If you want to do intense exercise, such as running or weightlifting, then you want to read this carefully because it shows a key to protecting your muscles against damage, recovering quicker, and avoiding exercise that may actually be bad for you.
Let’s start with some basics.
CONCENTRIC exercise is the “normal” exercise, lifting weights or running.
ECCENTRIC exercise is the “reverse” — putting DOWN the weights slowly is an eccentric exercise. Running downhill is an eccentric exercise.
When you exercise ECCENTRICALLY, you are elongating the muscle in a controlled way.
While ALL exercise has SOME eccentric component to it (like putting down the weights)… in general,
Intense Exercise can be either concentric or eccentric.
Concentric is the more usual type of exercise, for example when you lift weights up.
But when you’re putting the weights down, that’s eccentric exercise.
You’re actually fighting the effects of the muscle stretching, rather than contracting.
A good example of eccentric exercise is running downhill.
And there’s long been the knowledge that eccentric exercise can be protective, but it can also be very damaging.
So we set out to see
how much eccentric exercise protection muscles without being too much?
For example, one of the most common injuries to athletes is Achilles tendon injury.
And there have been several studies showing that doing eccentric Achilles tendon exercises can heal the Achilles tendon once it’s damaged, and they can prevent damage.
There seem to be benefits of eccentric exercise, but there’s also a huge price you pay when you do too much eccentric exercise.
The study tried to see if vitamin C would help prevent some of the damage from eccentric exercise:
Notice that vitamin C is only marginally effective at preventing eccentric muscle soreness or any post-exercise soreness.
But the results of eccentric exercise on the athlete are very clear.
So the next question is, how can you get the protections of eccentric exercise without overdoing it?
In this scenario, they gave the athlete some eccentric exercises to do and then waited two weeks.
Then the athlete performed some strong concentric exercises using the same muscle groups, and they found that the previous eccentric exercises conferred a significant benefit in terms of protecting the muscles against damage.
The effects were noticeable even two weeks later.
The research determined that TOO MUCH eccentric exercise is NOT helpful:
NO `INCREASED’ LEVEL OF PROTECTION IS OFFERED TO MUSCLE WHICH HAS PERFORMED MORE REPETITIONS
In other words, you only need to do so many repetitions of an eccentric exercise to get the benefits, and after that, no additional protection is provided.
The study shows that even 10 reps can produce huge benefit.
And the second conclusion of the study is quite interesting.
Normally, it is believed that micro tears in the muscle, muscle damage, is required to fully obtain the benefits of strength training.
However, that may be true for concentric exercise, but it is not true for eccentric exercise.
The study used the presence of an enzyme called creatine kinase (CK) to gauge muscle damage.
Because the eccentric exercises were performed with few reps, not to failure or anything close to failure, it meant that the eccentric exercise protected muscles against further damage from down-the-line concentric exercise.
AN INITIAL BOUT [OF ECCENTRIC TRAINING] THAT APPEARED TO CAUSE LITTLE OR NO DAMAGE HAS BEEN DEMONSTRATED
So what should you do now?
I do like to do strength training, and when I do, I do some eccentric training, especially paying attention to carefully lowering the weights.
If you slowly lower weights, you’re doing eccentric exercise.
But you don’t need to do too many “slowly lowering the weights” reps.
If you let the weight drop quickly, then you’re really not doing an eccentric exercise.
This may be a good idea once you’ve done a small number of eccentric reps especially when doing low rep high weight training.
If I’m running, I also may include some downhill running, but I’m not going to go out of my way to run downhill.
A little downhill running goes a long way to protecting the glutes and the quadriceps and probably the lower back.
Too much is too much of a good thing when it comes to eccentric exercise.
Citations
Exercise-induced skeletal muscle damage and adaptation following repeated bouts of eccentric muscle contractions
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/026404197367498
High Dose Vitamin C Effect on Muscle Soreness
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Allan_Goldfarb/publication/6841773_Effect_of_High_Dose_Vitamin_C_Supplementation_on_Muscle_Soreness_Damage_Function_and_Oxidative_Stress_to_Eccentric_Exercise/links/5422cebd0cf290c9e3ace688.pdf
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