The various skeletal muscles of your body have the ability to contract or shorten, and to hold and support weight. But these muscles also have the capacity to lengthen, stretch, and—although it’s not the correct term—uncontract.
Physiologists have named the contraction process concentric muscle action. The lengthening maneuver is called eccentric muscle action. In these contexts, concentric means moving toward the center of the body and eccentric means moving away from the center.
I’ve mentioned this earlier, but as a quick review: An exercise to use as an example would be the standing biceps curl with a barbell. Stand holding a moderately heavy barbell and smoothly curl the bar up to your shoulders. Then slowly lower it down to your thighs. The up movement involves concentric action of the biceps muscles. The down, or lowering, movement requires eccentric muscle action of the same muscles of the biceps.
Bodybuilders, weight lifters, and strength coaches simplify concentric and eccentric muscle actions by using the words positive (concentric) and negative (eccentric). In strength-training circles, lifting a weight is positive and lowering it is negative. The same is true of a weight machine: As the weight stack moves up, positive work is performed. As it moves down, negative work is accomplished.
For ease of understanding, especially for the recommended exercises involved in this book, I’ll use the words positive and negative instead of concentric and eccentric.
For more than sixty-five years, researchers have compared the various aspects of positive and negative work. In 1953, Erling Asmussen, PhD, an exercise physiologist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, was the first to point out in a scientific journal the differences between positive and negative work, though the measuring tools and techniques he applied were crude. In the 1980s, thanks to my colleague Arthur Jones of Nautilus Sports/Medical Industries, the tools and techniques became more valid and the results repeatable.
Jones discovered that both women and men were approximately 40 percent stronger in the negative stroke of an exercise machine compared to the positive stroke. Jones’s research opened the door for athletes and fitness-minded people to apply negative work in their weekly strength-training programs. But because of the precision of techniques involved, and the probability of misunderstanding, both scientific and lay publications over the last twenty-five years were riddled with little consistency and scattered results.
Marc Roig, PhD, in 2008, was head of the Muscle Biophysics Laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Roig and his colleagues saw the disparities in the published research and decided to sort things out by using newer types of statistical tests called meta-analyses. Meta-analysis comprises statistical methods for contrasting and combining findings from individual studies in the quest to identify patterns among their results.
Roig’s group carefully examined all the studies published over the last fifty years that compared negative-style resistance training with normal positive training. At first, they identified 1,954 titles from their literature search. Of this number, 276 were suitable for abstract review. More than sixty publications made the next cut. Deeper examinations, such as poor directions in testing and potential crossover effect, narrowed the studies down to exactly twenty.
These twenty studies involved a total of 678 subjects. The usual training frequency was three times per week and the duration of the experiments ranged from four to twenty-five weeks, with the most popular duration being six weeks. Entering all the data from those studies, the computerized meta-analyses, as reported in 2009 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, revealed the following:
Negative training was significantly more effective in increasing muscular size and strength than positive-style training.
Roig’s report was published online on November 3, 2008, and I remember reading it with much interest. Not only had I been interested in negative training for more than twenty years, but in early October 2008, I had been contacted by Mats Thulin of Stockholm, Sweden, who told me he had successfully designed a machine that accentuated the negative.
I flew to Stockholm on November 13, 2008, to meet with Thulin and try his new negative-accentuated equipment. Thulin called his machines X-Force, and they operated differently from any other type of exercise equipment I’d ever seen.
The approach Thulin applied involves a tilting weight stack powered by an electric servomotor. As the user begins the positive stroke, the weight stack is at a 45-degree angle. This angle reduces the selected resistance significantly. At the top of the positive stroke, the tilted weight stack returns to vertical and the resistance is instantly 40 percent heavier. The user then lowers 100 percent of the selected resistance.
After training with X-Force for three days and discussing the parameters and physiology with Thulin and his team, I was convinced of its overall potential. The ingenuity of the X-Force equipment is a patented, tilting weight stack that unloads the positive phase and then overloads the negative. X-Force’s fourteen strength-training machines supply negative-accentuated exercise—40 percent extra negative resistance compared to the positive—without the use of assistants.
When I returned to the United States, I knew I had to get a line of X-Force machines installed in Florida so I could continue my progression in better ways to lose fat and build muscle. One of the first people I talked with about X-Force was Joe Cirulli of Gainesville Health & Fitness. Cirulli and I had pursued various fat-loss and muscle-building projects together over the years, and X-Force was no exception.
It took a lot of discussion and planning, but in January 2012, Cirulli’s club was outfitted with fourteen X-Force machines. Gainesville and Orlando are an easy drive from each other, so I knew I could quickly get a research project together. Thus, on February 6, 2012, I started my first group training on X-Force equipment. By December 2012, I had trained eight groups on X-Force, with a total of 145 participants from Gainesville Health & Fitness. The research experiences, data, and photographs were combined into a book, The Body Fat Breakthrough: Tap the Muscle-Building Power of Negative Training and Lose Up to 30 Pounds in 30 Days.
Basically, the X-Force program in Gainesville that worked so well involved performing one set of 6 to 8 repetitions on each of six machines, with each repetition done to a count of a 3-second positive, immediately followed by a 5-second negative. Any time a trainee did 8 or more repetitions correctly, the resistance was increased by 5 percent at the next workout. The frequency of the workouts was twice a week.
Halfway through the book project, I realized I needed an alternative method of exercising for people who don’t have access to X-Force. In The Body Fat Breakthrough, that alternative method is called 30–30–30.
Through trial-and-error testing, 30–30–30 proved to be a results-producing alternative to X-Force. In Gainesville, I trained a dozen or so people in this manner, with excellent results.
To perform 30–30–30 properly, take 80 percent of the resistance you’d normally handle for 10 repetitions with a barbell or weight machine. Have an assistant help you get the resistance to the top position. Then do a slow 30-second negative, followed by a 30-second positive, followed by a final 30-second negative. That’s 1.5 repetitions, or 60 seconds of negative work and 30 seconds of positive work. That’s one set, and that’s all you need to do for each of six exercises. The exercises I selected were the leg press, leg curl, leg extension, chest press, lat pulldown to chest, overhead press, curl, and abdominal crunch.
While 30–30–30 proved to be a very good way to strengthen and build muscle, it was also difficult for people to get the hang of. Many trainees simply said, “30–30–30 is too hard. I don’t enjoy exercising in this fashion.”
So I decided to experiment with some variations of this slow method to see if I could discover a style that was slightly less intense but equally productive. Remember, I still wanted to accentuate the negative, because I knew the negative phase offered the most benefits.
After a couple of months of experimentation, I came up with what I call 15–15–15, plus 8 to 12 repetitions. Instead of taking 30 seconds to perform a slow negative, each phase was shortened to 15 seconds. Compared to 30–30–30, this new technique was somewhat easier, which proved to be a nice alternative, especially for women.
In the 15–15–15 method, you take 80 percent of what you’d normally handle on a resistance exercise. Get the barbell or resistance mechanism to the top position quickly, then do a 15-second negative, followed by a 15-second positive, then a 15-second negative. But don’t stop there—continue doing a series of faster, complete repetitions to a count of approximately 1 second on the positive and 2 seconds on the negative. Your goal is 8 to 12 of these faster repetitions. And again, only one set each of these six to eight exercises is necessary, which are practiced twice a week.
15–15–15 worked well on short-range abdominal floor exercises, body-weight movements such as the squat and push-up, and dumbbell exercises such as the curl and overhead press. But I still was not satisfied. I needed a technique that involved a bit more “punch.” That’s when I came up with a hybrid of 30–30–30 and 15–15–15, plus 8 to 12. I called this new method 30–10–30.
In chapter 3, I gave you a preview of a barbell curl in the 30–10–30 style. Basically, what you have is a slow 30-second negative repetition, which certainly tires the involved muscles. Immediately, with the same resistance, you perform 10 normal repetitions, taking approximately 1 second on the positive and 2 seconds on the negative. Now your biceps are fatigued significantly, but that’s not all. With the barbell still in the top position of the curl, you make a final attempt at a 30-second negative. What you have is a 30-second negative repetition, 10 faster positive-negative repetitions, and a final 30-second negative repetition—thus the name: 30–10–30.
But, and this is important, the name 30–10–30 involves more than those meaningful numbers. In practice, the 30-second negatives can vary from 15 to 30 seconds. Frequently, a trainee can manage the first negative repetition in 30 seconds but can barely get 15 seconds on the finishing negative. Thus, on his workout sheet, his notation would read “30–10–15.” Or sometimes, both the first and second negative might be a little fast, so the notation might read “25–10–25.”
Then, in actual high-intensity training, the faster middle repetitions are not always 10. Sometimes, you can only do 7, 8, or 9, so your record might read “30–8–30.” Or on a great training day, you might do an easy 10 repetitions and need to do two more to get the right feel, for “30–12–30.”
The idea is always to work to momentary muscular fatigue, especially on the in-between positive-negative repetitions and the finishing negative.
When you can complete any exercise in 30–12–30, that is the signal to increase the resistance by 3 to 5 percent for your next workout.
The next chapter will provide you with all the details and illustrations on how to plan and perform 30–10–30 routines with the recommended exercises.