If you’re someone who lifts weights, chances are you’ve heard of the term eccentric.
Although you might not be entirely familiar with the term, it’s still a very important aspect of your training.
It’s important to learn what the eccentric portion of an exercise is and how to get familiar with eccentric training.
In this post, I’m going to share with you everything there is to know about eccentric training.
What are the different portions of every exercise
To begin, I first need to explain what the different portions of each exercise are.
When you’re performing an exercise, there are three different portions of the exercise that you’ll go through.
Knowing these will help you recognize what the eccentric phase of an exercise is.
These are:
1. The concentric portion: This is when your muscles are contracting and are in the shortened position. Essentially when you’re pushing the weight.
2. The eccentric portion: This is when your muscles are squeezing and stretching. The eccentric portion is when your muscles are in the lengthened position.
3. The isometric portion: This is that small pause at the bottom of your rep after the concentric portion.
Understanding each of these three portions of each exercise is essential if you want to maximize your gym progress.
Because understanding each part of the movements you’re doing can allow you to better control the motion.
How to recognize the eccentric portion of an exercise
The eccentric portion of an exercise is when your muscles are in the lengthened position.
You’ll be able to recognize you’re in the eccentric when you can feel the most stretch on your muscles.
Since this is when you’re muscles are stretching and are in the lengthened position, it makes sense that to know you’re in the eccentric you focus on feeling the stretch in your muscles.
Additionally, visualizing at what point in your movement your muscles would be the longest can also help you identify the eccentric portion. Since this is when your muscles are in the lengthened position.
For example, if you were performing bicep curls, you would feel the most stretch on your biceps as you’re lowering your hands. You can also visualize that when you lower your hands, this is when your biceps are the longest.
This would be the eccentric portion of the exercise.
What is eccentric training
Eccentric training is when you focus primarily on the eccentric movement of an exercise.
Meaning that when you perform an exercise, most of your concentration goes into the eccentric. Which, for the exercise, could look like focusing primarily on squeezing your muscles as they are lengthening.
While performing this entire section of the motion much slower than the concentric or the isometric portions.
Eccentric exercises are sometimes called negative reps. This is because instead of focusing on pushing the weight up, you’re focusing on the opposite part of the exercise. The part where you slowly lower the weight as your muscle lengthens.
With a combination of squeezing the muscle and increasing time under tension, you can get the best stretch on the muscle while putting it under the most tension.
What are some of the benefits of eccentric training
Eccentric training brings a lot of benefits to your workouts. While also greatly increasing your potential for muscle growth.
Some of the benefits are:
It can help you train to failure
Training to failure means that you’re training until your muscles fail, or you can’t do anymore reps.
However, usually when we can’t push anymore reps, we think we reached failure. What we fail to realize is that this isn’t necessarily true failure yet.
Because the eccentric portion of the exercise requires less energy to perform, once we’ve reached failure on the concentric reps, we can start implementing eccentric reps. This will help you get an even better burn and be even closer to failure.
To do this, you can push yourself to do eccentric reps after you reach failure. This would mean that once you get the weight up and you think it’s the last rep you can push, you slowly lower the weight, as slow as you can, to keep tension on your muscle after reaching failure.
Slowly lowering the weight when you think you have already reached failure will allow you to put even more tension on the muscle you’re training.
Even though you couldn’t push another rep, you could stimulate more growth by implementing an eccentric rep.
You can have more efficient workouts
As I said before, eccentric movements require much less force to complete than concentric movements. However, they still stimulate just as much muscle growth, if not more.
As a result, eccentric movements allows you to get more out of your workouts, while exerting less energy.
You have the potential to make as many, or more, tears in your muscles by slowing down the eccentric portion as you would during the concentric portion. Without using as much of your energy to perform a single rep.
Because of this, you’re able to make more progress for less energy. Making your time spent in the gym more efficient in terms of energy exertion and muscle stimulation.
Additionally, you can also have a much better mind to muscle connection during each exercise. This again will help you stimulate much more muscle growth during a set.
You can have more intense workouts
Because eccentric training allows you to train closer to failure than before, you can get more out of your workouts.
You can have more efficient workouts by training more intensely during your working sets.
Nearing failure is essential to have an effective workout. Because of that, each exercise it’s important to focus on properly squeezing and contracting your muscles.
Squeezing and slowing down the eccentric portion of your exercises puts a lot more stress on your muscles than if you were flying through the movement.
As a result, eccentric training has the power to make your workouts much more intense.
Examples of eccentric movements
It can be hard to visualize what all of this eccentric, concentric, and isometric stuff means. Especially if this is your first time hearing about it.
To make things easier, I want to explain what that would look like during an exercise.
I want to use leg extensions to demonstrate how an eccentric exercise might look.
To do leg extensions and focus on the eccentric portion of the exercise here’s what you need to do:
1. Get into the seated position and quickly straighten your legs. This is the concentric portion of the movement.
2. Once you reach the top, begin slowly lowering your legs while sitting fully back in the seat. Squeeze your quads and feel the full stretch throughout your quads. This is the eccentric portion of the movement.
3. Once you reach the bottom, quickly raise up and straighten your legs again in the concentric portion of the movement.
Takeaways
Understanding all three portions of an exercise is essential to making progress in the gym.
If you’re looking to increase the intensity of your workouts and stimulate the most muscle growth, then understanding the term eccentric is especially crucial.
Now that you know more about the eccentric portion of an exercise, you can better implement eccentric training strategies into your workouts to get the most out of your time spent in the gym.
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