News You Can Use: Training

Train Large Muscles First: When training full-body, or even in muscle-specific training, it is generally best to train larger muscles first using compound movements (more than one joint involved). If you train smaller muscles first using isolation exercises (single-joint movements), the muscles become fatigued quickly and are unable to handle the larger weights that are beneficial for building size and strength with compound movements. For example, do squats before doing leg press or leg extensions, do close-grip chins before doing concentration curls, and so on. Most trainees who have been in the gym for a while already know this, but some geeks in a laboratory decided to do a study to see if it is true. [J Strength Cond Res, 19:152-156, 2005]

Do Squats on the Bosu Ball to Build Core Strength: A group of Canadian scientists decided to see if instability exercises would increase core strength (abdominals, obliques, and lower back). Using EMG to measure muscle activation (electrical activity of the muscles is measured in this approach), they determined that core muscles are activiated more while doing squats on a Bosu ball than while doing free-bar squats or Smith machine squats. [Can J Appl Physiol, 30:33-45, 2005]

Interesting study, but the results don't have much use for those of us who train heavy. Doing free-bar squats with large weights works the core muscles more than anything you can do safely on a Bosu ball. However, for older or weaker trainees, the Bosu ball is an excellent tool for developing core strength -- as long as the trainee has no serious knee problems.

Doing Heavy Negatives Impairs Muscle Performance: Greek researchers found that doing heavy negatives (eccentric contractions) impairs muscle performance more than doing light eccentric exercise, but that damage to the muscle was the same. Many lifters do negatives to inflict more damage on the muscle with the thought that increased soreness (common with heavy negatives) indicates a better workout. While it is true that increases in strength result largely from the eccentric portion of the exercise -- when done under control -- this study seems to indicate that we can get the same benefit without going as heavy. [J Strength Cond Res, 19:184-188, 2005]

Instead of doing negatives at the end of your bench workout, try using your eight-rep max and doing a two-second negative on each repetition (for four sets of six reps). Make tempo a part of all your lifts, aiming for an explosive concentric motion (under control) and a two-second eccentric motion. Try different lengths of time for the eccentric -- but be aware that the number of reps you can get with a weight will decrease as the length of the eccentric contraction increases.