What Is Accommodating Resistance
(And How To Use It)

“I didn’t invent toilet paper, but I’m smart enough to use it.” - Louie Simmons

Louie didn’t invent Accommodating Resistance, but ask someone about the Westside Method and you’re sure to hear about the heavy weights, hardcore training and, of course, bands and chains.

Westside brought Accommodating Resistance to the world, infiltrating powerlifting, then strength and conditioning for sports and, finally, into regular gyms across the globe. 

But despite this massive adoption, very few people truly understand the purpose of accommodating resistance, how it’s used and what it even “accommodates” in the first place. 

In this article you’re going to learn the science behind all of these questions and gain a new appreciation, and understanding, of the how’s and why’s of accommodating resistance. 

What Does Accommodating Resistance “Accommodate”

Accommodating Resistance, often referred to as “variable resistance” in textbooks, was given its name because it “accommodates” the strength curve. 

The Strength Curve describes the change in difficulty on an exercise as you move through the range of motion. (When you graph this change, it looks a curve, hence the name - there is a visual included at the bottom of this article)

Understanding the strength curve is easy if you imagine a squat. You can quarter squat more than you can half squat and half squat more than you can full squat. The same thing happens with a bench press, a leg curl, even a bicep curl. 

*This also applies to exercises like a deadlift, despite starting at the bottom of the curve. 

The reason you can quarter squat more than you can half, or full squat, is that your position becomes less and less advantageous as you move through the range of motion. This continues until you reach the bottom position and then begins to reverse as you stand back up. 

Bands accommodate this change by shortening as you lower a weight, providing less resistance at the bottom of an exercise. Chains have a similar function where they begin to collect on the floor, being their lightest at the bottom of the range of motion as well. 

With either, as you then begin to lift, they continue to slowly add more weight, or resistance, until you reach the full range of motion, or top, of a movement. 

This similarity, in terms of being lighter where you’re weakest and heaviest where you’re strongest is how they came to be understood as Accommodating Resistance. They accommodate the natural change in your strength through a range of motion, and match it. 

Knowing this the next question becomes…

Why Should You Use Accommodating Resistance

There are two distinct reasons to use accommodating resistance in your training. The first is to get more work, and subsequently more results out of each rep you perform. The second is to build power and explosiveness. 

Getting More From Every Rep

Getting more from every rep, and building more muscle and strength, is a phenomenal benefit of using bands or chains. 

Now that you understand the strength curve you recognize that for most of the range of motion during a lift, you can handle more weight than you can at the very bottom. But what happens if you add even slightly more than you can handle at the bottom of your strength curve?

You get squished. 

Adding more weight than you can handle in your weakest position will cause you to fail the lift, which isn’t fun for anyone and definitely isn’t productive for progress. Using accommodating resistance allows you to get around this problem. 

Using bands, or chains, that increase the resistance where you’re stronger allows you to get as much possible work out of every single rep - something bars and plates simply cannot do. 

This benefit for muscular growth and strength should not be overlooked as it can be a significant advantage for a training program. 

Performance

The next major benefit of accommodating resistance is performance, building power and explosiveness. 

In very simple terms, if you want to be explosive you need to lift explosively… but this isn’t as simple as it seems. 

If you were to bench press with a full acceleration, or squat with a full acceleration, truly lifting as fast as you could the entire time - you would lose control of any weights that weren’t near your maximum. (and if you were lifting near your maximum you weren’t going to go very fast anyway)

For the same reason that bands and chains allow you to get the most work out of every possible rep, they also allow you to fully accelerate and lift as explosively as possible. 

Because of the strength curve, any weight you can accelerate quickly at the bottom of an exercise will be too light to continue accelerating at the top without losing control. 

Unless that weight somehow gets heavier over the range of motion…

Accommodating resistance allows for exactly that, and therefore allows for you to train for genuine explosive power. 

Using Accommodating Resistance

Within the Westside System the Dynamic Effort Method is where you’ll find Accommodating Resistance used most prevalently. To begin learning about the DE days click here for a great article from one of the Westside experts, Burley Hawk.

Pictured: The Strength Curve