Lower Reps Slow to Grow?

Should you do your reps with 3-second negatives to get the most growth from a set?

In the STX protocol, explained in the Old Man Young Muscle ebooks, your first set is very controlled: lift in 1 second, lower in 3.

The reason for lowering slowly is that you’re cold. That first very controlled set acts as a higher-rep warmup AND to exhaust the slow-twitch fibers so you transition to fast-twitch activation toward the end of the set…

Then, after a brief rest, you use an accelerated tempo on the second phase to tap into the fast-twitch fibers from your very first rep, a.k.a. Speed: 1.5-second reps…

You can see that the STX sequence is a combination of slow and fast tempos. And the logic is sound for a fiber-array cascade. That gets at your high-threshold motor units quickly. It’s efficient hypertrophy stimulation…

But what if you’re not using STX? If you watch most champion bodybuilders train, their reps are almost all Speed. From Arnold to Jay Cutler, every set is a series of wham-bam reps…

They may be onto something. Perhaps the majority of your sets should be Speed, with only your first at a slow pace, as in STX…

As Paul Carter (hypertrophy researcher Chris Beardsley’s in-the-gym colleague @liftrunbang1) explains…

Almost all of your muscle hypertrophy is from radial growth—an increase in fiber and physiological cross-sectional areas…. That occurs because of CONCENTRIC contractions. The idea that you’re going to grow a lot of muscle from slow eccentrics [or negative strokes] is nonsense.

That’s because you can lower about 30 percent more than you can lift, so you’re involving mostly slow-twitch fibers on the lowering portion…

But doesn’t some research show excellent hypertrophy stimulation with negative-only training? Yes, but that’s with eccentric OVERLOAD, where the subject uses a weight that’s more than he or she can lift concentrically….

That’s not a feasible way to train, unless you can blackmail a couple of goons to lift the mega-heavy weights for you. Back to Carter…

You’re not going to grow “a bunch of muscle” by doing slow eccentrics. And in some data, very slow eccentrics were counterproductive to fast-twitch hypertrophy.”

So going too slow can derail growth. Who the heck wants that? (For more on Speed Sets and how to use them, see the ebooks below.)

Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.