Back & Glutes – 8/28

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Catching a view of the clouds 🙂

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Top & Shorts: Nike

Tip of the Day: In Tuesday’s tip of the day, I talked about negative resistance training or focusing on the eccentric movement of the muscle. I thought it would be fun to go further into that discussion and talk about the entire movement of any exercise. There are 3 phases of lifting: concentric muscle action, isometric muscle action, and eccentric muscle action. To be more applicable to today’s workout, let’s use a pull up as the example. In the concentric muscle action, we pull ourselves up towards the bar, which physically shortens the bicep and back muscles. We discussed the eccentric movement of the muscle (the “negatives”), which would be then when we lower ourselves down from the bar, lengthening the muscles. The part that wasn’t mentioned was the isometric muscle action; during this phase the muscle is activated and a force is generated, but there is no movement. An example of this would be pushing against a brick wall.

First off, I think these terms are interesting to know just because I personally enjoy going deeper into the education behind weight training. Also, studies have measured the force involved in each of those three phases and the finding is very beneficial to training…the muscle can product the most force in the eccentric phase, followed by the isometric then concentric. This simply means we are the strongest when working on the negatives. 

The challenge today is to work on the negatives of a pull up. Pull ups are an exercise that a lot of us wish we were stronger at; by working on the negatives (the portion we are strongest at), we can become better at the exercise. So, jump up into the pull up either off the ground or bouncing off a bosu ball, then slowly lower down and continue repeating. Hopefully, you’ll find yourself stronger at raw pull ups.