Negatives a necessity for strength training?

[Longshanks]

This may be a daft question but as I'm coming towards the end of the injury recovery (thank god for that) I'm in a position where I'm finally able to incorporate the concentric part of the exercise. Would it be good practice to maintain the slow negative as well as the concentric phase on a permanent basis?

From all of Coach Sommer's posts it seems to be the golden ticket, and even his videos seem to all emphasize very slow control for each movement. With this in mind is there even any point in the concentric part if it is possible to progress with harder and harder eccentric only exercises?

[Christian Sørlie]

Such a loaded and interresting question.

This is a good article about eccentric style training that you might like to read. It's weight training related but still.

http://arthurjonesexercise.com/Athletic ... rength.PDF

[Longshanks]

Interesting article. Thankfully it's much easier to do negative only training with bodyweight exercises. You just use the easist variation you know for an exercise in the concentric phase, then lower slowly in the hardest variation you can.

I've got an interesting article on negative only training on my PC at home, will post it when I remember.

[Joshua Naterman]

There is a guy whose entire workout "system" is based on "negative only" training, and truthfully it's not bad if all you are after is a good look. The biggest problem with negative only training is that it does very little to develop concentric efficiency, which is really important for actual performance. Of course, that's only because the vast majority of actual sport performance is concentric, with some exceptions like ring strength, where there is a pretty good mix of negatives, isometrics, and concentrics.

By eventually slowing your negatives down to where you can take 20-30s to perform one rep at a continuous speed you will essentially be performing an isometric hold at every moment in the exercise and this will build the base for easily being able to move concentrically, but by itself it is not enough for performance since you have not learned to be efficient concentrically yet (assuming all you are doing is negatives). The other major downside of negative only training is that your body has to deal with a LOT of damage. That is not the ideal strength stimulus, simply because you have to repair all the damage before you can grow new myofibrils, and you are only using 70% of the motor units that would fire under the same load concentrically (this both teaches a different firing pattern AND is part of the reason that so much damage occurs during eccentric movement). That is the reason you can usually do controlled negatives with up to 133% of your 1rm (depending on your neural efficiency). But, with the right PWO nutrition, a lot of this particular potential downside can be avoided.

Eccentric strength and mass gains with eccentric training are better than they are with concentric training of the same intensity, but they are also fairly specific to eccentric work. The gains also appear to be very velocity-specific. In other words, they do not seem to transfer well to faster movements. This is perfect for bodybuilders and athletes who are looking to put on more muscle mass for the purpose of accelerating strength development once a return to more performance-oriented training is made.

[Longshanks]

Interesting comments thanks Slizz. I was under the impression that eccentric strength has a great carryover to concentric strength and that was the whole point of starting most hard new BW feats that way. I personally have only trained negatives for the last few SSC's and have seen great carryover into concentric movements of the same intensity movements.

What you're saying does make a lot of sense though. You want to get better at a movement so you do more of that movement. Since the purpose of this is to condition my body for MMA i realise there will never be a need to allow someone to slowly pull out of your guard (negative pull-up) or to punch someone slowly in reverse (push-up), you want to do both with power and in the opposite direction.

Wonder if I should stick to negative only training for a few years and get back to you on this.

[Joshua Naterman]

Well, in my opinion you have to separate out the reasons why eccentric strength gains are so velocity specific and why they do not carry over as much to concentric work. It is all neurological. 100%. It would seem that a heavy focus on eccentric training is a very good way to build the muscle mass that you need, but you will still have to teach your body to use this muscle mass effectively, which can take a while.

Eccentric training HAS to be slow in order to be effective for mass and therefore strength gain. This, of course, starts gearing the body towards slow movement efficiency and only using 70% of the muscle fibers that are innervated during concentric movement of the same load. These adaptations either have to be unlearned (this will apply to people who train with only negatives for long periods of time) or minimized by a certain amount of concentric speed training with similar loads. You must make sure you do not lose velocity with a given load. Very important, that is.

I personally think that a slow transition from slower to faster movements with the same resistance will be very effective, as would slowly increasing the concentric load while maintaining velocity. This has, in fact, been proven to be a very effective method of improving RFD and through this the 1RM for bench press in particular, and I would be very surprised if this was not the case for every lift.

I believe Chad Waterbury goes into a reasonable amount of detail with these in his books, but I could be mis-remembering that.

Speed is kind of a hard thing to get back once you lose it, as I am finding out. You can certainly do it, but don't expect quick results. In my opinion it is better to maintain the speed as much as possible so that this re-learning process is minimized.

[Longshanks]

So you think it would be a good idea to eventually build in slow eccentrics with explosive concentric's in each rep to get the best of both worlds? I can imagine this taxing a lot of recovery capacity, but then slow negatives do as well really, suppose it's just about scaling down to what your body can recover from on a regular basis.

[Christian Sørlie]

I know this is a really simple statement, but as a good rule of thumb:

"lift, don't throw, lower, don't drop"

[Joshua Naterman]

Christian, that's for bodybuilders and people who are not interested in optimal development of their athletic abilities. Performance athletes, nearly across the board, NEED the throwing to develop recruitment during the stretch reflex and during explosive movements. You simply do not train (learn and ingrain) the neural patterns that are used during fast movements during slow movements. That's just the way it is, according to quite a lot of research that does not have a significant detracting body of evidence. That is also directly from athlete experience. Even during electro-stim training, contraction velocity is maximal. There is not a slow build up of force.

Things do get more complicated from here, and it is not in my interest to detail everything you have to consider. Nearly everything has a place in training, but there is no one constant. Not even rest. If you want to learn more basics about that, you can read up on Dual Factor Training Theory. Ido has talked about that extensively here before, though not directly by mention of name.

[Christian Sørlie]

Hey, I agree Slizzardman, just wanted to convey a walk before run type message. Not saying that one should never participate in faster and momentum based exercise.

[rubadub]

I used to do quite a bit of negative work usually mixed with concentrics though, I would work them in on the end of a set, like do a series of ring dips and finish 2-3reps short of failure and do a load of negatives at the end. Slizzardman is right about the damage, you can get VERY bad DOMS if you overdo negatives, I used to actually do them if I knew I would not be working out for a few days (bit of a DOMS junky :wink: )

slow eccentrics with explosive concentric's in each rep

I have done this doing standing military presses, towards the end you can do a push press to get the bar up again. I also do single dumbbell presses and can assist the weight up with my free hand. This is easily done doing bicep curls too. Doing weighted pushups you can drop to the floor and pushup on your knees then extend out and lower down with knees off the ground.

I posted before about negatives

but I never saw a study having eccentric training beating concentric training at improving concentric strength.

Here is one on negative only training.

https://www.rpfit.com/pdf/Negative_Case_Study.pdf

No doubt some will find flaws in it, as with all studies! Or question its authenticity completely.

CONCLUSIONS

After thirty years of teaching high school weight training in a high intensity fashion, I have learned to expect a 10-15% strength increase during a semester (16 weeks). The 15% improvement is generally from the students that are supervised the closest.

The negative workouts averaged 11 minutes per session. From a time standpoint, negative workouts are a very attractive way to train. In a high school setting, where having enough time to get everything done with athletes is a problem, negative workouts may be the answer.

The eight football players showed an average strength increase of 25% from nine negative workouts. Inclement weather forced the closing of school for several days, reducing the workout days from twelve to nine. The next step is to train a group for 16 weeks with a negative protocol and document the results. The next question to answer is at what point do the workouts need to be reduced from two times per week to three times every two weeks.

I like negative training and am surprised it is not more popular. I do them when I am not feeling my best as I feel I can get a decent workout with little effort. On many forums people all jump to recommend negative chinups/pullups for beginners and they work really well, then they seem to forget all about them.

I think negatives are avoided for 2 main reasons,

1 -since people overdo them and end up with terrible DOMS. I am still not convinced about the theory that the negative causes more DOMs. I think people try to get the same intensity and so overdo them, if you go to failure on negatives you are almost guaranteed to be sore the next day -so simply do not do it!

i.e. If you hooked up some machine that told you how stressed your muscles are I think you would breeze through negatives, like if you went to failure on 10 regular chins it might only take 15 negative only chins to mimic the same response as those 10, and I think this would be a breeze to most people. The problem is if you went to failure on the negative only reps I think you would have put far more stress on the muscles than going to failure on normal ones. e.g. You might be able for 25 negative only chins to failure while 15 might have equalled your 10 normal ones, so by doing 25 you have destroyed yourself, and gone well beyond your usual failure.

2. -They are far too easy to do, so people do not feel they are doing a real workout -like how some people might like DOMS to "know" they worked hard, or people want to at least break a sweat or go 1-2 reps prior to failure. Being too easy then goes back to point 1 again.

[Joshua Naterman]

I definitely agree with that, Christian!

Rub, you make a lot of good points. Negatives work, when properly utilized.

I have read a fair amount of research papers and there does seem to be some very strong links between DOMS and eccentric movement, but there may never be anything causal in our lifetimes. I definitely get much more sore when I concentrate more on eccentric action, like when I do my supplementary higher volume training... much of that is eccentrically focused and it works well for what I need out of it, but man does it make me sore for a few days! I HAVE noticed that my body has adapted to it after about a month of consistency, and soreness is nothing like what it was in the beginning!

[Neal Winkler]

This is a very negative thread. I'd like to see more positivity around here.

[Joshua Naterman]

*groan*

[Neal Winkler]

bada bing!

[Longshanks]

This is a very negative thread. I'd like to see more positivity around here.

That was just shameless....

Negatives work, when properly utilized.

I've had very mixed experience with negatives in the past. Like you say it's very easy to think you're not doing anything and push yourself way too far and cause injury flare ups etc. I've found by treating them like you would your statics I've had nothing but success with them recently, just test how many consecutive negatives you can do and do a few sets of half that for a full SSC. You do get really bad DOMS for the first week or so (especially when you test your max's) but it soon becomes more manageable after a week or two.

I feel I owe a big thank you to rubadub, for posting that article, and Coach Sommer for his input backing this original post on negatives. It was a definite turning point in my injury recovery.

[Neal Winkler]

This is a very negative thread. I'd like to see more positivity around here.

oShTJ90fC34

[Longshanks]

Ok, that was quite funny... lol

[rubadub]

just test how many consecutive negatives you can do and do a few sets of half that for a full SSC.

I have been wondering about some sort of formula like this for them, I do like using rep calculators like this http://www.naturalphysiques.com/tools.php?itemid=18 as I rarely test my 1RM.

Looking at my log (on another site) I have seen I once did 9 N.O. chins with an added 40kg, and this was after 14 regular chins. My 1RM chin record around this time was 40kg which would have had a quick enough negative phase.

I see another time I did x2 BW+40kg regular chins followed by x8 BW+40kg negative only reps -I would have been worn out after the first and the negatives were probably not to failure.

On a right angle bar dip station I have done x10 BW+70kg negative only reps and about a week later managed x8 BW+40kg regular dips. My BW was around 80-85kg during all these workouts.

(sorry in advance if this confuses people, I'm an engineer )

Say you can handle 133% of your normal 1RM on the negative phase for 1rep (I have heard 130-140% estimated on a few sites), this would mean if you used your usual 1RM weight it is really 75% of your "negative only 1RM" (75% being the inverse of 133%). This 75% is a useful number. Looking at the table at the bottom of this page

http://www.exrx.net/Calculators/OneRepMax.html

they estimate you can do 10reps at 75% of your 1RM. This could in turn be used to estimate you being capable of 10 N.O. reps with your usual 1RM weight.

But then I read this

http://arthurjonesexercise.com/Unpublished/Colorado.pdf

In order to perform positive work, you must be able to lift the weight; if you can’t lift it, then no work is possible. But proper negative exercise requires a weight so heavy that you can NOT lift it. Obviously, then, your positive strength level limits your ability to perform negative exercises properly…when both forms of work occur in the same exercise.

If the weight is right for positive work, then it is too light for negative work. But if it is right for negative work, then it is impossibly heavy for positive work. So you can have one or the other, but not both…not at least, with a proper level of resistance.

So they are telling you to go beyond your usual 1RM, which I personally would not think is too advisable -though I did it myself once with my 10x70kg dips, I have tried 70kg normally and did just fail, in theory I should have managed it. Now in the experiments they were talking of 6-8 reps so this does tie in with using more weight than your 1RM, but I just find this un-nerving and asking for injury and would stick to my usual 1RM or less, and probably less than 10reps too to see how I get on DOMS wise, maybe 6-8. (although people readily do negative chins when they cannot manage a single one)

I feel I owe a big thank you to rubadub, for posting that article

Some might be wary of these articles, I know the colorado experiment has its critics, both subjects having been previously trained so it was thought "muscle memory" played a role -and they had a vested interest in selling the machines. In the one I linked about the footballers it also involved people with the same vested interests...

I would be interested in reading any other articles on N.O. training if anybody has any links.

EDIT: seems to be a good few on google scholar http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start ... s_sdt=2000

[Joshua Naterman]

I searched for eccentric exercise on pubmed and got a huge list of relevant results! Pretty much everything from meta-analysis to individual experiments points towards eccentric exercise being better for eccentric strength gains and muscle size increases than concentric training, but also that the gains are very velocity specific, meaning that they do not carry over to faster movements.

That 130-140% of 1rm thing comes from the neurophysiology of eccentric lengthening. Basically, around 70% of the EMG activity for concentric movement of the same load is observed during the eccentric phase. This appears to mean that less muscle fibers are managing the same load, which causes much more microtrauma. So, if you do the math, you could make a linear calculation that means you have a 30% reserve and assume 130% of 1RM is eccentric training weight max or so, OR you could be more specific and divide your 1RM weight by .7, which of course brings you a 42.8% increase (1/.7=1.42857...) increase, bringing you to 142.85%. That's the source of the numbers. Unfortunately this is not accurate unless you are used to training near your max, because these numbers assume you have pretty efficient motor unit recruitment. You don't get that efficient unless you are dealing with fairly heavy weight (90%+ of max) on a regular basis, so unless you're doing heavy singles as a regular part of your training you are not going to quite meet those numbers.

What you COULD do is take your 10RM, divide that by .7, and then try that as your 10RM for eccentrics. That, despite being fairly simple, should be accurate. You could then apply that to a number of protocols. In fact, if you start breaking GVT down mathematically, this is a very similar weight breakdown to what you would use in GVT. HMM... there could, perhaps, be an underlying principle here. GVT is, after all, heavily dependent on eccentric movement for results.

[Mikael Kristiansen]

I have had nothign but extremely good results with negatives, but I think it might matter what you are training and what your goals are. Most of my strength for handstand presses, 1 arm press to handstand, 1 arm flags, planche, bowers, and 1 arm back levers were built almost solely from negatives. Then again, none of these skills require you to be explosive or fast. I have never experienced excessive DOMS from this kind of training, but then again, since I train 6-7 days a week, I almost never go to failure. From my experience, I see negatives as one of the best ways to build pressing strength for handstands, as it is easier to work on straight arms and proper form when going down. I think for some skills, like 1 arm press to handstand it is an absolute necessity, but for most skills and general strength training I think other methods can work just as well.

[Justin Kyle]

Hey Handbalancer, if you don't mind, could you describe how you went about doing planche negatives. Thanks buddy

[Joshua Naterman]

I have had nothign but extremely good results with negatives, but I think it might matter what you are training and what your goals are. Most of my strength for handstand presses, 1 arm press to handstand, 1 arm flags, planche, bowers, and 1 arm back levers were built almost solely from negatives. Then again, none of these skills require you to be explosive or fast. I have never experienced excessive DOMS from this kind of training, but then again, since I train 6-7 days a week, I almost never go to failure. From my experience, I see negatives as one of the best ways to build pressing strength for handstands, as it is easier to work on straight arms and proper form when going down. I think for some skills, like 1 arm press to handstand it is an absolute necessity, but for most skills and general strength training I think other methods can work just as well.

That makes a lot of sense, and I definitely agree with your assessment. Negatives should give excellent results for anything that is not explosive, and should build a good strength base from which to LEARN explosive techniques.

[yuri marmerstein]

Hey Handbalancer, if you don't mind, could you describe how you went about doing planche negatives. Thanks buddy

From a handstand, begin to lean your shoulders forward slowly going down with control as low as you can

[Graham Smith]

Purely anecdotal, but I have found that working negative headstand pushups (I don't yet have the requisite strength for anything beyond the negative portion) has not only given me a much more solid handstand, but allowed me to explosively break through a plateu I had in the gym performing dumbell military presses. Working the negative HeSPU gave me vastly more strength for pushing up weight than merely sitting on a bench and pushing up weight! I also began pullups by standing on a chair to get into the "top" position and just performing the negative.

So I for one have no doubt as to the necessity of negatives. They are not the be all and end all by any means, but they can certainly help you to push through a plateu into a new strength skill.