So, what, am I supposed to get my butler to lift the weights up for me so that I can just lower them back down?
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Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
31–40 of 219 posts
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#32> Professor Nosaka recommends using two hands to help with the concentric (lifting weight) phase, before using one arm for the eccentric phase (lowering weight)
Technically, that's not doing 'half as many reps', as the article claimed, it'll take you exactly the same amount of reps. If you care about minimizing time rather than reps, that's even going to take you (roughly) twice as long compared to using two dumbbells at once.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#33I 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.
Thanks for this tip! I am trying to build upper body strength and pull-ups kill me
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#34Yeah, well.
Here's a concept: Every single researcher who wants to conduct these kinds of experiments needs to, as a prerequisite, read Starting Strength [0] and then go to a certified gym for a year or more before even remotely being able to say anything useful about the subject.
Yes, sure, Starting Strength isn't perfect. I am not presenting it as the sum of all knowledge and the one-and-only true anything. However, there is a vast difference between someone who think they understand strength training and someone who reads this book and actually does it (under trained supervision) for as little as a year.
Someone mentioned dumbbell exercises being harmful and unnecessary. Absolutely agreed. The isolation exercises and machines are dangerous gimmicks for almost everyone going to the gym. There are people for whom they might have value. For the average person who wants to get fit and strong, these exercises and machines are a horrible idea.
My own story: I thought I knew how to lift. I was frustrated because I was not able to make progress. Someone at work introduced me to Starting Strength. I read the book and found a local certified trainer. The difference was like night and day.
I remember the first time I went back to a regular gym after about a year on Starting Strength. I had not touched a dumbbell in probably two years, if not more. Not once. I decided to see what I could do. Long story short, I got all the way up to the 120 lb dumbbells and could not go further 'cause that's the heaviest they had. Anyone looking at me would not, in a million years, have guessed I could go pick-up two 120 lb dumbbells and workout using them. I had guys coming to ask "WTF?", because they were struggling with weights less than half that much.
This goes with my favorite quote: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" - Mark Twain. These researchers need a cat to hold before they think they know what they are talking about.
[0] https://startingstrength.com/
PS.: Rip is an interesting character. Trained with him. Even had discussions about the use of his approach in space travel applications. Nice guy.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#35> 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 y…
I don't think your arguments are a fair critique of this study: > First of all, I've been lifting for many years and I haven't done dumbbell curls in a decade. The study authors aren't arguing that dumbbell curls should be the center of your workout. And they are are presumably using an isolation exercise because it is more straightforward to test improvements to strength when you are just examining the effect on a s…
> It is a giant pet peeve of mine when scientists run a diligent study and then the response is "No shit, that's common sense" with the audacity to call it "junk science." Putting actual data and numbers behind a "common sense" belief is what science is all about - it is not "junk science".
Oh, come on. It's well-known that eccentric exercises fatigue the muscles more. Maybe I can retract "junk science" and say "junk headline / junk journalism" because the study compared concentric–eccentric coupled (CON-ECC), concentric-only (CON), and eccentric-only (ECC) resistance training of the elbow flexors for their effects on muscle strength and hypertrophy and the headline is proclaiming "Less gym time, more results."
But we can criticize the participants in the study: 50 odd 20 year old novices?? Measuring their elbow flexion in three ways over 5 weeks. Are you actually extrapolating a lot of useful information from these results or are you outraged for the sake of it ?
> I think there are other fair critiques about the applicability of this study (for example, another commenter mentioned that they were dealing solely with untrained individuals), but the fact that they used dumbbell curls isn't one of them.
Not using compound exercises is an absolutely viable critique. Most exercises are compound exercises.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#36This 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…
It's not a popular news outlet. It's one of the university's PR website.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#37Sounds 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"
Someone brought it up here, but you could also do something like pullups, where you use your legs to lift you and use your arms to lower yourself down slowly.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#38I 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.
Thanks for this tip! I am trying to build upper body strength and pull-ups kill me
Bands help. You get the most assistance at the bottom and the assistance decreases as you pull up to your strongest position.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#39I 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.
I had a similar experience in learning to do my first pull-up at age 40. It felt great!
Though in addition to the lowering, I also did horizontal rows using my kitchen table to work in the concentric direction.
Re: Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do
#40From my personal experience, for the majority of people, I would recommend to stay away from classic body building weight trainning. I trainned that way for several years in my early twenties (back then, I was even a certified body bulding trainner) and the overload in my joints was a recipe for disaster + the kind of body I developed was disfunctional for activities other than weights themselves.
The excercises I've been doing for years now (apart from other activities (climbing, gymnastics, martial arts etc)) are mostly own-weight ones (pull ups, push ups, dips, squats etc with variations). Every now and then I perform them using a weighted vest with a maximum of 20 kilos. This has kept me in very good shape, injury free and agile.