It’s hard to increase your strength. It takes a lot of hard work, variety, and pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion to make serious gains. One additional technique to use that really stimulates your muscle is negatives. As most of you may know, the negative part of a lift is the opposite of the “main” motion. For instance, when doing bench press, bringing the weight back down to your chest is the negative motion while pushing the weight up is the positive motion.
Explosive Up
I think it’s important to have a powerful positive motion when working out. This will help make you an explosive athlete, increase the strength of your fast twitch muscle fibers for quick burst of power. This will benefit you in the gym, with sports, and in your daily life.
Slow Down
This is where the negative motion comes in. People typically don’t think anything of it; it’s simply the motion before you complete your next repetition. Try to switch your mentality into thinking that this is an equally important part of your repetition. Let’s use bench press again as an example. As you bring the weight back down to your chest, count to 3 instead of a typical quick action. This slow motion will help improve your strength and make your exercises more controlled, giving you better form.
Active Muscle Fibers
I still remember a great analogy our high school lifting coach used to mention. He would take a mop and say that the individual ropes were like your muscle fibers. When you bring the weight back down quickly, you get one quick twitch. However, when you have a slower negative portion of each lift, your muscle fibers are constantly twitching during the whole repetition, boosting results.
Heavy Weight Negatives
If you’re really looking to increase your strength with negatives, grab a partner and get ready for a hard day in the gym. The negatives I have been talking about before typically require you to use slightly less weight or less repetition since the slower negative will make you more fatigued. When doing heavy weight negatives, you actually use more weight and focus entirely on the negative portion of the lift. Because you can slowly lower more weight than you can lift, this technique allows you to handle more weight than normal, making you much stronger, much faster.
The Process
Since we’ve been using bench press as an example the entire time, we’ll stay consistent. Use a weight that you can lower 4-8 times in a controlled manner. This will typically be at least 10-20% more than you can bench press the same number of times. Your partner will help you get the weight up and then you lower it as slowly and as controlled as possible. When you get to the bottom of your rep, you push up, but your partner purposefully offers significant help before you slowly lower the weight again and repeat.
Handling Heavier Weight
As I said before, this allows you to handle more weight than normal, greatly strengthening your tendons, ligaments and muscle. In the near future as you push to improve your positive lifts, you’ll be amazed at how your negative training has helped drastically since your body has been exposed to the increased weight before.
About the Author
Cooper is passionate about business, fitness & blogging. When he's not working on his two websites, he writes about about Velashape Cellulite Treatment, cooking and a myriad of other topics. He's also active with Sono Bello on Twitter and Sono Bello on Facebook.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 04 May 2011 23:58
