I have heard negatives make you sore they increase size, but they do nothing to increase strength, I am thinking of training without using negatives at all. My goal is strength only, I train for my sport and I cant afford to be sore but still need strength increases.
Is this a good way to train for athletes?
Look, if your training for strength you can still do the complete lift just focus more on the speed of the lift. Explode with every movement so you stimulate the nervous system. Don’t lift with an extremely slow negative.
This is an interesting topic and one that is still more or less experimental. I know when Dr. Squat Fred Hatfield set his world record squat attempt he was training in this fashion (using zero eccentrics)…however, at the other end of the spectrum you have successful strength coaches who highly advocate eccentrics…Charles Poliquin among them. In fact, he says that the more advanced an athlete the more their routine should involve pure eccentric training…a very advanced athlete may do 1/2 their workload using pure eccentrics…and these methods are backed up with plenty of research and science…among them is a form of training known as the strength deficit method which bases an athletes programming upon their concentric vs eccentric strength in a given movement…so which method is more likely to give you the results you desire? I dont know about powerlifting in other countries but here in the U.S. the strongest powerlifters as a whole train using the Louie Simmons style which for the most part advocates more explosive concentrics and limits eccentric stress.
Now as far as soreness is concerned you will definitely be less sore if you avoid the eccentric. My advice is to experiment with the system and see what it can do for you…drop everything quick to avoid the stress on the eccentric and utilize explosive concentrics. A really easy way to do this is to incorporate a lot of exercises using sled dragging. Many exercises done with the sled totally eliminate eccentric stress
you heard bits and peices of the truth… my advice, go with the 1st guys advice
I seem to remember Charles Staley reccomending something similar to the WSB 8x3 protocol for combat athletes. So I’d ad a speed bench day and a speed boxsquat day to your workout. Also for quickness, read speed/power, you need to work the stretch shortening cycle. This means quick eccentrics and explosive concentrics
You can do it two ways. 1) Heavy weights for low reps (1-5). 2) The Westside and Staley way of using a lower weight (50-60% of max) and lifting it explosively for numerous sets of low reps (10x3). Both should work. Also, if you are looking for explosive strength, then I would incorporate many of the Olympic lifts in your routine. But I would not try to eliminate eccentric lifting from your workout. Just don’t do very slow eccentric lifting (I wouldn’t do more than a 3-second eccentric). Just lower it fairly slowly and under control (2-3 seconds) and explode with the concentric part of the lift.
MO, for a MUSCLE to get stronger it must get bigger. your ability to lift a wt. is not a definition of your strength. its been shown that heavy wt. low reps lead to “strength” increases but is it realy a “strength” increase, no. by training a lift w/low reps you develope the ability to lift that same wt. useing LESS muscle fiber, now in theory that will anable you to become stronger without getting bigger, but are your MUSCLES realy stronger, I say no. skill is VERY sport-specific, you get better at the skill you are performing (in this case wt. lifting) but without the fibers getting stronger I do not believe it will transfer over to your sport. peace
Strength is NOT just related to muscle size, although of course fiber cross section is important. Remember two things - there’s the type of hypertrophy involved (sarcoplasmic vs. sarcomere) which is greatly affected by training, and there’s also your body’s ability to recruit motor units. Training for sarcomere hypetrophy leads to more bang for your buck, as you’re developing the right kind of hypetrophy for strength (which is typically developed using lower reps and higher weight, or maximal tension with a submaximal weight). Your body also has to “learn” to efficiently fire motor units, and this is a skill your body picks up from practicing a particular movement as well as from certain forms of training.
Negatives lead to greater protein degradation (negatives = more stress = more muscle torn down), but can also help your body to "learn" how to hand a supramaximal weight (lowering 100%+ of your 1RM is a good way to do this).
I am guessing you are a boxer. If you don’t lift anything, fuck explosive lifting. You don’t need to develope lifting skills, and you REALLY don’t need to fuck up your neck, especially if you are a boxer. Negatives done properly will bring you to you knees, very quickly. Take a weight you can lift once or twice, smoothly, and just lower it, slowly. At the last rep you will be trying to raise it as hard as possible, but it will beat you. If you don’t lift weights in your sport, it does not matter how you get stronger.
“MO, for a MUSCLE to get stronger it must get bigger” no, that isn’t correct. Some of the points made afterward about myofibular/sacromere hypertrophy that you can’t see were, but one can also increase strength by improving recruiting patterns- better RFD through better neuromuscular firing, or straight up recruiting a higher percentage of your muscle fiber.
spanky, your body “learns” by useing less fibers. to me the idea of becomeing stronger in the bench press thru “learning” how to use less fibers (it is protecting itself) and believing it will transfer over into boxing would be like roger clemens adding 5 mph. to his fastball and thinking he will be able to kick a football farther. they are two tataly different SKILLS. peace
Actually, it’s not that your body learns to use less fibers. It learns to fire MORE motor units at the same time. This is partly why small Olympic lifters can lift such heavy weights, because they have become extremely neuromuscularly efficient through the type of training they do. The only time you would ever use less fibers is when you’re lifting a submaximal weight at a submaximal velocity… this is because you simply don’t need to recruit as many motor units because tension is low.
Now throwing a baseball and kicking a football are unrelated activities and there is no carry over, obviously. But better neuromuscular efficiency through weight training DOES carry over to sports performance - of course wiring your muscles to squat and wiring your muscles to kick may be different, but the fact is that your body has become good at generating force through squatting, so there is some carry over to kicking. Also consider this... Better neuromuscular efficiency leads to using a heavier work weight, which leads to greater tension, which leads to more protein degradation, which ultimately leads to greater hypertrophy and thus fiber cross section. And we all know that greater fiber cross section (along with neuromuscular efficiency, tendon strength, etc.) leads to greater strength and better performance.
Spanky, I hear what you are saying, but I think you are falling into a cause and effect trap. Some science, Ellington Darden did some PHD research and found that there is virtually no sports caryover: meaning that the fastest straight line runners are not the fastest circle runners, better back strokers are not better breast strokers and so forth. So the question is, does doing all this “EXPLOSIVE” lifting make an athlete (meaningfully) more explosive, or are naturally more explosive athletes doing these movements? Are champion athletes made, or are they born? The more consideration we allow for these items, the clearer the relation the size and strength of a muscle are related. Go to Medx’s web site and check out what is actually required to measure the strength of a muscle (things like friction, stored energy and so forth). We know that increasing skill (like lifting technique) will increase performance in one (and only one) type of lift, and we also know that a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle (all else being equal, meaning the same person). This points quite emphatically to a direct (if perhaps not linear, or even continuous) relation between muscle strength and size. I mean c’mon, you gotta think that to get bigger you must get stronger, and that getting stonger will make you bigger, don’t you?
spanky, I wish you were correct, the body learns to use LESS fibers to lift the same amount of wt. NOT more, thru low rep (1-3)training that is.now what happens is you still have the ability to recruite as many fibers as you did before so the lift DOES go up but the muscle is NOT stronger and that only happens in THAT movement. you will apear stronger, you will probably think you are stronger but you are only stronger in that skill, and benchpressing and boxing are about as similar as throwing a baseball and kicking a football. I wish it would carry over but it does not. now when they say low reps build strength without size they KINDA do, but only in that movement. I say it is NOT realy a strength increase. REAL strength will carry over but because your body got “better” at benching does not mean it will carry over because it will NOT. peace oh, if you would like I will try and find the study for you, I have it here somewhere but I’m a slob, so if you keep an open mind and would like to read it I will try to find it. again peace
Colin, I see your point as well, but I think you’re misunderstanding me a little here. I’m not saying that muscle size isn’t important. It definitely is. The wiring can only get so good before you need to put in a bigger motor, right? What I’m saying is that the size of the muscle is not the only factor in strength. Muscles can be taught to work more efficiently. Explosive movements (Olympic-type movements) DO have carryover to sports. Olympic lifters typically have unreal vertical jumps, and some are actually run faster than sprinters (in the first part of the sprint, anyway) - there have been studies done on this. Explosive movements are done to teach the athlete to be explosive and to help him learn how to generate force. Of course genetics play a big factor… some people are just naturally strong or explosive. But I don’t think one has to be “naturally” explosive in order to become that way. As for my other point, I know that was probably confusing… What I mean is that becoming neurologically efficient at a weightlifting movement (e.g. squat) can have indirect carryover to a sport related movement. Getting better at squatting (due to neurological efficiency or greater muscle fiber crossection) can lead to better strength, and that definitely has carryover to sport.
Hetyey, if you become stronger but lift the same weight that you used before at the same speed then of course you're going to recruit less motor units. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that when you get stronger it's not only because of muscle size. Your muscles learn to become more efficient and you can fire more motor units at once, creating greater force. Yes, of course when you bench press your muscles get used to the motor recruitment pattern of benching, but there's also the issue of the muscle simply getting better at generating force, period... Bench pressing for boxing is kind of a bad example actually, as most of the force of a punch comes from the trunk and legs anyway.
ah yes heytey thank you i couldn’t remember the 3rd kind. For strength increases, there is A)Hypertrophy of muscles B)inter-muscular coordination (learning the movement by your neuro-system) C) intramuscular coordination (being able to better use your muscles, by your nervous system, regardless of the biomechanics of a certain movement, for that those involved muscles) you keep forgetting the 3rd one.
I would like to read the Darden study.
In the meantime, I’m not so sure what I believe anymore about strength carryover into sport honestly. I believe that as you develop strength (however you go about it) you can take that strength into your sport if you are also practicing those skills; i.e. as you get stronger, you can teach that stronger body to perform the sport skills and get stronger application of those skills. But I am not entirely convinced you get more carryover, especially in relation to injury risk, by moving ballistically, acceleratively, etc.
Nor am I convinced that this is not the case, assuming you have been taught proper form and progressed to that point in an appropriate manner (how often is this actually the case? Seldom? Less often than that?)
The more I work with athletes, the more inclined I am to believe that my main job should be to develop strength in the "supporting cast" of muscles, enhance recovery of the primary movers used in the sport, teach a clean diet, and the importance of rest. The skill/sport coach is the one that has to make them better players. In other words, I am supposed to make sure they can continue to show up for skill and tactical practice and to competitions and are capable of practicing/competing as hard as it takes to win, period. Their opponent won't know or care how much wt was lifted in the OLs or anything else (unless of course, they compete in OL!), just who won, and how strong (s)he felt in play.
The old adage, “the best way to get better at____ is to do ____,” is right on. And perhaps the best way to develop strength in the muscles needed to do ___ is to develop strength in the muscles that will limit their recruitment while playing the sport in question. Teach stabilization and force reduction and let them play themselves “strong”, in other words.
So now I’m way off topic and rambling to beat the band (can anyone else tell I’m just thinking “out loud”?) and all I wanted to do was ask for the citation for the study!
my point is that if your bench goes from 300x2 to 330x2 because you have practiced lifting heavy wts. that does NOT mean you are stronger, in that movement you can say you are, but your muscles are realy no stronger. let me ask you this, we may dissagree on what the limits of our recovery ability is but whatever it is do you think an athlete, say a basketball player, would be better off strength training and practiceing his skill more or do you think he would be better off spending more time on his explosive training and less time on his skill development? I think he would be better off spending more time on skill developement. peace
How can you say you haven’t gotten stronger if a lift has increased? This is like saying that someone whose deadlift increased from 100 lbs to 800 lbs didn’t get any stronger, they just got better at deadlifting. There are too many variables to list that could contribute to someone becoming stronger at a particular movement. Some variables only affect that movement, of course - what you’re talking about is the body’s muscles growing accustomed to the motor recruitment pattern of bench pressing, thus the body “learns” how to bench better. But muscle size could have increased… the muscles’ ability to generate force may have increased… you just don’t know.
As far as skill development goes, that depends on where the athlete is in his training. An athlete definitely needs the skills, don't get me wrong... the skill set is the whole point of the sport, whatever it is. But it's important that the athlete also use strength training, at least at the beginning of a training cycle... as he progresses strength training becomes less important and skills training becomes more important... In other words, build strength, then learn to apply it. Proper strength training can help tremendously in a sport. This is why just about every serious athlete out there strength trains.
jeez heytey you are REALLY WRONG. REALLY. Please read supertraining or something. The thing is with training at a high level especially, is it must be individualized. In the BBALL example. Is the athlete Tyson Chandler or Shaq. Shaq needs more skill improvement (hint: free throws) than physical improvement. Chandler on the other hand is way too small and weak to be a center or Power Forward, although he is pretty skilled, he must gain weight and strength. Also, why don’t you recognize strength athletes abilities to utilize a higher percentage of their muscles (intramuscular coordination). Your theories, in short are incomplete. Again, please read Supertraining or Science and Practice, they (esp. Supertraining) cite real evidence to back up assertions, something you cannot do right now, because your logic is only partially correct.