So, the upshot of this is that, if muscular growth is your goal, make sure to emphasize the negative portion of the movement. In the second part of this essay, I will talk a little about incorporating negatives into a workout and also give some real world examples of negative versus positive only athletes. Last time I talked about some of why negatives seem to be very imprtant for muscular growth. Although the mnechanisms of muscle growth have not been totally elucidated, recent research, as we saw last time, seems to point the finger at the negative, or eccentric, portion of the movement as the primary catalyst for muscle growth due to the amount of muscular damage caused by negatives. Well, that's all well and good in the lab, but, as we know, what the researchers think and what happens in the real world are frequently not the same.
Olympic lifters perform almost exclusively positive only movements.
This sport requires extremely explosive strength requiring the athlete to move a very heavy weight quickly from the floor to either the chest or above the head. The weight is then dropped with no negative being performed. This occurs both in training as well as in competition. Well, if you compare similar weight bodybuilders to Olympic lifters, you will notice that the bodybuilders have a much larger amount of muscular mass then the Olympic lifters . Presumably, this is due to the lack of negatives in the Olympic lifters training.