Of the many fitness, strength and hypertrophy voices I’ve listened to, read and followed over the years, Dr. Eric Helms stands head and shoulders above the rest. Since I abhor unsupported opinions, I will provide robust evidence to support mine.
First, he has the educational credentials to establish himself as an expert in his field. He has taught undergraduate and graduate level nutrition and exercise science, has a BS in fitness and wellness, an MS in exercise science, a second masters in sports nutrition, a Ph.D. in strength and conditioning, and is a research fellow for AUT at the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand.1
Second, he not only talks the good talk, but has walked the good walk, and continues to do so. He is a Pro Natural Bodybuilder, a competitive Powerlifter, a competitive Weightlifter and a competitive Strongman. I can think of no other who can claim this feat. The “natural” part is of particular importance to me as drug use substantially changes every facet of the fitness game, from the levels of muscularity one can achieve, the levels of strength one can produce and how one structures their training, diet and recovery.
Third, and this is a bit more subjective, he is among the best, if not the best communicator of science information in the business. In both his writing and presentation skills, he communicates clearly, provides thorough analysis of his positions and can calmly, rationally and reasonably debate anyone on any topic in his field of expertise. This may be a subjective opinion, but it is a hugely important one as science communication is an area where we lack sufficient talent. Many scientists communicate in a way designed for other scientists, leaving the lay person either confused, or unconvinced. The ability to break down complex and nuanced information in a way people can understand and apply is a real skill, and the good Dr. has plenty of that skill.
With all that said, I recently listened to a hypertrophy oriented episode of the Iron Culture podcast and at some point decided I’d revisit the Strength and Training Pyramid book to see if I could find some grains of sand to throw into my jar of big rocks, little rocks and pebbles. Sure enough, I found some and as usual, it is something I knew instinctively through experience, but some poor understanding in application set me down the wrong path.
As Faithful Readers know, since 2007 I have trained almost exclusively for Powerlifting, which is rather comical as I am ill suited for the sport with a small frame, long limbs and small joints other than my hips and knees. Nonetheless, I loved the idea of having objective measures of improvement, i.e. I can lift more weight than I did before, and I wanted at least the possibility of competing to give training a greater sense of urgency. Of course I did end up competing and hope to again.
In my training of the power lifts, I quickly learned that the eccentric portion of the lift; lowering into the bottom of the Squat and Bench Press, was quite fatiguing under heavy loads and made the reversal more challenging. In the Squat in particular, an excessively slow descent also robs you of some of the power of the stretch reflex which gives you some rebound out of the bottom as you try to maximally accelerate out of the hole. In the Deadlift, one tries to avoid any eccentric portion at all really, allowing gravity to return the bar to the ground and just keeping your hands on the bar and staying in position as the rules of competition require lowering the bar to the ground under control. So you don’t drop it exactly, but you’re not exerting any effort in slowing the bar down. I will note that on the Bench Press, allowing a quick descent to the chest is fine, but you won’t get a press command until the bar is motionless on the chest, so I found it to be more effective to at least somewhat resist gravity on the way down so that I stayed in position and could quickly get the bar motionless on my chest.
When it comes to hypertrophy however, there is a lot of literature suggesting that the eccentric portion of an exercise can induce hypertrophy because we can lower more weight than we can lift. Because the eccentric portion is just resisting gravity, it’s not exactly a muscular action like a maximum contraction is. The muscles are lengthening rather than contracting, so the same mechanisms are not taking place. If it were possible to load a heavy weight on the bar and just do the eccentric portion, one could load significantly more weight than if one also had to do the concentric portion. This is the kind of experiment done in the research, which gives us the result that heavy loads while lengthening the muscle can induce hypertrophy. But in practice, we can’t really do that very effectively. You’d need some specialized equipment that would do the concentric portion of the lift for you, so that you could then do the eccentric portion. There are work arounds, for example one could do heavy weight dips, hanging plates on the dipping belt until the weight was heavy enough that you couldn’t do the concentric portion of the lift, do slow eccentric dips, then use your legs and the steps on the dip machine to get back to the top and repeat.
So the question is, what place do eccentrics have in hypertrophy training and how should they be used? This is where old gym lore and bodybuilding magazine culture steered me to draw the wrong conclusions, and Dr. Helms has helped me right the ship. Conflating mechanical tension with total time under tension would suggest that doing a slow eccentric and a fast concentric would give you the best of both worlds. The hypertrophy stimulus from the eccentric portion we’ve read about in the literature, and the hypertrophy stimulus from the concentric that’s been well established in the literature. This is where a misapplication from research that is designed to test a very specific hypothesis can cause us to make mistakes in the application of the data.
Hypertrophy is caused by tension on the muscle fibers of sufficient force and/or duration to recruit high threshold motor units that activate as many muscle fibers as possible until they distort and deform under the stress. We know this is caused by the contraction of the muscle fibers, i.e. the shortening of them in the concentric portion of the lift. Raising a can of beer to your mouth is contraction, shortening the fibers, and lowering it back to the wet coaster is lengthening the fibers. So the concentric portion of the lift, done with enough weight and/or enough duration to get the job done will give us the results we’re after. Because we can’t replicate the overloaded, heavy eccentric portion we see in research, intentionally slowing down the eccentric to try to get some of that extra hypertrophy stimulus is actually degrading our results. I will try to explain.
As I learned first hand in my Powerlifting training, slowly lowering the weight is fatiguing, and would make it harder for me to complete the turn around concentric. Fearing it would cost me a pound or two on the bar, I stopped doing a slow descent and switched to a controlled, yet not resisted descent. In other words, I let gravity do the work and I just kept my form in check and the bar path in the right place. I felt much stronger then when I did the concentric. If we apply this same fatiguing principle to a hypertrophy oriented set of Squats, say for 8 reps, if we use a slow eccentric where we’re actively resisting the lowering of the weight, we’re building a lot of fatigue into the lift and as a result, we’re going to get less reps! The total volume of stimulating reps in a workout is a crucial component of the hypertrophic stimulus from that workout. By intentionally doing slow, resisted eccentrics, we’re short changing ourselves from the stimulus we’re actually after, because we’re going to do less overall volume.
This is the kind of thing Dr. Helms excels at as I mentioned at the outset. He understands the literature, can interpret the literature, and most importantly, can correctly apply the literature to application in the real world. Because he’s done the training himself, he knows the most common pitfalls we’ll all encounter and he can address them before you’ve even asked him, as he did in the Pyramid book. Imagine that I find the exact answer to the exact question I had in mind in his book, laid out in an easy to read yet detailed and researched way. That is a real skill, and it’s the equivalent of having my own PhD to tell me Don’t Go Slow on that negative Joe.
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