by Scott Hogan, ACE-CPT, COES
Eccentric training is the most underutilized, underrated corrective exercise technique. When implemented properly, it can help you build more muscle, improve flexibility, and fortify your connective tissue against injury.
This article provides an overview of how eccentric training works, the benefits, and how to safely implement it into your training routine.
What is eccentric training?
Eccentric training a form of resistance training that emphasizes the lowering phase of an exercise to challenge the muscles’ ability to elongate, build strength and muscle mass, and optimize collagen formations within connective tissue.
It creates more muscular force than any other exercise type. It also produces the largest increases in muscle fiber length, making it a useful flexibility training method. When implemented correctly, it’s a safe and effective resistance training technique.
In order to understand how eccentric training works, it’s helpful to understand the various types of muscle contractions. There are three primary types of muscle contractions. Each affects skeletal muscle and connective tissues differently:
There are many reasons to incorporate eccentric exercise in your exercise program, but the most research-backed, practical reason is to prevent tendonitis, tendinopathy, and other connective tissue injuries.
Most exercise regimens focus on fast-paced movements that emphasize the concentric, or lifting, phase of the movement. Over time, this creates an imbalance between the development of your muscles and the resiliency of underlying connective tissues.
By adding eccentric training to your exercise routine, you can effectively fortify your tendons and joint systems against overuse injuries. This is evidenced by the fact that eccentric exercise is the most common therapeutic exercise regimen for treatment of tendinopathy (tendon degeneration).
Despite common assumptions about eccentric training being an advanced training method reserved only for bodybuilders and athletes, decades of research show it helps prevent injuries, improves mobility, and supports overall health and wellness in virtually every population. Here are a few of the most cited benefits of eccentric training:
Unlike NSAIDs, rest, stretching and many other common tendinopathy treatments, only eccentric training and slow-tempo exercise helps rebuild damaged tendon cells in a way that allows for full recovery from tendon overuse injuries.
A study of patients with patellar tendinopathy (degeneration of the tendon located just below the kneecap) demonstrated that eccentric training improved short-term and long-term measures of pain, strength, and collagen turnover. In the same study, patients who used corticosteroid injections to manage inflammation and pain showed short-term improvements in pain levels but poor long-term tendon health.
Another study of patients with Achilles’ tendinopathy showed that 12 weeks of slow, eccentric-focused training increased collagen synthesis in injured tissues. As the researchers pointed out, this could indicate a relationship between necessary collagen turnover and tendon injury recovery.
See Related: The Difference Between Tendinitis and Tendinopathy in Injury Recovery Guide
(Collagen formation illustration) Eccentric training helps realign and strengthen collagen formation patterns within tendons.
Here are four ways to incorporate eccentric training into your exercise routine. For all of the methods referenced below, remember that your muscles and joints need 2-3 days to recover between sessions to prevent accumulated stress:
After the lifter slowly lowers the weight through the eccentric portion of the movement, the spotters will assist in lifting the weight back up or complete the concentric portion of the movement without the lifter getting involved. The main idea is to focus the lifter’s efforts on controlling the eccentric phase of the movement without expending energy on the concentric phase.
The volume of eccentric training you should perform depends on your fitness level, injury status, and goals. To start, I recommend completing 3-6 sets per week of either the 2/1 Technique or Slow/Superslow Technique. Choose a weight you can easily lift for 10-15 repetitions, then focus on controlling the eccentric phase of the exercise for 5 seconds. It’s not necessary to push your muscles to the brink of failure to benefit from eccentric training.
Eccentric training should be a staple in your exercise routine, whether your goal is to build muscle and strength, improve flexibility, or prevent overuse injuries. Though you will likely experience some muscle soreness after completing an eccentric training session, it’s a relatively safe technique that bolsters overall joint function and total body resilience.
To learn more about how to program eccentric training into your exercise routine, check out my book, Built from Broken.
In it, I lay out a complete training program with exercise demonstrations, set and repetition schemes, and periodization techniques that ensure you make consistent progress toward your fitness goals without causing joint degeneration and overuse injuries.