One of my friends was trying to convince that you will get stronger if you intentionally slow down the eccentric motion because this increases muscle tears. He even suggested curling with one hand until you fail and then lifting the weight with your other hand and letting it fall slowly to produce more tears.
It seems counter-intuitive that eccentric motion will increase your concentric strength, but I'm having a hard time finding the cellular biology to make a hard case for it. All I can find is that muscle growth occurs when "micro tears" (snapping myofibrils?) in your muscle heal and create more fibers in response to the stress. If becoming stronger is nothing more than tearing muscle, wouldn't hitting my muscles with a hammer or over stretching increase strength?
What exactly causes muscle growth on a cellular level? Is there any value in intentionally tearing your muscles?
What is strength? How is it displayed? By lowering weight? I'm not concerned with the muscle physiology – it's interesting, but it has nothing to do with training. How do the strongest men get that way? By fucking around with forced reps and eccentric bullshit?
I don't like where his health is going so I've been thinking of ways to persuade him into strength training. At 63 years old, he suffers from sciatic pain and has gastrointestinal issues. He's never lifted weights in his life, but he has been a L.A. Marathon runner since 1986, never missing a race. He has the title of "Legacy Runner." That makes him really happy. And that makes me happy too.
I used to think this was a great way for him to stay in shape but now I'd prefer him to get STRONGER. I'd like to show him some of Dr. Sullivan's Big Medicine writings in This Year in Strength Science to gear him toward resistance training...but I dunno. What would you do?
Fire up your printer. Print this too: Barbell Training is Big Medicine
Unfortunately, there's not much one can do to force one's parents to do anything. Give him the information and try not to argue about it.
I would really love to see my mom barbell training, but she's so goddamn stubborn in thinking that she doesn't need to get stronger (though she was diagnosed as having low bone density at the young age of 52, and recently hurt her back pretty badly) that nothing I can say or do will make much difference.
I spent 4 years trying to convince my parents, that as ADSL internet was the same price as the Dialup internet they were using... it would be common sense to upgrade. They finally did it when an electrician recommended the exact same.
I spent the last 2 years trying to convince my Mum to consider strength training, it took a doctor briefly mentioning it to see it happen.
I don't know, hire a doctor to tell him to do it? Old folks are pretty good at blindly following medical advice, they don't know how to google and Socratically reason as well as us superior young folk who know what's best for them.
I suggest to the OP that, whatever he does, he not come at it from a place of condescension. Even those "inferior old folks" can sniff that out. Not to mention that, unless one's father was horrible and abusive, I would assume that he deserves respect and not contempt. You know, because he's one's father and all.
Your Back: The Key to a Bigger Bench –Phoebe Hightower
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