Sports science describes two ways to strengthen your muscles. Concentric exercise strengthen the muscles by shortening it and eccentric exercise strengthens the muscle by lengthening it. Every day at the gym people are doing concentric exercise tensing and shortening their quadriceps muscles when they attempt to straighten a leg on the leg extension machine or pull a hand weight toward a shoulder in a biceps curl. Concentric motion and movement is typically where most people focus their attention during their workouts. There is not much attention offered to lengthening the muscles. When we ignore lengthening our muscles, we are leaving out a very important and critical aspect of the development of strong healthy muscles- eccentric exercise.
Eccentric exercise lengthens and strengthens and is just as important as concentric exercise. But this form of exercise is often overlooked and viewed as a waste of time! When you bend a knee and stretch out your quadriceps you bear the full weight of your body as you stand up. You are strengthening and lengthening. Just as in physics, the longer the lever, the heavier the load. Eccentric exercise allows you “lever” (muscle) to bear more resistance while in its lengthened position. The result simultaneously lengthens and strengthens muscles. Eccentric exercise simultaneously strengthens and lengthens and as it develops healthy strong muscles. Since muscle cells burn more calories so when the difficulty of the load is increased on the longer muscle, you increase muscle mass, you increase your body’s metabolic rate, you burn more calories and you loose weight!
And, “yes” eccentrics is also a powerful anti- aging program. As the scientific community began to find new discoveries and new light on how our DNA ages, we learned that eccentric exercise specifically, directly and powerfully communicates with our cells to reduce oxidative stress on a cellular level- this means that it directly combats aging!!!
The answer is “yes” , there is a positive and direct relationship between eccentric stretching, stress reduction and anti -aging.
Are you ready to do a class in Classical Stretch, Essentrics and the Aging Backwards program?? For more information on classes and events, go to www.dancingfromtheinsideout.com or email: Arielle firstname.lastname@example.org!!