Negative Reps Are a Positive Addition to Your Workout!

Sometimes you gotta shock your muscles in order to keep growing! A little kick-in-the-pants is needed to get your muscle mass and strength to next level. Next time you're feeling physically stymied, try adding negative repetitions to your itinerary. Whether you're performing curls or bench press, shoulders or squats, negative reps are a positive addition to your workout which will get your blood flowing and your pump growing!

So what exactly are negative repetitions? Negative reps focus on the eccentric or "lowering phase" of a repetition. If you are doing biceps curls for example, you'd hold the weight at the top/peak position and then slowly lower it back to the starting position. If you're doing the bench press, your arms would be extended while slowly lowering the weight back to the starting position.

The trick is to "fight gravitiy".

As difficult and/or challenging it is to lift/raise the bar, performing negative reps puts even more stress on your muscles and forces them to maintain the weight for a longer period of time. How long that duration is - is negligible - because fighting gravity while lowering the bar can become a workout in itself. I have on occassion devoted entire workouts to negative reps. But that should be an exception for you and not the rule.

Negative reps overload muscles with more resistance than normal especially if you're using heavier than normal weight. Example: I could never seem to make the leap from 200 to 225 pounds on my bench press. All the inclined push-ups in the word wouldn't help. What did get me over the hump were negative sets with 225 lbs. This happened over time and even with 205 pounds I needed help pushing the weight up, but the negative-eccentric phase was all me. This supplemented my regular bench workout. Over time the poundage went up as my body adapted to the extra weight and I finally was able to get over that mountain. In short, negative reps can be a great way to break through a plateau while at the same time gaining muscle mass.

I have found that in order to get the most benefit out of negative reps you gotta go slowly and you need to use heavier-than-normal weight. If the time it takes you to lower the weight is less than 5-6 seconds I wouldn't call it a negative rep. If you feel like the weight is going to fall on your head then take some weight off the bar. I also do at least 3 sets x 8 reps of negatives. Furthermore, I perform my negative reps while in my "muscle-failure" stage which for me means not so much at the end of my workout per se but rather at the end of a particular exercise.

I don't perform negative reps all the time nor do I do negs for every exercise. Which is not to say you can't or shouldn't. Like anything you do, too much of it makes you complacent. But I can tell you, negative reps are a positive addition to your workout if done methodically and with a goal in mind.