Hundreds of thousands of gym goers across the globe are destroying their chances of building an impressive physique on a daily basis! Why? Because they are not paying attention to the velocity and timing of a single rep!
Boost HGH Levels 17 times by slowing down reps
Resistance training where you take three seconds to do the return; e.g lower the weight – or in sports scientists’ jargon: the eccentric part – result in a drastically higher growth hormone secretion than when the return movement is done in less than a second. Brazilian sports scientists write about this very subject matter in Biology of Sport.
More growth hormone
Strength athletes can do all sorts of things, some of them somewhat crazy to boost the secretion of growth hormone. For example, they use supplements such as alpha-GPC, ornithine or GABA or even go as far as synthetic HGH injections, peptides and sarms.
But the effects of all these methods are limited by one factor when it comes to resistance training. This being how you perform each and every repetition, or more importantly the timing.
Brazilian sports scientists, at the Methodist University of Piracicaba, discovered a way of increasing post-resistance workout growth hormone secretion by an incredible factor of 17. Imagine being able to boost your HGH output seventeen times by merely changing the way you perform a repetition!
Lets take a look at the Study
The Brazilians divided 16 experienced male resistance athletes into two groups and got both groups to do 4 sets of bench presses with 70 percent of their one-rep-max weight. The men in both groups did sets of 8 repetitions.
The men in one group took half a second to do the return movement [fast eccentric velocity; FEV]; the men in the other group took three seconds to do the same [slow eccentric velocity; SEV].
Results
Before and for half an hour after the short workout, the researchers measured the concentration of lactic acid [lactate] and growth hormone in the men’s blood. The concentration of lactate, but above all that of growth hormone, was higher in the men who had taken three seconds to do the eccentric movement.
Fifteen minutes after the workout, the growth-hormone concentration was a whopping 17 times higher in the blood of the men in the slow eccentric velocity group than in the men in the fast eccentric velocity group.
Conclusion
“Muscular adaptations result from a multifactorial process involving mechanical, metabolic, and immune/inflammatory factors in addition to various hormonal responses. Therefore, if the emphasis in resistance training periodization is to induce a greater acute metabolic stress and growth hormone response, we recommend manipulating the eccentric movement velocity.”
Basically what the researchers have shown through this study is by slowing down our eccentric (or negative) part of our repetitions we can systematically increase Growth Hormone Levels post workout by seventeen times!
Rather than looking for some magic bullet, or injecting synthetic hormones why not just down your reps and reap the benefits. It may seem too simple on concept for some, but answers are most often right in front us, we just have to get back to the fundamentals.
Source:
Biol Sport 2014; 31(4):289-294.
