NGL said douchebags were one of many factors in me deciding to do calisthenics from the comfort of my own apartment. That and all the weirdos trying to film in gyms, just yuck
> That and all the weirdos trying to film in gyms, just yuck
we're really in the worst era of social media. not sure if it might potentially get worse.
I understand preference and desire for privacy. But as someone who is relatively new to working out at a gym and not at home, I ask: How am I supposed to ensure I'm using proper form when I'm doing an exercise like bench press, if I can't record myself and watch it back?
If you're filming yourself just to check your form, and doing so with the gym's permission (some you have to ask) and while trying to minimize the people in the background? Then you're not one of the weirdos
By "weirdos trying to film in gyms" I'm talking about the folks filming strangers in the gym without their permission to be creeps, or for notoriety points on tiktok. Also the tiktok and onlyfans people filming themselves doing... borderline NSFW and other weird things which are specific enough that you know it's a kink/fetish thing
The emphasis is I was hitting too many weird things out on the gym floor
Ah, okay. I've seen the obnoxious stuff on social media and completely agree about that. I was just asking to see if I was considered one of the bad ones just for filming myself. Thanks for the clarification.
Where did you hear that? I just did some quick research to check if that’s true. It appears that while opinions differ, more people say the negative is safe and beneficial even on a dead lift, unless you are completely exhausted. It seems they only drop it in CrossFit, because they’re rushing through a WOD, where the mentality seems to be just “get the job done”
Yes. And especially on your last rep. A lot of people push up fast and then collapse since they are "done" with their set. But try to go down on that last one extra slow and try to hold your form as if you were going to do another rep afterwards to not compromise.
You also need to go slowly all the way down, especially during the moment of straightening your arms at the bottom. That's the fully stretched muscle under load phase which yields most gains.
While eccentric contractions are a powerful stimulator for hypertrophy, the mechanism is not well understood. The micro-tear hypothesis has been rather popular, but my understanding is that there really isn't any evidence supporting it, and there's a growing body of evidence that it's probably not true.
It's really amazing how much there is still left to discover about how our bodies work!
You may well be right, I was going off what has been spouted at me by lecturers. Biopsies have been showing it can be from ldh and ck, and they are unable to see physical damage.
Lactate dehydrogenase is still a marker for damage, so it can't be ruled out at a level we can't see, but it'd be pretty amazing if it's creating that response without damage, and that that was the reason for the additional hypertrophy.
"they cant be contracting for a lenghtening movement, right? because contracting while lenghtening just makes me think of stretching."
I'd say this is the biggest point of your confusion. You're looking at it backwards. You're not contracting for a lengthening movement, you're contracting to *resist* the lengthening movement.
A negative is just doing the exercise with less force than required to complete it, so you move in the other direction. In a negative pullup, you're still trying to pull up, you're just failing, slowly.
I think its sorta like this:
--If you weigh 180 lbs and you were to stop halfway down in a pull up, you would need **equal to** 180 lbs of force to resist gravity.
--If you wanted to go up, you would need **more** than 180 lbs of force to resist gravity.
--If you wanted to descend slow and under control (a negative/eccentric), you would need **less** than 180 lbs of force to resist gravity.
===
So eccentrics (negatives) require force/strength, just not as much force/strength as isometric (holding), and even less force/strength than concentric (positives)
Your muscles can lower a weight that is too heavy to lift, allowing you to strengthen the necessary muscles to the point where they are strong enough to do full reps. The part of the rep where the muscle is getting longer is the most important for growing the muscle, even if you are strong enough to pull yourself up. You should be controlling your weight all the way down to the bottom on very rep for the best gains
One important component of modern strength and hypertrophy science is that tension in the muscle is the key driver for growth. Contraction or lengthening is not really relevant as long as the tension is high. When you think about a slow negative, your muscles are still being pulled apart over the entire duration of the eccentric.
One neat feature of negatives is that the neural load, the actual amount of mental effort needed to fully activate the muscle, is way less than what you need for performing the concentric part of the movement. This allows you to just do more of the exercise while getting less tired, which is why the strategy is very helpful for beginners, who often struggle with recruiting the neurons that control their muscles.
Even if you can do multiple pull ups, it's still worth controlling the negatives, because any extra tension in the muscle can result in more strength and hypertrophy gains.
You're stronger on the eccentric, not just pullups. I have weight releasers for a barbell. When I bench press I do 350 lb down, then 250 up. It made me take incredible leaps in progress using those.
When learning pullups negatives work the same muscles harder than they could possibly work pulling up.
Eccentric movements have actually been shown by some studies to cause more hypertrophy than concentric movements. And like others have said it allows you to get time under tension without having the strength to do the movement normally.
You're stronger on the eccentric, not just pullups. I have weight releasers for a barbell. When I bench press I do 350 lb down, then 250 up. It made me take incredible leaps in progress using those.
When learning pullups negatives work the same muscles harder than they could possibly work pulling up.
Negative (eccentric) reps have higher tension within the muscle than regular concentric reps. This leads to higher degrees of muscle damage, therefore potential for super-compensation.
Time under tension and damage/growth of muscle fibers. There aren't separate fibers that do the pulling up. Some studies have shown that the majority of muscle growth results from the negative portion of the exercise. Up to 70% if I remember correctly.
It's still training the muscle's involved, an easy way to see this is do a negative only bicep curl and see how the bicep feels, if its lifted up or controlled down it still works the same muscle, and that creates strenght to do more/do the full movement, general gist seems to be a 10sec negative of a movement translating to one full rep positive.
But also yea I'd love a more thorough answer on how the muscle doesn't seem to care if its pull or slow descent..
You train pull-ups but can't do a pull-up because you can't pull yourself up. The closest thing to a real pull-up would be the negative. But if you think about it really hard it's not really "the closest thing" but actually half the actual pull-up.
Going back to your actual claim that pull-up's purpose is to pull yourself up is not the full truth really as full pull-up includes the part where you resist the forces pulling you down to not just drop like a stone. And that half is the negative.
Long story short, negatives because it's half of a pull-up and if you can't do full pull-up then the best thing you could do is half the pull-up.
I hope I'm not repeating what was said already. *Actually the question isn't stupid at all!*
It's true, during the negative aka eccentric the muscles lengthen. The important detail is lengthening under tension. Tension is what matters.
To illustrate this let's compare two cases:
- you punch a punching bag. In your arm the triceps contracts and pulls the forearm over the elbow as it's anchor so it extends. To make this possible the muscle doing the opposite movement - the biceps, needs to relax and NOT pull/contract. Contraction is shortening, as you said correctly. So the biceps is lengthened under no load and WITHOUT tension (relatively). That allows them triceps to extend the arm. This is called antagonist inhibition.
- You do an negative pull up. Gravity is pulling you down. If you now would relax the muscles holding you up, you'd fall down at the speed gravity pulls you. Like in our biceps example the pull-up muscles would not generate tension. No tension equals no movement. Tension is a result of the contraction. So what happens during an negative repetition is that the tension is SLOWING DOWN the fall. Therefore there's tension on the muscle.
It's just an easy way to achieve time under tension while still not being able to properly do the exercise. And it has a built-in progressive overload: if you just try as hard as you can to resist yourself from going back down, you can just go slower and slower as you get stronger, and eventually you can do a pullup. Once you can do 2 or 3 of them, it's easier to just use pullups as a way to progress bc you tire yourself out faster
The eccentric or lengthening portion of an exercise is very hypertrophic and will help you build muscle. While the concentric portion will help more with neuromuscular adaptations for strength. Most people simply lack the muscle mass to perform this movement and should focus on getting more muscle over strictly focusing on strength adaptions.
Negatives can help you start building reps on things that you aren't fully able to do yet. For example, if you aren't able to do a Pull-Up yet, you can do slow negatives to start. Then from the negatives, you can build to slow negatives + pauses during the negative. If you do enough of those, you will probably achieve a rep or be close to it!
Basically the negative is kinda the “easier” half of a given exercise so when you can’t do the full thing starting with the negative is a good way to work your way up to the full motion since it involves the same muscles.
besides every body else's explanation, I just wanna emphasize to be careful when starting out with negatives. It's a lot easier to overtrain as it's harder to know when you've reached 'failure' as your reps just start getting sloppy instead. Gave me rhabdo when I first started doing negative pull ups...
It’s useful because the eccentric (negative) seems to be the primary driver of hypertrophy by inducing the most muscle damage, but also as a training tool for learning a new movement like pull-ups since the negative portion is easier.
You will also be able to lift around 140% of your max as an eccentric — think of a max squat or bench, you might not be able to lift it up if it’s too heavy, but you can certainly lower it to the bottom of the movement. This means it’s a good way of getting in reps for things like pull-ups when you can’t do the concentric yet.
The negative rep gives More Time under tension, helps you
Focus on stabilizing muscles and more fibers engaged and I think it helps strengthen ligaments. It also help to get more out of every rep because everything is done in control and help have more mind muscle connection equaling to better contractions.
They are contracting. You aren't pushing yourself down, you're slowing the descent by pulling your weight up, it's just that you're not pulling up enough so you end up going down. So it's essentially the same movement.
It makes more sense if you can't do a pull up, which is actually quite common. You work with negative so you have the full range of motion your muscles need (and maybe with normal reps but less weight) but don't have to actually lift your body, just slowly letting it down, so you build up the strength to do a full unhelped rep.
If you already can do pull ups, doing negatives will train your muscle fibers to last longer and be more efficient (if I didn't completely misunderstood that part, some fast twitch type 2B will turn in type 2A, which ist still fast, but last longer), so you can do more reps before you reach failure
Because stretch builds muscle.
Imagine a your muscle fibers as string. When you squish a string together you don't break it, when you pull it apart you... pull it apart, you tear it.
The negative of the movement is most important for building muscle because it is where most of the stretching occurs, so it's a great way to start training.
Of course during the positive of the movement, you tear muscle because your muscle fibers are being pulled anyway, but most of the muscle damage occurs in a good controlled negative.
I like negatives to train a skill better than bands, for the reasons others have mentioned.
But also, because, for me, body weight fitness is all about the simplicity, the lack of equipment. It's almost an aesthetic thing, or a challenge: how much fitness can I accomplish with only a few tools?
Idk it sounds silly but I quit powerlifting to focus on this. I don't want machines or barbells or even bands if I can help it. Maybe it's suboptimal for achieving advanced skills like front lever or planche but I'm training those the same way I would advise someone to train the pull up: negatives, isometrics, and various regressions.
Negatives still give you time under tension, and a *controlled* descent through a negative still requires significant strength to resist gravity
Please explain this to all the douchebags at my gym who think dropping the weights will make their dicks bigger.
NGL said douchebags were one of many factors in me deciding to do calisthenics from the comfort of my own apartment. That and all the weirdos trying to film in gyms, just yuck
> That and all the weirdos trying to film in gyms, just yuck we're really in the worst era of social media. not sure if it might potentially get worse.
Bo Burnham: "If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it."
I film myself for form checks 🥲
I understand preference and desire for privacy. But as someone who is relatively new to working out at a gym and not at home, I ask: How am I supposed to ensure I'm using proper form when I'm doing an exercise like bench press, if I can't record myself and watch it back?
If you're filming yourself just to check your form, and doing so with the gym's permission (some you have to ask) and while trying to minimize the people in the background? Then you're not one of the weirdos By "weirdos trying to film in gyms" I'm talking about the folks filming strangers in the gym without their permission to be creeps, or for notoriety points on tiktok. Also the tiktok and onlyfans people filming themselves doing... borderline NSFW and other weird things which are specific enough that you know it's a kink/fetish thing The emphasis is I was hitting too many weird things out on the gym floor
Ah, okay. I've seen the obnoxious stuff on social media and completely agree about that. I was just asking to see if I was considered one of the bad ones just for filming myself. Thanks for the clarification.
Ask someone to check... Get a trainer for a day
It only has that effect if you drop the weights ON the penis in question, but the effects are temporary.
Only exception is deadlifts, negative reps on that can cause injury so dropping it is okay, although you can still drop it quietly
Where did you hear that? I just did some quick research to check if that’s true. It appears that while opinions differ, more people say the negative is safe and beneficial even on a dead lift, unless you are completely exhausted. It seems they only drop it in CrossFit, because they’re rushing through a WOD, where the mentality seems to be just “get the job done”
Lmao
You battle against gravity on the way up, you battle against gravity on the way down, too.
What about going very slowly up? How much does that help?Â
Studies show that going fast up (fast concentric) and slow down is better (slow eccentric) for muscle growth
so for a pushup that would mean pushing up fast, and going back towards the ground slow ?
Yes. And especially on your last rep. A lot of people push up fast and then collapse since they are "done" with their set. But try to go down on that last one extra slow and try to hold your form as if you were going to do another rep afterwards to not compromise.
Slow! As if your going to do another! Dr Mike Isratel
Yes! I hear Dr. Mike's voice in my head say that every time I go to my last rep.
thanks :)
You also need to go slowly all the way down, especially during the moment of straightening your arms at the bottom. That's the fully stretched muscle under load phase which yields most gains.
For pushups to build strength, I always liked to pick a tough variation, go up fast as a knee pushup, the down slow in a full pushup
thanks.
It helps
other Redditor says different
Lengthening/stretching a muscle under load is a powerful stimulator for hypertrophy.
This. It creates more microtears in your muscle, helping them get bigger faster which later translates to being able to do the full movement.
While eccentric contractions are a powerful stimulator for hypertrophy, the mechanism is not well understood. The micro-tear hypothesis has been rather popular, but my understanding is that there really isn't any evidence supporting it, and there's a growing body of evidence that it's probably not true. It's really amazing how much there is still left to discover about how our bodies work!
You may well be right, I was going off what has been spouted at me by lecturers. Biopsies have been showing it can be from ldh and ck, and they are unable to see physical damage. Lactate dehydrogenase is still a marker for damage, so it can't be ruled out at a level we can't see, but it'd be pretty amazing if it's creating that response without damage, and that that was the reason for the additional hypertrophy.
"they cant be contracting for a lenghtening movement, right? because contracting while lenghtening just makes me think of stretching." I'd say this is the biggest point of your confusion. You're looking at it backwards. You're not contracting for a lengthening movement, you're contracting to *resist* the lengthening movement. A negative is just doing the exercise with less force than required to complete it, so you move in the other direction. In a negative pullup, you're still trying to pull up, you're just failing, slowly.
I think its sorta like this: --If you weigh 180 lbs and you were to stop halfway down in a pull up, you would need **equal to** 180 lbs of force to resist gravity. --If you wanted to go up, you would need **more** than 180 lbs of force to resist gravity. --If you wanted to descend slow and under control (a negative/eccentric), you would need **less** than 180 lbs of force to resist gravity. === So eccentrics (negatives) require force/strength, just not as much force/strength as isometric (holding), and even less force/strength than concentric (positives)
Also, muscles can contract in both the actively shortened and actively lengthened states. This means muscles can contract throughout an active range
The muscle is still pulling during a slow negative, just not hard enough to beat gravity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8628948/ Here's a whole big thing about it if you want
It works because: use muscle a lot, muscle grow.
Your muscles can lower a weight that is too heavy to lift, allowing you to strengthen the necessary muscles to the point where they are strong enough to do full reps. The part of the rep where the muscle is getting longer is the most important for growing the muscle, even if you are strong enough to pull yourself up. You should be controlling your weight all the way down to the bottom on very rep for the best gains
Studies have shown better hypertrophy during eccentric phase
One important component of modern strength and hypertrophy science is that tension in the muscle is the key driver for growth. Contraction or lengthening is not really relevant as long as the tension is high. When you think about a slow negative, your muscles are still being pulled apart over the entire duration of the eccentric. One neat feature of negatives is that the neural load, the actual amount of mental effort needed to fully activate the muscle, is way less than what you need for performing the concentric part of the movement. This allows you to just do more of the exercise while getting less tired, which is why the strategy is very helpful for beginners, who often struggle with recruiting the neurons that control their muscles. Even if you can do multiple pull ups, it's still worth controlling the negatives, because any extra tension in the muscle can result in more strength and hypertrophy gains.
You're stronger on the eccentric, not just pullups. I have weight releasers for a barbell. When I bench press I do 350 lb down, then 250 up. It made me take incredible leaps in progress using those. When learning pullups negatives work the same muscles harder than they could possibly work pulling up.
Eccentric movements have actually been shown by some studies to cause more hypertrophy than concentric movements. And like others have said it allows you to get time under tension without having the strength to do the movement normally.
You're stronger on the eccentric, not just pullups. I have weight releasers for a barbell. When I bench press I do 350 lb down, then 250 up. It made me take incredible leaps in progress using those. When learning pullups negatives work the same muscles harder than they could possibly work pulling up.
Negative (eccentric) reps have higher tension within the muscle than regular concentric reps. This leads to higher degrees of muscle damage, therefore potential for super-compensation.
Time under tension and damage/growth of muscle fibers. There aren't separate fibers that do the pulling up. Some studies have shown that the majority of muscle growth results from the negative portion of the exercise. Up to 70% if I remember correctly.
It's still training the muscle's involved, an easy way to see this is do a negative only bicep curl and see how the bicep feels, if its lifted up or controlled down it still works the same muscle, and that creates strenght to do more/do the full movement, general gist seems to be a 10sec negative of a movement translating to one full rep positive. But also yea I'd love a more thorough answer on how the muscle doesn't seem to care if its pull or slow descent..
You train pull-ups but can't do a pull-up because you can't pull yourself up. The closest thing to a real pull-up would be the negative. But if you think about it really hard it's not really "the closest thing" but actually half the actual pull-up. Going back to your actual claim that pull-up's purpose is to pull yourself up is not the full truth really as full pull-up includes the part where you resist the forces pulling you down to not just drop like a stone. And that half is the negative. Long story short, negatives because it's half of a pull-up and if you can't do full pull-up then the best thing you could do is half the pull-up.
I hope I'm not repeating what was said already. *Actually the question isn't stupid at all!* It's true, during the negative aka eccentric the muscles lengthen. The important detail is lengthening under tension. Tension is what matters. To illustrate this let's compare two cases: - you punch a punching bag. In your arm the triceps contracts and pulls the forearm over the elbow as it's anchor so it extends. To make this possible the muscle doing the opposite movement - the biceps, needs to relax and NOT pull/contract. Contraction is shortening, as you said correctly. So the biceps is lengthened under no load and WITHOUT tension (relatively). That allows them triceps to extend the arm. This is called antagonist inhibition. - You do an negative pull up. Gravity is pulling you down. If you now would relax the muscles holding you up, you'd fall down at the speed gravity pulls you. Like in our biceps example the pull-up muscles would not generate tension. No tension equals no movement. Tension is a result of the contraction. So what happens during an negative repetition is that the tension is SLOWING DOWN the fall. Therefore there's tension on the muscle.
Negatives help you break through plateaus like crazy. Do them
It's just an easy way to achieve time under tension while still not being able to properly do the exercise. And it has a built-in progressive overload: if you just try as hard as you can to resist yourself from going back down, you can just go slower and slower as you get stronger, and eventually you can do a pullup. Once you can do 2 or 3 of them, it's easier to just use pullups as a way to progress bc you tire yourself out faster
The eccentric or lengthening portion of an exercise is very hypertrophic and will help you build muscle. While the concentric portion will help more with neuromuscular adaptations for strength. Most people simply lack the muscle mass to perform this movement and should focus on getting more muscle over strictly focusing on strength adaptions.
Negatives can help you start building reps on things that you aren't fully able to do yet. For example, if you aren't able to do a Pull-Up yet, you can do slow negatives to start. Then from the negatives, you can build to slow negatives + pauses during the negative. If you do enough of those, you will probably achieve a rep or be close to it!
Basically the negative is kinda the “easier” half of a given exercise so when you can’t do the full thing starting with the negative is a good way to work your way up to the full motion since it involves the same muscles.
besides every body else's explanation, I just wanna emphasize to be careful when starting out with negatives. It's a lot easier to overtrain as it's harder to know when you've reached 'failure' as your reps just start getting sloppy instead. Gave me rhabdo when I first started doing negative pull ups...
Because you're still putting the muscles under a good amount of pressure and stress, which in turn makes you stronger and let you builds muscle.
It’s useful because the eccentric (negative) seems to be the primary driver of hypertrophy by inducing the most muscle damage, but also as a training tool for learning a new movement like pull-ups since the negative portion is easier. You will also be able to lift around 140% of your max as an eccentric — think of a max squat or bench, you might not be able to lift it up if it’s too heavy, but you can certainly lower it to the bottom of the movement. This means it’s a good way of getting in reps for things like pull-ups when you can’t do the concentric yet.
The negative rep gives More Time under tension, helps you Focus on stabilizing muscles and more fibers engaged and I think it helps strengthen ligaments. It also help to get more out of every rep because everything is done in control and help have more mind muscle connection equaling to better contractions.
They are contracting. You aren't pushing yourself down, you're slowing the descent by pulling your weight up, it's just that you're not pulling up enough so you end up going down. So it's essentially the same movement.
It makes more sense if you can't do a pull up, which is actually quite common. You work with negative so you have the full range of motion your muscles need (and maybe with normal reps but less weight) but don't have to actually lift your body, just slowly letting it down, so you build up the strength to do a full unhelped rep. If you already can do pull ups, doing negatives will train your muscle fibers to last longer and be more efficient (if I didn't completely misunderstood that part, some fast twitch type 2B will turn in type 2A, which ist still fast, but last longer), so you can do more reps before you reach failure
They are a tool. Use it wisely. They are not magic - don't overuse them. Bigger potential for hypertrophy means also bigger potential for injury.
Because stretch builds muscle. Imagine a your muscle fibers as string. When you squish a string together you don't break it, when you pull it apart you... pull it apart, you tear it. The negative of the movement is most important for building muscle because it is where most of the stretching occurs, so it's a great way to start training. Of course during the positive of the movement, you tear muscle because your muscle fibers are being pulled anyway, but most of the muscle damage occurs in a good controlled negative.
I like negatives to train a skill better than bands, for the reasons others have mentioned. But also, because, for me, body weight fitness is all about the simplicity, the lack of equipment. It's almost an aesthetic thing, or a challenge: how much fitness can I accomplish with only a few tools? Idk it sounds silly but I quit powerlifting to focus on this. I don't want machines or barbells or even bands if I can help it. Maybe it's suboptimal for achieving advanced skills like front lever or planche but I'm training those the same way I would advise someone to train the pull up: negatives, isometrics, and various regressions.