How strong are you? How much do you bench press? How much can you squat?

These are the typical questions faced by people who exercise with weights. However this can lead to a significant misunderstanding regarding what are beneficial goals. For laypeople weight training falls into two classifications:

  1. Lifting heavy weight low reps which results in bulk and strength
  2. Lifting lighter reps more reps and attaining tone

Both of these extremes are actually quite misleading. For instance, building bulk does not necessarily build all that much strength. Secondly, the term “tone” is undefined. To most people it means a smaller more defined muscle. However, people can have small untoned muscles while large bodybuilders can have large muscles that are quite tone. Also, this subject of tone is often exclusive of the discussion of bodyfat. Those with high body fat can be very powerful but will not show tone, while those with a low bodyfat may have low muscle mass but may be quite tone. Some people even think you can make a “longer leaner muscle” and may be surprised to learn that no matter what you do, you muscles will stay the same length. They have to as they connect to the joints. A lengthened muscle would end up with a longer person, which outside of some medieval torture racks has never happened.

Form and Speed

Something very much ignored when attempting to lift a lot of weight is the form and the speed. For instance, by using poor form and by radically accelerating the weight, a person can maximize the weight they can lift. Not coincidentally, this is the way many people (particularly those who really want to get stronger) work out. In fact, without controlling for the form and the speed as well as the depth of the excersise (i.e. how far they complete the repetition) its very difficult to say anything about a person’s strength level. Furthermore, strength in the gym does not translate directly to strength in the real world, although there are a number of things a person can do to make their gym workout translate much better than most.

Importance of Negatives

Rather that focusing on lifting the maximum weights on the upstroke, scientific studies indicated that the majority of benefit of weights comes on the down stroke, or the “negative.” Furthermore, the down stroke needs to be performed very slowly, and should take close to 3 seconds in fact. Weights that can be moved this slowly on  the down stroke are much lower than those that can be performed when the down stoke is performed swiftly. Most people exercise focusing on the positive or the upstroke. With negative training, we can get multiple benefits:

  1. Better control over weight which translates better to real world strength
  2. Protecting joints and connective tissues
  3. Better muscular stimulation

The one downside, particularly for those with their ego strongly tied to their training is that the weight used must be decreased.

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