Mixing it up

It's really important that when we work out we change our workout fairly often. This helps challenge our muscles in new ways so that they continue to adapt, grow and strengthen. The hard bit though is when you get into a good routine you don't really want to change it right away. Luckily we have a few modifications we can do. The one I'm covering today is contractions. There are three basic types of contractions: Concentric contraction, Eccentric contraction, Isometric contraction. If that makes you want to throw up, that's cool. We can call them Positives, Negatives and Holds.

Positives (concentric) are probably the type of contractions you imagine. It's when your muscles shorten as you do the exercise. A barbel curl is a good example. As the hands move up and then closer to your arm your muscles are flexing and becoming shorter. Most exercises are done in this way and if you've done so many you're bored as heck, try out some negatives.

Negatives (eccentric) exercises are done in the opposite direction. It's when your muscles lengthen as you do the exercise. Typically you'd want more weight than you can do a positive contraction on. Just enough that you can't quite lift the weight. Here's an example.  What's happening here is that he's trying to curl his arms up, but the weight is just heavy enough that it forces your arms to expand rather than contract.  There is a lot of evidence to show that these types of exercises are actually far more strenuous on the muscles causing more micro tears. BLAH BLAH BLAH it means you will get stronger doing Negatives than doing the other exercises. Be warned though, I'd only recommend doing these sometimes as they will cause some serious soreness. Good sore though, right? :)

The last one, Holds (isometric) involves no movement at all. You would take your weight and hold it at one position for as long as you can. A lot of gymnasts will use these types of exercises to improve their strength range. By this I mean the distance at which you will have strength and the strength along that distance. For example, if you were to do a pushup with your arms really far out you will notice a far greater weakness in that range. To improve your strength in that situation you'd hold a pushup in that same position for as long as possible.

So next time you're working out and need a bit of a change, try some of these contractions. You can typically do the same exercises you usually do but with a different contraction. Be careful though, you'll most likely need different weights for each contraction. It's best to start off a bit light and work your way into it until you're comfortable doing something really challenging.