“Negative Reps” Isn’t a Weightlifting Cheat Code
A new study shows that you can build muscle by simply lowering weights without lifting them. While this may seem like a surprising discovery, it’s just a reiteration of what we’ve known for a long time: the negative (downward) part of the exercise also works your muscles.
You can recognize this as the same concept of negative pull-ups. If you can’t do a full pull-up yet, you can jump up to the bar or stand on a box or bench to reach the bar with bent arms. Instead of pulling up , you start at the top and work your way down .
This works the same muscles as pulling up, and the stronger you get, the better you can control the movement. On the first day, you can hold on with all your might, but your body weight quickly pulls you towards the floor. Once you get comfortable with them, you can slowly lower yourself, taking maybe 10 seconds to complete the negative. Hold it long enough and soon you will be able to do a full pull up.
What did the study find?
The study that is currently being circulated is one that involved young people who hadn’t done any weight training in the previous 6 months. There were 14 people in each group and they trained with either the concentric (up) part of the lift, or the eccentric (down) part, or both, or neither.
People who only lowered the weight experienced the same increase in strength as people who both lifted and lowered the weight at the same time. The researchers noted that, technically , you could consider them to have acquired the same power by only doing half the work. This has led to headlines like ” Less Gym Time, Same Result ” even though time works differently. Ten repetitions up and down will take about the same time as 10 repetitions of a simple lowering.
How to lower the weight down without lifting it?
Before we move on to whether eccentric repetitions are beneficial and what caveats you should be aware of before trying them, I would like to answer one of the common questions that came up when discussing this study. Namely: how do you just lower the weight? Doesn’t it need to be raised somehow so you can lower it?
Yes it is. There are many, many ways to get around this seeming impossibility. Take a look around the gym and you’ll notice the many ways people isolate or emphasize eccentric contractions:
- Pull -ups: Use a bench to rise to the top of the movement, then lower yourself back down.
- Arm curls : “Fool” curls by jiggling your hips to lift the barbell. Then lower back.
- Push-ups : Get on your hands and knees, then straighten your legs to be in a high plank position. Then bend your arms to lower yourself and repeat.
- Single dumbbell exercises : Use two hands to move the weight into place and then lower the weight with only one.
- Leg press-like machines : Straighten both legs against resistance, then take one leg out of contact with the machine and return the machine to its original position using only the other leg.
In these examples, you usually lower the weight slowly. (It doesn’t require your muscles to do very much work to bring it straight down.)
You can also emphasize the eccentric by lifting a weight that is not too heavy. For example, the Romanian deadlift. You start in the top position (either with the bar off the floor or off the rack) and then slowly lower it down until you feel a stretch in your hamstrings. Then quickly get up and slowly lower again. They are usually performed with less weight than regular deadlifts.
Why Eccentric Reps Are Not a Cheat Code
Eccentric reps are useful , but they are not some magic key to a more efficient workout.
Remember that in normal strength training you are lifting and lowering weights. You are already benefiting from the eccentric, even if you are also lifting weights. Regular up-and-down reps are usually easier to do, as you may have realized by reading the “how to” list above. Stepping to the top of a pull-up and then slowly lowering yourself down takes longer and, frankly, more annoying than just moving up-down-up-down for the required number of reps.
Therefore, we use eccentric repetitions for certain reasons and at certain times. A great example is cheat curls: you can do normal curls and then cheat the last few reps (cheat, go straight down) to get a few more reps. Or we do negative pull-ups when we can’t do an up and down lift. kind yet.
There are also differing views on how much emphasis should be placed on eccentricity in regular up and down workouts. When doing deadlifts, for example, some people lower (or very quickly lower) the weight as soon as they reach the top , while others lower the weight slowly down to gain additional eccentric benefits. Both have their benefits: losing weight can give you slightly more gains, while losing weight can lead to less fatigue, allowing you to do more sets or train with heavier weights.
And now that we’re talking about fatigue, there’s one more important thing to know: eccentric reps do more damage to the muscles than concentric reps. This is both a plus (more damage means more healing and possibly more growth) and a minus (more damage means you’re more likely to get sick, and in some cases can be more likely to contribute to injury).
So is it worth lowering the weight down? This is definitely a training strategy worth considering! But you don’t have to choose either. For example, it is quite common to do regular squats on one day, and slow-down squats on another day of the week. When there are pros and cons to an exercise, the best way to split the difference is to do both.