You might recognize this as the same concept of negative pullups.
Instead of pulling yourselfup, you start at the top and lower yourselfdown.
Keep at it long enough, and soon youll be able to do a full pullup.
What did the study find?
The researchers noted thattechnicallyyou can consider them as having gained the same strength from only doing half the work.
This resulted in headlines like Less gym time, same results even though thats not how time works.
How do you lower the weight down without lifting it?
Namely: how do you only lower a weight?
Doesnt it have to get lifted somehow for you to be able to lower it down?
Yes, it does.
There are many, many ways to get around this seeming impossibility.
Curls: Cheat the curl by swinging your hips to get the bar up.
Then lower it back down.
Then bend your arms to lower down, and repeat.
In these examples, youll typically lower the weight slowly.
(Dropping it straight down doesnt require your muscles to do very much work.)
you might also emphasize the eccentric with a weight thatisnttoo heavy to lift.
For example, Romanian deadlifts.
Then you stand up quickly, and lower it down slowly once again.
These are usually done with a weight that is lighter than your usual, normal deadlifts.
Remember that a normal lifting session has you lifting the weight upanddown.
Youre already getting the benefit of the eccentric, even if you are also lifting the weight up.
So we use eccentric reps for specific reasons at specific times.
Or we do negative pullups when we cant do the up-down kind yet.
There are also different schools of thought on how much to emphasize the eccentric in regular up-down training.
So should you lower the weights down?
Its definitely a training strategy worth considering!
But you also dont need to choose.
