Less Effort, More Muscle: How Eccentric Exercise Can Boost Strength

• An often-overlooked type of exercise can help people build strength and improve fitness, even if they are not very active.
• Eccentric exercises — like lowering a weight or walking downhill — can create more force with less energy. They may also support muscle, heart, and brain health.
• Whether you are a top athlete or just starting out, eccentric exercise can add unique benefits to your workout routine.

When most people think about weight training, they picture concentric exercises: those powerful moves that shorten muscles, like curling a dumbbell or pushing up from a squat.

Concentric exercise is a proven way to build muscle and get fit. But eccentric exercise — the part of a movement that lengthens the muscle — may offer extra perks.

Eccentric training is a type of exercise that often gets overlooked. It can help people build strength while feeling like they are putting in less effort.

According to an article recently published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, eccentric exercise may help build muscle strength with less strain on the body. It may also offer specific advantages over concentric exercise for muscle recovery and even brain health.

These benefits may be especially important for certain groups. For older adults and people who are less physically active, eccentric exercise may offer a low-impact, easy-to-access way to improve fitness.

Study author Kazunori (Ken) Nosaka, PhD, director of Exercise and Sports Science at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, said he hopes to make eccentric exercise more common.

“Every eccentric contraction counts. People may be discouraged by thinking they have to do lots of exercise to get fitter and healthier. But people can do a small amount of these exercises and still benefit,” Nosaka told Healthline.

What is eccentric exercise?

Muscles have three basic types of contraction:

• Concentric — muscle shortens, like lifting a dumbbell.
• Eccentric — muscle lengthens, like lowering a dumbbell.
• Isometric — muscle stays the same length, like holding a plank.

In physiology and exercise science, eccentric contractions were not well understood until the middle of the 1900s.

“The word eccentric literally means something that’s odd or peculiar. This type of contraction was given that term because for a long time, scientists weren’t able to explain it. How muscle produces force while it is being lengthened was a big question mark,” said Lindsey Lepley, PhD, associate professor of athletic training at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. Lepley was not involved in the study.

Put simply, scientists were puzzled by how a muscle could create force while being stretched.

The idea of a concentric contraction feels natural because the muscle is clearly doing work. However, research into muscle biomechanics has shown that muscles can also create a lot of force during eccentric movements.

Even more surprising, muscles may be able to create significantly more force — over 20% more, according to Nosaka — than during concentric or isometric contractions, while using less metabolic energy.

Benefits and risks of eccentric exercise

The biomechanics of eccentric exercise give it unique benefits, but also some downsides, compared with more common concentric exercise.

For athletes and weightlifters, eccentrics allow for greater mechanical loading: you can handle heavier weight during an eccentric than during a concentric. This can help with both strength and muscle growth.

At the same time, eccentric movements tend to be less tiring. This allows people to do more repetitions and get a higher training volume.

Research suggests that eccentric exercise may also help the brain through neural adaptations related to motor control and coordination.

Even for people who are not athletes, eccentric exercise can be an easy way to improve fitness. Eccentric exercise is not just weightlifting: walking downhill and going down stairs are both forms of eccentric exercise — and both have been shown to provide health benefits.

A 2017 study found major multisystemic benefits in older women with obesity after a 12-week program that focused on eccentric contractions during downhill walking and stair descent.

At the end of the program, participants showed improvements in heart rate, systolic blood pressure, oral glucose tolerance, and lipids.

“You don’t have to be super fit to walk down a flight of steps. This is helpful to get people who are potentially less fit to be able to see that they can be doing eccentric-based exercises, which provide a greater mechanical load than just flat-level walking,” said Laura Richardson, PhD, clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. Richardson was not involved in the studies.

Eccentric exercise has historically been linked to a higher risk of muscle damage and delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) than concentric exercise, especially in people who do not do this type of training regularly.

However, Nosaka stresses that these risks can be reduced with proper training and technique, such as warming up properly with a lighter weight. Training volume also matters. Muscle damage from eccentric exercise tends to decrease in people who exercise regularly — a protective adaptation known as the “repeated bout effect.”

“We don’t recommend maximal eccentric contraction for certain populations, especially those who are not fit,” Nosaka said.

Getting started with eccentric exercise

When thinking about an eccentric movement, it is usually the opposite phase of the exercise that you would normally focus on: a slow, deliberate lowering and lengthening.

For beginners interested in starting eccentric training, Nosaka recommends just a few bodyweight exercises:

• Chair squats — a partial squat that focuses on the lowering phase instead of the upward push. Nosaka recommends slowly counting to five during the descent.
• Wall push-ups — a less intense version of the traditional push-up that focuses on slowly lowering the body toward the wall.
• Chair reclines or reverse sit-ups — an abdominal exercise that focuses on the lowering part of the movement.
• Heel drops — the reverse of a standing calf raise, where the heels are slowly lowered below the level of a step or platform.

As mentioned earlier, walking, hiking, and stairs can also become eccentric-focused when you go downhill instead of up.

“If you know you need to walk, walking downhill can build muscle better than walking in a more metabolically taxing way,” Lepley said.

“There are plenty of little daily activities you can get into, I like to call them exercise ‘snacks’ where you can get some benefit just by changing simple parts of your daily routine,” she added.

And Nosaka reminds readers that the old

Source: Healthline