Podcast 26

What Makes Exerbotics So Effective?

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SHOW NOTES

Amy and Brian go into the science behind eccentric overload and why this little-understood movement is responsible for the incredible gains in strength Exercise Coach clients experience in their first six sessions. Find out what eccentric overload is and how to optimize your exercise so you can use more effort in less time, and see greater results.

• Eccentric training is well understood by research labs and high-level coaches but it’s not the most common idea for your average exerciser. It’s built into the unique way that makes Exerbotics so effective.
• Eccentric is simply a muscle contraction. All your muscles ever do is generate force by either contracting or detracting, and an eccentric motion is when you are attempting to shorten your muscles but the load is so great that your muscles actually lengthen.
• A good example is the bicep curl. When you bend your elbow to lift the dumbbell, that is the concentric portion of the muscle action. When you lower the weight is the eccentric portion. The trouble is that bicep curls are not a great eccentric training exercise.
• Research shows that we get better fitness results when we overload and meaningfully tax our eccentric strength. This is difficult to do with traditional exercises but is built into how the Exerbotics machine functions.
• There is a mechanical mismatch with gravity-based exercises. You can only lower what you first lifted, which means you can never fully optimize the exercise for the eccentric portion of the movement.
• You need 40% more resistance in order to effectively work your muscles eccentrically, and it’s even greater as your muscles fatigue. We need a way to apply an appropriate resistance eccentrically if we are going to tap into the benefits of eccentric training.
• Exerbotics is a connected strength training technology that adapts to each user’s ability and strength in concentric and eccentric movements. This allows Exercise Coach clients to give more effort in less time by capitalizing on every second of every rep.
• With an increase in the quality of the exercise stimulus, comes a decrease in the time spent to get results.
• Research shows that you are going to get strength gains that are twice as good when you can perform effective eccentric overload. You can also gain benefits to hypertrophy in shorter periods of time compared to traditional methods.
• Eccentric training also increases flexibility because of the increased extensibility of the muscles involved.
• The benefits also extend to the metabolic systems of the body. Recent research has shown improvements in cholesterol profile and a general reduction in systemic inflammation in the body.
• When we perform effective eccentric training we get the fitness results we want in less time, and while feeling less demanding. Eccentric training uses fewer muscle fibers but they are generating more force, which makes it a super stimulus for those muscles.
• The most basic exercises and protocols are automatically built into the programs of the Exercise Coach.
• For over 7000 women that completed six sessions at The Exercise Coach, they saw a 33% increase in overall strength. Compare that to traditional exercises, where it can take over a year to achieve the same results.

The results of ecentric overload aren’t just mechanical in nature. It’s not just making you stronger and growing your muscles and improving the extensibility of your muscles, but also the benefits extend to the metabolic systems of the body.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast with your host, exercise coach, CEO, and co -founder, Brian Sagan, and me, Amy Hudson, exercise coach, franchisee, where you get up -to -date information on living a healthy lifestyle. Today on the podcast, we’re going to revisit a topic we’ve mentioned in the past called eccentric training. If you are a client at an exercise coach studio, you may have heard your coach use this term with you before. We’ve certainly mentioned it in the past, but we’re going to revisit it. Eccentric training. What is it?

What is so special about it? What does the research have to say about it? So Brian, let’s chat all things eccentric training today.

All right, let’s do it. And you can help me. hopefully make sense. Eccentric training is something that is very well understood in exercise physiology research labs and high -level strength and conditioning coaches are very familiar with what eccentric training is. We’ve been helping people apply the effectiveness of eccentric training at the exercise coach now for the last 10 years in a pretty unique way, powered by a technology called exerbotics. And so our clients have experienced the benefits of it, but sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to explain, especially to listeners. So you can help me out, but you have your work cut ou will start with what is i training?

And so I always it’s helpful to define what an eccentric is. And what we’re talking about really is what’s known as a muscle action or just a muscle contraction. An eccentric contraction is a way in which you can perform work with your muscles. And to understand eccentric training or eccentric muscle contractions, we should mention another term and that’s concentric. So CON centric versus ECC, concentric and eccentric.

And so in reality, all your muscles ever really do is attempt to generate force by shortening or contracting. Our brains send a signal to our muscles to contract or to shorten. And that’s what generates the force that moves our body or that lifts an object. And when we generate a force that is greater than any object that is resisting that force, our muscles shorten. That’s called a concentric contraction. It’s a shortening contraction.

And when we attempt, when we generate force and attempt to shorten our muscles, but we’re working against a load that is so significant that our muscles actually lengthen while we are attempting to contract them, that’s called an eccentric or a lengthening contraction. They’re also known as positive or negative work when we’re using a resistance that’s gravity based. So if you’re lifting a weight like a dumbbell, or it could be a box or a bucket of dirt, what’s known as positive work is when you’re actually lifting the weight and or like on a machine, a weight training machine, when the weight is going up, that’s generally the positive. And that’s when your muscles are shortening. And then the negative is when your muscles are lengthening.

So eccentric muscle contraction occurs when you encounter a resistance that actually lengthens your muscles while you are contracting them. think people can see that?

Let’s paint a picture. I think everybody understands a bicep curl, and the idea of a bicep curl. So go ahead and break down as somebody does a bicep curl, the concentric and eccentric and what’s going on there.

Okay, so using like a dumbbell, if you perform a bicep curl, so your arms are hanging at your side, and you have the dumbbell in your hands, or a dumbbell in each hand, when you bend your elbow to lift up that dumbbell, that would be the concentric contraction because your muscles are shortening in order to move your arm around your elbow joint to lift the weight. And then when you lower the weight, your muscles are lengthening. Now, in that example, that’s not really much of an eccentric contraction. And the reason is you are much, much stronger when your muscles lengthen than when they shorten. When you come into an exercise fresh, your muscles are about 40 % stronger during that lowering phase or the eccentric phase than during the concentric or the lifting phase. So if we just lift say 20 pound dumbbells, lowering them isn’t very difficult because we’re so much stronger eccentrically.

So real effective eccentric training or what you might call eccentric overload requires the ability to actually deliver more resistance during the lengthening phase of an exercise than we do during the shortening phase of an exercise. This is true eccentric training and this is where it gets really exciting because what research shows and what our experience demonstrates is that we get better results when we actually overload or meaningfully tax our eccentric strength.

And so traditionally, that’s hard to do is change the load that you’re applying on the eccentric portion of a rep of exercise, which is how exerbotics comes in and how unique exerbotics is in allowing the user to apply a very different load on that eccentric contraction than they did on the concentric contraction. Can you paint a picture of that a little bit for us?

That’s a good point because there’s this mechanical mismatch with gravity -based exercise or resistance. You can only lower what you first lifted. So you only ever get to work eccentrically with a load that you’re able to actually lift. And again, fresh, you really need 40 % more resistance in order to effectively work your muscles eccentrically. It’s even greater than that as you fatigue. So if we keep working our muscles to the point of fatigue, it gets harder and harder to lift the weight or perform concentric movements.

but our strength eccentrically doesn’t degrade in the same manner or at the same rate. So you could end up multiple hundreds of percent stronger in the eccentric than the concentric as your muscles actually fatigue. So we need a way to apply an appropriate resistance eccentrically we’re going to actually tap into the types of benefits that occur from eccentric training. And in the case of the exercise coach, which is the fitness studios around the country that we operate, we use a technology called DexRobotics as a connected strength training technology that provides bio -individual resistance. that actually adapts to each user’s ability.

But not only that, it adapts to the difference in strength that they have in the concentric versus the eccentric portion of any lifts that they do.

Which is amazing because of the fact that an individual is able to just give as much as they’re able to give. every second of every rep of every exercise they do with the exercise coach, that does help to explain why it takes a lot less time to truly fatigue the muscles and get that effective workout because they are capitalizing every second of every rep on what they can give, even if it is drastically different on that eccentric portion versus the concentric portion of the exercise.

Yeah, it’s just a much higher quality exercise stimulus. And with that increase in quality comes a decrease in the need to spend time exercising to get results, we actually get better results. in less time because of the nature of the exercise that we’re performing. It’s such a high quality and we’re tapping into that eccentric strength, the eccentric abilities that each individual has. What research shows is that you’re going to get strength gains that are twice as good when we can actually perform effective eccentric overload. You’re going to get early gains in hypertrophy or the size of your

muscle cells that again research has shown two times or even five times better and much faster that usually is a result that takes quite a bit of time but when we include meaningful eccentric overload In your first several weeks of strength training, you can actually start to see benefits that include the synthesis of new muscle tissue and not just gains in strength from neurological adaptations. That’s usually what happens with more conventional methods. Research shows that when we perform eccentric overload, we actually improve flexibility. which is something that I think is surprising to people. But eccentric training actually causes an adaptation known as sarcomerogenesis, which is the laying down of brand new contractile proteins in our muscles in line that increase the extensibility of that muscle, leading to greater flexibility. And there’s research that shows that the results of eccentric overload aren’t just mechanical in nature.

It’s not just making you stronger and growing your muscles and improving the extensibility of your muscles, but also the benefits extend to the metabolic systems of the body. There’s recent research that has shown people get improvements in cholesterol profile and in blood sugar or A1c, which has to do with your overall metabolic health and is also connected to the systemic inflammation that exists in your body. And so the benefits of eccentric training are really enormous. And the crazy side benefit is again, when we perform effective eccentric training, we can get all these results, all the results that people want in much less time. And it’s actually less demanding. This is a really interesting truth as well.

When we perform eccentric training, we’re stronger, we can generate more force, but it actually costs less neurologically, metabolically, and from a cardiovascular standpoint. So what I mean by that is you can work harder, generate more force, but it actually feels less demanding. And that’s because it requires the use of fewer muscle fibers to generate the same or more amount of force. And so when we perform eccentric training, there’s less muscle fibers being used, but they’re generating more force. And that’s why it’s such a powerful stimulus for those fibers.

It’s like a super stimulus compared to a strength training that does not include eccentric overload.

Wow.

So if you just listen to that explanation, you are sold as I am on the benefits of eccentric training. And there really is no more elegant way, in my opinion, to experience eccentric training for your muscles. That’s done in a safe, slow, controlled way than in an exercise coach studio under the guidance of a coach. You have to try it. Our coaches even have access with the click of a button to a whole host of protocols. as well within the exerbotics technology that are designed for various eccentric challenges for clients as they progress and get stronger and want to build more flexibility and strength.

Our coaches can design sequences and routines with different protocols designed to maximize that eccentric effort that we ask the client to give in various exercises, just to experience that in different ways as they progress. And it is really cool and very cutting edge.

And it is, Amy, like you say, it’s very elegant in that it’s just seamlessly integrated into the workouts at the exercise coach. It might be easy to take for granted, actually, if we don’t call it out and talk about it. and remind people that we’re actually doing it. Our most basic, most standard protocols at the exercise coach, which our clients begin with, actually incorporate right away meaningful, eccentric overload. And anyone can do it regardless of their current fitness level or any conditions that they have. And we talked about in a recent episode about our scientific support paper.

And in there, we actually referenced some internal data that we collected. And we looked at over 7 ,000 women that completed six sessions at the exercise coach, and they got stronger by 33 % on average in just six sessions. Now, We compare that in the paper to a study that was actually a study that looked at pretty good conventional strength training methods, but using machines, unlike exerbotics so machines that don’t deliver eccentric overload. And in that study that looked at 15 ,000 people, it took as much as a year to achieve average strength increases of 30%. Our clients just experienced very profound changes very rapidly because they’re encountering the most effective exercise stimulus possible. It’s optimal resistance training based on their unique individual abilities.

And the only way that someone can experience that is if the methodology does give them access to meaningful eccentric loading.

I hope you heard that. That is amazing. Six sessions, 30 % strength gains compared to taking a year to get those 30 % strength gains using traditional equipment. Our clients often tell us right around that fifth or sixth session with us, how much better they’re feeling. And that certainly explains the fact that they’re gaining so much strength so fast. It’s going to translate into a lot of areas of life and you’re going to start feeling

a lot better. Even when you’re thinking about getting started, if your coach says, imagine yourself 30 % stronger, people may think about that as a pipe dream. Maybe it’ll take years to achieve that. No, not true. Six sessions, Brian, that is amazing.

And that’s an average on average. Yeah, that’s an average. That is really fast. And that’s just a slice of the people that we’ve worked with at the exercise coach. But again, that was over 7 ,000 women and it’s an average result. So this is something that has a lot of data behind it.

We have a lot of experience behind it and it’s an effectiveness that you can count on.

If you’re going to strength train, and of course we recommend you do because strength changes everything. Make sure you include that eccentric training. If you don’t know how to do that, if you’ve never tried visit an exercise coach near you, your coaches will show you exactly how to do it and how it works. So you can experience those profound health changes that eccentric training brings. Brian, thanks for explaining that to us today. We look forward to seeing you back next week with us on the podcast and remember strength changes.

It changes everything.