The Power of Negativity

The top five reasons you should be doing negatives — and three ways to implement them today.

- Lara McGlashan

In bodybuilding, the athletes are always looking for the best way to get better, faster, stronger, leaner. They try all manner of training techniques, practice crazy splits or do insane exercises. Truthfully, the technique you’re seeking is one you probably already know, one that can get you the results and the physique you want with a shallow learning curve: negatives.

Negative, or eccentric, training is a technique in which you simply extend your time under tension in the eccentric portion of a repetition — the lowering or extending phase of a muscle contraction, as opposed to the concentric (positive) lifting and contracting phase. Before you pass over negatives as yesterday’s news, have a gender at these five, research backed reasons to add negatives to your training:

1. You’ll get stronger.