I was reading that Dante himself says “6 to 8 true seconds” for negatives. That struck me as quite remarkable given also the number of reps expected. Many would have to drop weights to below 50% 1RM to get that many reps with negatives that are that long, and I don’t believe they are dropping their weights that light.
In trying to search further on this, I found among other things that he berated some of his followers for using a stopwatch and from this asking if 5 measured seconds was okay.
This has me doubting whether “true seconds” is intended by him to be verified as being actual seconds, or necessarily ever was verified by him as being such, and raises the possibility that what he calls true seconds may be nothing like actual seconds.
And a 6-count or 8-count is for most people radically different than 6 or 8 actual seconds.
So next step: how about some videos purported to be DC-style training?
While I did not view every such video, the longest negatives I saw were about 4 seconds. Most were 2 seconds. Some were 1 second. For sure not a single video had a single rep as slow as 6 true seconds.
The next thing I noticed was rest duration for rest pause sets. One fellow took about 40 seconds. This is vastly different than 15 seconds. However that is a side note, as I don’t at all think that resting 15 seconds is too short for rest-pause, and myself view the lengthy rest as being misapplication of the method.
But on the other hand if those speaking of how well DC works for them are actually usually using rest periods such as 40 seconds in the RP sets, then it is worth knowing that when considering their testimonies. If that is what a person is doing then it would be more accurate to attribute their benefits to doing 3 maximal-reps sets with 40 second rest periods than to doing “one RP set.”
Back to the duration of negatives: There’s no need to provide a quote of what Dante says as I’ve seen what he says on the subject.
The question is, these people generally getting good results from what they call DC training, what is actually being done in terms of time of negatives?