Negative Thoughts (Part 1)

The following article was written by General Tso. This gentleman has spent many years refining his craft, many years studying proper exercise when he’s not making his delicious chicken bites. The general is not part of the Renaissance Exercise team, but we do find his insights noteworthy and we would like to share his observations about the current state of High Intensity Exercise.    

SLOWLY…Letting go of the past

Most people still believe that we are approximately 40% stronger on the negative portion of an exercise?  The “solution” to this is has been to “emphasize the negative” by spending twice the amount of time lowering the weight. 

2/4 protocol right?

So the negative offers a respite because the muscle(s) have an advantage during the lowering portion of the exercise.  We then engage them in this respite longer, twice as long as the positive lifting part of the exercise. We make the easier part of the exercise longer (twice as long) and this is designed to increase the efficiency of the exercise? 

Now add to this situation the friction problems inherent in the early machines that unload the muscles even further while lowering the weight and you’ve got a real mess on your hands.  This entire process was a step in the wrong direction.  Even removing friction with bearing upgrades does not release a person training in this modality from “emphasizing the easy”. 

This respite situation only seems to come up when discussing 10/10 protocols because we “spend too much time on the negative” while everyone else spends twice as much time on it, and that’s just fine and dandy.  Don’t believe that you’re using heavier loads for your 2/4, and that you’re unloaded less because of this.  We use damn heavy loads with cams that load up coming back, not backward cams that generally reduce resistance as you lower the weight. 

The problem is congestion, more on that later.

Let’s explore this a little further.  We’ve been led to believe that, through the performance of an exercise your positive strength is depleted and in some cases your negative strength actually increases.  It’s all over the MedX literature. 

Even though it is clearly stated in the manual and literature, what the non-careful reader may not observe is that while MedX states that only static testing is valid, the negative lines on many of their graphs are:

1. Dynamic (how could you take a static negative?)

2. Not produced on a MedX testing machine that they were selling. 

Instead they were (probably) produced on a true isokinetic machine built in the early to mid-80’s.  How exactly would a negative strength reading ever occur on a MedX testing machine, right?

On pages 112-113 of Arthur Jones “The Lumbar Spine” (the older large blue book), it is stated during a test of the quadriceps muscles:

                “Prior to the exercise it was established by the test of the fresh strength that this subject was 40 percent stronger during the negative test than he was during the positive test, so his negative to positive ratio was 1.4 to 1.  With fresh muscles”.

                “But that ratio changed as the fatigue increased the friction within his muscles; during the fifteenth repetition his ratio was 2.2 to 1, meaning that his negative strength was then more than twice his positive strength.  During the last repetition, number thirty-six, his ratio was then 9.6 to 1; his negative strength was nearly ten times as high as his positive strength”.

I have no doubt that this is what the test indicated.  However this test is fraught with problems.

The subject performed 14 sub maximal repetitions.

Was the subject resting (unloading or taking tension off the muscles) at any point during the set?

I can only guess what the protocol speeds were (fast). 

Thirty-six repetitions is a tremendous amount of mechanical work to perform and virtually warrants that the resistance was too light, or restated not meaningful enough to induce an efficient inroad.  If the subject was in control of his effort (the resistance he was subjecting himself to) he had incredible endurance?

I’m not sure, I wasn’t there.

The fatigue was ultimately dramatic to the positive portion of the exercise; I wonder what portion of that was neurological do to the shear amount/volume of the exercise.  In many ways this experiment probably shows us more for the lab, then leading us to refining protocols.

So the common wisdom is that after we have depleted all of our positive strength, we have loads and loads of negative strength remaining.

 If you train on lousy cams and faster protocols that load/unload the musculature, I believe you end up in a situation where you have loads of congestion that “you get to keep” that works against you during the positive portion of the exercise (probably inhibiting true inroad) and works for you on the negative/lowering part of the exercise, inhibiting and masking inroad. 

Ever hear how people were trained on this machine?

Perform the exercise until positive movement ends.  Next, machine lifts leg(s) via motor to the extended position and subject performs a negative (read- muscles resting during this process)- repeat. 

Poor guy’s in the damn machine for something like 30 plus reps. 

Don’t get me wrong, that’s a hell of an effort and one that I would imagine few could replicate. But if you’re not getting weaker with every rep, and quick, something is wrong.

So, the inroad takes a step back and the congestion remains, and probably increases.

 My contention is that lots of congestion gets in the way of inroading.  It also gets in the way of what you think you’re observing, which in turn influences how you believe you should train. 

It all comes back to how the muscles receive-and what they do-with the resistance at hand.

Tagged as: Arthur Jones, High Intensity Training, inroad, isokinetics, MedX, negative training