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Eccentric muscle training is something that most gym-goers really aren’t too familiar with, but in some cases, it can provide your muscles with an even better workout compared to typical resistance training.

Think of eccentric muscle training as arm wrestling; as the weaker competitor starts to tire, his arm starts to fall over.  Typically, his arm doesn’t give out right away.  He starts to make weird faces, and his arm slowly starts to come closer to the table, even though he’s still pushing against his opponent’s arm.  That’s eccentric muscle training in a nut shell.  Even though his arm muscles are still contracting, they’re lengthening out as his arm falls toward the table.

From a gym standpoint, if you’re doing a biceps curl, as you curl the weight up, your muscle contracts and shortens.  This is called a concentric muscle contraction.  As you let the weight fall back down, this is called an eccentric muscle contraction.  Eccentric muscle training would be allowing the weight to fall slowly, so you’re basically resisting the force of the weight, but at the same time, you’re allowing your biceps muscle to slowly lengthen back to its original length; this brings your hand back to your side.

So after seeing what eccentric muscle training is, have you ever done this?  Like I said earlier, some have and some haven’t.  For those of you that have, do you know why you incorporated eccentric muscle training into your program, or did you just do it because you saw others do it or you read about it in a magazine?

The reason I’m asking is because there’s a time and place for eccentric muscle training.

I’m a big proponent of a concept called time under tension (TUT).  TUT is the amount of time a muscle is contracting.  Eccentric muscle training is one way to increase the amount of time a muscle is contracting.  Other ways are by slowing down your repetitions, doing more repetitions, doing more sets, etc.  For some fitness goals, slow eccentric muscle contractions are bad, but for other goals, slowing down the eccentric phase of your lift is a good thing.

Let’s take a bench press exercise for example.  I guarantee that if you walk into your local gym right now, you’ll see some guy who thinks cranking out repetitions on a bench press with a ton of weight on the bar is the best way to bulk up.  He’ll probably be one of those guys that loads the bar down with as much weight as he can, does his repetitions as fast as he can, allows the bar to bounce off his chest to help him get the weight back up, and squirms all over the bench when pushing up the bar.  As you can probably tell, this isn’t too smart.

The repetition tempo for an exercise is something that’s very important.  For those that have a goal of bulking up, slowing down the speed of your repetitions is crucial to your ultimate success.  By lifting a little less weight and slowing down the eccentric phase of your lift, you’ll be able to achieve your goal of muscle development a lot faster.¹  So for example, when you are doing a seated cable row, by slowing down the exercise (not using jerky movements), and by slowing down the time it takes for the weight stack to fall back to its starting position, the more time under tension there is in your back and biceps muscles, so the faster the muscles will develop.

I use this concept all the time when I work with clients who want to put on muscle.  During the “bulking” phase of a program, I typically have my clients slow down their eccentric phase to about 3-4 seconds.  It’s something that they’re not used to, and takes some time to adjust to, but in the long run, they can always tell that the quality of their workout was better.

For some of you, you may be saying, “Well that’s great Dan, but I could care less about getting bigger.”  Well guess what, eccentric training is vital for endurance training too.  Endurance training is all about training your body to withstand long durations of exercise.  If you go for a long run, but then come into the gym and lift weights at a fast pace, does that really make sense?  No, it doesn’t.  Going back to the whole time under tension concept, if you keep your muscles under tension for a longer period of time, similar to running for a longer period of time, your muscles will start to develop that endurance to handle the lengthy TUT.¹

Slowing down the eccentric phase of your endurance lifting to about 4 seconds will give you the tempo you need to stimulate the muscle fibers in your body to adapt to a more endurance role.  Remember talking about muscle fibers? 

Even though bulking and endurance lifting have about the same tempo for the eccentric phase, what separates bulking from endurance lifting is the volume of lifting (sets and reps), rest break, intensity, speed of concentric phase, speed of isometric phase (the phase between the eccentric and concentric phases where you have dropped the bar all the way to your chest and are about to push it back up), etc.

Just like any program, there needs to be different phases, so you don’t always want to focus on eccentric training.  You need to change your program up by cycling in and out of eccentric training so that your body doesn’t get burnt out.
 
For the typical person, slower is better when it comes to lifting weight.  For the most part, no matter if your goal is weight loss, getting in better shape, putting on more muscle, etc., including program phases that incorporate slowing down the eccentric phase of your repetitions, as well as the repetitions in general, will help you achieve better results.  But when can slower be a bad thing?  We’ll talk about that next week.
 
References:

¹ The National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), 2005.

Dan Falkenberg is the co-founder of Your Live Trainers.  He can be reached at DanFalkenberg.com.

Tags: muscle gain, program design, weight loss