Accentuated Eccentric Training EXPLAINED

What is accentuated eccentrics training? It’s basically the reverse of your traditional or regular training. It’s a powerful way to have an immediate impact on your training outcomes.
Instead of placing emphasis on the concentric, or shortening phase of the exercise, typically referred to as the “up” phase in an exercise like the bench press. In accentuated eccentrics the emphasis is on the lengthening phase of the exercise…like the lowering of the bar to your chest in a BB Bench Press. In essence, there's a greater level of external loading applied during the eccentric phase of the lift.

Because we can tap deeply into our body’s muscle building properties with accentuated eccentrics, we use this in our programming to not simply humble you, but to reap the biomechanical/physiological benefits such as; an increase in muscular size and strength, resting metabolic rate, flexibility, and a decrease in injury risk.

Traditional training focuses primarily on the concentric phase of the workout…like the push or up phase of that BB Bench Press. The eccentric phase is typically used to give the muscles a break between exertions, but research tells us eccentrics could be the best time to push the muscle harder.
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Focusing more attention to your muscles during the eccentric phase of any exercise is a good way to essentially access untapped strength. It’s like using a new exercise or hitting your muscle from a new angle—changing things up can yield results you’d never obtain doing things the way you always have.

It’s important to note, where there is gain there is often loss. One caveat to eccentric based training is eccentric exercises generally increase delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), that soreness you feel up to 72 hours after a tough workout, in a big way. That’s because in eccentric actions, the weight is greater than the amount of force produced by the muscle, so it creates more microscopic damage to the muscle.

So with that in mind, you’ll want to pick loads that MAKE SENSE. Don’t be a hero the first week of this type of programming. Save room to grow. We recommend using the RPE Scale to help guide you effectively and efficiently through this new variable. Check out our video on RPE and RIR for more information.