Is this new? Heard this from my exercise savvy friend some year ago. Still great to have it more confirmed if course.
Science is always 30 years behind practitioners in diet/exercise
Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
11–20 of 219 posts
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#12Sounds great if you've got an assistant who can raise the weight back up for you!
"...each participant in the CON group was instructed to lift a dumbbell for the concentric phase in 2s, and each participant in the ECC group lowered a dumbbell in 2s, and the investigator set the dumbbell in the starting position (0° for CON, 50° for ECC) after each contraction"
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#13So, what, am I supposed to get my butler to lift the weights up for me so that I can just lower them back down?
As the article says, feel free to use two hands to raise the weight, but only one to lower it.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#14> The team, which also included researchers from Niigata University and Nishi Kyushu University in Japan and Brazil’s Londrina State University, had groups of people perform three different types of dumbbell curl exercise and measured the results.
First of all, I've been lifting for many years and I haven't done dumbbell curls in a decade. And to be honest, you probably shouldn't be doing isolation exercises unless you don't mind risking injury and joint inflammation in the long-term. For those who don't do bodybuilding but real training (that's going to be squat, press and deadlift, pullups and variations of these), this is sort of junk science. No one serious uses a "leg press" - another injury-prone nightmare (do you value your lower back and are you something other than a football player?). He mentions (overhead / strict) press and perhaps there's something to try there with negatives, if one is extremely conservative and not an olympic weightlifter. Negative pullups are a thing, that's been known by the calisthenics community for ages, but only as a variation.
>It found those who only lowered a weight saw the same improvements as those who raised and lowered weights — despite only performing half the number of repetitions.
No shit. That's because eccentric exercises are far more fatiguing for the muscles. It's not something you can do all the time without burning yourself out and damaging your training progress long-term ("long-term" not being a key feature of this junk science study).
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#15I used eccentric muscle contractions to gain enough strength to do pull-ups when I was too weak to do even one. I stood on a chair to get into the top position, then lowered myself as slowly as I could. The exercise was effective, and after a few weeks I could do full pull-ups without the chair.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#16So, what, am I supposed to get my butler to lift the weights up for me so that I can just lower them back down?
Similar thought. Article states you can use both arms/legs to lift and one to place down. Both arms to do the curl up, one arm to bring down. Both legs on the the leg press machine up, one down. Butlers likely would also work, but wasn't studied ;)
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#17This article is a perfect example of
1. An academic publishes an extremely limited study, group size is 14 people that haven't exercised much, they do a single exercise, and they mention eccentric-only is particularly useful for rehabilitation. They make no outrageous claims whatsoever, they just put more numbers to something that is widely known and has been measured before.
2. Some popular news outlet wants to get clicks and runs away with it by making super general fitness advice out of it that's total nonsense. But you know, it's backed by Science (!) now.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#18The "negative" or eccentric component's contribution to hypertrophy has been well known since the 80's. I took a look at the linked journal and zeroed in on the cohort.
"A total of 53 (25 male and 28 female) healthy university students ... who ... had not performed a structured resistance training in the past 6 months, participated in the present study." Ok; so, totally untrained/detrained individuals. This lends less credence to the usefulness of this study.
This study doesn't contribute to the advancement of exercise science and ignores neuromuscular adaptations, the stretch-shortening cycle, and/or lactate threshold effects of non-eccentric muscle contractions.
Depending on your sport or personal goals, a mix of different time-under-tension parameters and rest periods will get people closer to their desired health goals. The eccentric phase is just one part of the equation.
Saying this is "all you need to do" is wrong. The curious should examine the syllabus of the NSCA CSCS program.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#19To lower the weights, you first have to lift them..
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#20So, what, am I supposed to get my butler to lift the weights up for me so that I can just lower them back down?
As the article says, feel free to use two hands to raise the weight, but only one to lower it.
Sounds like you'd just have to do twice as many reps, one for each arm. I get that those reps would notionally be more effective, but enough to balance out? Seems unlikely.