vocational skill designed for an active industry, and learning it face-to-face ensures you can safely and confidently help clients achieve their strength and muscle goals.
Become a Suspension Training Instructor in Milton Keynes
We run the face-to-face suspension instructor course twice per year at our Milton Keynes Academy. Click the link below to join us. You’ll leave this one-day course with 2 certificates with your name on it and buzzing with ideas and enthusiasm to integrate into your current FITPRO practice.
https://courses.parallelcoaching.co.uk/products/level-1-suspension-training-instructor-course
Summary
Suspension training is a powerful tool for building strength and hypertrophy. It provides progressive overload through body weight, engages stabilisers, promotes full ranges of motion, develops muscular endurance, and complements traditional lifting. For fitness professionals, mastering this method enhances your ability to design varied, effective programmes and deliver better results for clients.
👉 Want to add suspension training to your strength programming skills? Learn more about our suspension training courses at our Milton Keynes Academy and gain the confidence to coach clients toward their strength and hypertrophy goals.
Dedicated to More
Hayley “The Role of Suspension Training in Strength and Hypertrophy Development” Bergman
Parallel Coaching
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Sources
- Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (2019). Muscle activation during bodyweight and instability training.
- American Council on Exercise (ACE). Suspension Training for Strength and Hypertrophy.
- European Journal of Applied Physiology (2021). Progressive overload and body weight resistance training adaptations.