How Important Is Proper Technique?

Bigger Stronger Leaner
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Bungees
https://www.lowes.com/search?searchTerm=bungee

You can get a Lows, Home Depot, etc.

I initially got mine from…

Strength Cats

About the same time Bands came out Mike Berry (deceased) came up with Bungees and was the Strength Coach for the Milwaukee Fire Academy.

The Bungees set up like the Band on a Power Rack.

For the Bench Press, Berry had a creative method, pictured below.

image

3 D-Ring

The cool part of about Berry Bungees was the 3 D-Ring. A strap hangs down from the bar with 3 metal D-Rings. It allows you to hook the band high or low, as a means of increasing or decreasing the top end loading.

Strength Cats is no longer around. If you want a 3 D-Ring, look at…

IronMind Daisy Chains

You can also find Daisy Chain a places like REI. A bit different but they work.

Bungee Tension

It depends on how long and thick the Bungee is, as with Bands.

Measuring Tension Poundage

A fishing scale works.

Pocket Digital Luggage Fishing Scale 88lb 40kg

Attach the Scale to the Bungee or Band. Then pull it to the height where you finish the movement, such as your Squat, Bench, etc.

With shipping it is about $10.00.

Hang Pulls

As a Conventional Deadlifter, I blow the weight off the floor.

My sticking point is in the knee area.

Thus, I work the knee area with various type of Hang Pulls combined with Partial Good Mornings in that area.

Yes, I have. I preform them in the Power Rack with Reverse Bands, sometimes Bungees.

Power Cleans/High Pulls with Bungees or Bands really overload the Traps, pump them up.

Kenny Crodale

1 Like
22

“A Lot More Tension”…"

Lowering the weight fast allows you to use a heavier load, which increase the Force.

Force = Mass (Bar weight in this case) X Acceleration (Eccentric Bar Speed).

The end result is real bar weight is magnified beyond what is on the bar.

A great example of this is Dr Tom McLaughlin’s research in…

Bench Press More, Now (Book)

McLaughlin found that Novice/Intermediate Lifter allows the Eccentric Bar Speed to descend faster than Elite Lifters.

McLaughlin provided an example of the amount of Eccentric Force generated with Eccentric Bar Speed with a…

300 lb Bench Press

  1. Novice/Intermediate Lifters with the faster Eccentric Bar Speed magnified the Force (Bar Weight) by 147%.

147% X 300 lbs - 447 lbs of Force.

  1. Elite Lifters with slower Eccentric Bar Speed only magnified the Force (Bar Weight by 112%.

112% X 300 lbs = 336 lbs.

Reversal Force

  1. Novice/Intermediate Lifter needed to produce 447 lbs of force to drive the weight off their chest in the Bench Press.

  2. Elite Lifters needed to produce 336 lbs of force to drive the weight off the their chest in the Bench Press.

Take Home Message

In a Bench Press Max, Squat as well, you need to lower the weight slowly. Doing so drastically deceases that amount of force needed to drive the weight back up; 336 lbs vs 447 lbs.

Now…

The Paradox

Heavy Eccentrics: As you stated, lowering a Heavy Eccentric faster increases the tension/force. The muscle work harder for a shorter period, increasing Limit Strength.

Thus, Speed can be utilized as a means of increasing the tension/muscle loading. It a good thing.

Supramaximal Training

This is Eccentric Training. Supramaximal meaning the load utilized with Eccentric is greater than your 1 Repetition Max Concentric Bench Press, whatever exercise.

Eccentric Loads

Loads of 100 to 120% of your 1 Repetition Max Concentric Bench Press (any movement) are effective. Some individuals can use Eccentric Loads of up to 130%

Going beyond 130% ensure that, in let say a Bench Press, you going end up with the bar wrapped around you neck in a milliseconds.

Eccentric-Only Training

I am not exactly sure what you are asking.

Performing an Eccentric-Only movement allows you to use load greater than 100% of your Bench Press (any lift).

To reiterate your statement, this places greater tension on the muscles. It engages more muscle fiber.

It produces greater “Muscle Damage” which increases muscle mass. However, the greater the muscle damage, the more recovery time required.

The Research On Wound Healing

Research simply reinforces Common Sense on this.

The greater the trauma to the body, the longer the recovery time required.

Before moving on the the second question, let look at…

Starting Eccentric Load Selection

The majority of individual start off an Eccentric-Only Exercise with a load that is too heavy.

As you know, Eccentrics are notorious for producing Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness.

Individual who are too ambitious and start off with too heavy load with an Eccentric will need to call a taxi to take them from the bedroom to the bathroom the next day.

I am a former member of that club. I did it with Squats, years ago. Sitting down and getting up was painful for about a week. No training for the rest of that week.

Where To Start

You need to ease into Eccentric-Only Training, as you would with anything new.

When initiation an Eccentric-Only Exercise start with a load the is around 70 to 80% of lets say your Concentric Bench Press Max. Then progressive increase the load each week.

Doing so elicits…

The Repeated Bout Effect

Getting a small (lighter load) dose of an Eccentric-Only Exercise allows your body to adapt to the heavier load to come without getting sore.

It works on the same principle of getting a small dose of the flu, a Flu Shot. It allows your body to build up flu antibodies. A Small dose Eccentric-Only does the same.

Good Question

Chris is a smart, creative Strength Coach.

The research that I have gather on Faster Eccentrics indicates that it is more effective for increasing strength and size.

However, a Slow Eccentric-Only may trip the mTOR switch.

Chris didn’t provide any research reference in this article that substantiates that fact.

I’d like to see the his research reference on that.

At this point, I can’t say.

Kenny Croxdale

1 Like
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I don’t understand the meaning of the word allows here. I can lower a light load just as fast as I can lower a heavy one.

Tension and force are not synonyms. Consider: If a lifter pauses a heavy weight mid-ROM and simply holds it there, s/he will generate tremendous tension despite the fact that the force (of the bar) is zero.

Further, the term tension is ambiguous–does it mean max instantaneous tension, average tension, total tension (ie, AUC)?

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What I believe he means is: if you choose to lower the weight faster, you will be able to use a heavier weight for the selected rep range than if you had chosen a slower tempo.

Really slowing down the eccentric leads to fatigue faster than with a fast eccentric, thus the inability to use a weight that is as heavy as when lowering it more quickly.

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And this is because if you let the bar drop more quickly (fast eccentric), you’ll have a harder time reversing the motion because it developed more momentum while dropping. Did I get this right?

Anyway, I’m trying to figure out exactly how the right tempo should feel while doing an exercise.

Let’s suppose I’m doing a curl. Once I’ve reached the point where I have to reverse the motion, how should I go about it? How much an effort should I make in slowing the bar down, if at all?

Same with, say, a lateral raise. Once my arm is parallel to the floor, how much should I control the descent versus just letting it drop?

… With the goal being hypertrophy

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You have simply changed the word allows to the word choose. Again, the intended meaning is lost on me.

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Maybe it should have been phrased like this:
If you choose to lower your weight faster (i.e. You choose a faster tempo), it allows you to use a heavier weight for your target rep number.

If you choose to lower your weight more slowly, for the same target number of reps, you won’t be able to use such a weight as the first case and you’ll have to choose a lighter one to complete the same amount of rep with a slower tempo (which, according to his thesis, means less work being done by the muscles, resulting in less hypertrophy).

Makes sense now? I might be missing something

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Not yet. Assuming one doesn’t literally pull the bar toward their chest, max bar speed is independent of the weight on the bar (it’s ~32 feet/sec^2). So I could ‘choose’ or ‘allow’ an empty bar to come down at 32 feet/sec^2, and I could do the same with a bar loaded to 500#.

What’s missing, of course, is some indication of what the lifter is doing. Is s/he resisting the bar with maximal effort? in that case, the empty bar vs 500# scenarios would turn out very differently. So if we stipulate that the lifter is maximally resisting the downward movement of the bar, then it’s true that a bar loaded to, say, 110% of 1RM will travel faster than will one loaded to 105%. But going back to my original question, I don’t understand how the lifter could be said to be ‘allowing’ the 110% bar to descend faster than the 105% bar.

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@EyeDentist

At this point I believe we might be talking about two different things.

Unless I misread Kenny’s post, he never said that a heavier weight makes the bar drop faster.

That looks to me like an inverted version of what he said.

He said that, if you are doing faster eccentrics (that is, you are not strongly resisting the downward motion of that bar), you will be able to use heavier weight for your sets, whereas if you were resisting such motion of the bar (that is, slow eccentrics), you wouldn’t be able to complete as many reps with the same weight, which means that in order to complete the same number of reps you would have to lower the weight (which is another way to say that doing the eccentric faster lets you use a heavier weight, which is what he said in the first place)

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If I’m not “strongly resisting the downward motion of the bar,” what stops it from crushing me?

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You are resisting it strongly enough to keep it from crushing you, but not strongly enough to visibly slow down the motion.

In other words, you are contracting your muscles hard enough to decelerate it so that it takes, in our example, 1 second to drop back to starting position. Whereas in case of a slower eccentric, one would be resisting it harder, making the descent last, say, 3 seconds

NB: I’m only making hypotheses, not claiming that what I’m saying is necessarily right. Just trying to learn

32

Samul has explained it as well as I would have.

At this point, you need to examine the research data and figure it out for yourself.

Kenny Croxdale

1 Like
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I’m reading this before the coffee has kicked in. I’m in my 30s, but when I read this line, the only thing that crossed my mind was:

'This guy must be a machine in the bathroom!"

3 Likes
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If you say so.

The research data cannot help me figure out your word choices or the ambiguities in your assertions. Maybe someone else will take up the challenge.

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Let’s say you have to choose the weight you are going to use for a set of 10 on the bench press.

In which case will you be able put more weight on the bar, everything else being equal–if you do your reps with a one-second negative or with a 5-second negative?

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One-sec of course. But I thought we were talking about negative-only training here.

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He did talk about negative-only training also, but if you reread his post and the sentence you initially quoted, he was actually replying to part of my post in which I was referring to “normal” training, not eccentric-only.

Hope that finally clears things up

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Oh Boy!

Why are there bifocals? Because 2 focal points are better than one! Why do we power clean fast and do partial goodmornings slow? Because 2 rep speeds are better than one!

Fast reps with a bounce? More force. The extra force comes from your connective tissue. Just like bouncing a ball. Throw the ball down, it bounces higher. Pull the weights down faster than gravity, they bounce up more. But it goes so fast, you don’t have time to get all your muscle into it.

Slower, controlled, heavier reps without bounce? Plenty of time to generate all your force into a slow moving object. All muscle.

Kenny’s studies don’t show 1 rep execution is best, they show reps are different, they produce different results. Different sports (PL, BB, Baseball, Wrestling) and different lifts can use Different speeds.

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That clears the first thing up. But please don’t feel compelled to take this any further.

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@FlatsFarmer

Some thoughts:

As Kenny noted, a slower eccentric is better when doing a 1RM because it allows more weight to be moved while having to express less force. As we know, powerlifers will do anything to move more weight, including for example shortening the ROM (like arching the back in a bench press).

On the other hand, BBers, which is what I’m actually interested in, will do anything to make exercises more difficult on their muscles.

This has brought me to some considerations that hadn’t come to my mind when I first read Kenny’s post.

As per the studies he quoted, a faster eccentric might be better for gains because it forces the muscles to work harder on the concentric (having to reverse the motion of a heavier internal load because of its greater momentum). However I can’t help but think that a faster eccentric might imply more variables to come into play—the stretch reflex of the muscles, as well as the tension in passive structures such as tendons and ligaments. If I’m not mistaken, this might result in actually less work being done by the muscles.

Whereas slowing down the weight on the way down would mean more work being done to slow it down, and virtually no help from stretch reflex and other structures. But this would also mean the internal load is lower because it has (nearly) no downward momentum when you begin the concentric. So what is better?

What would the others be?