Eccentric Warmup Sets

We waste a massive amount of time on warm-ups.

Athletes spend fifteen minutes doing band walks, foam rolling, and looking at their phones. It looks like work. But it does not prepare the nervous system or the soft tissue for intensity of the lift that's about to happen.

This week I saw an idea from Ben Hollander out at Arizona that I loved . He uses extreme slow eccentrics. Not as an accessory. Not as a finisher. He uses them as the actual warm-up.

Here is the setup. Take a Squat. Load it to roughly fifty or sixty percent of a one rep max.

The athlete does one single repetition. But the eccentric phase lasts forty seconds.

It is agonizing. It overloads the tendons and the central nervous system at the exact same time. It forces complete focus. If an athlete cannot hold perfect posture for forty seconds on the way down, they have no business moving fast on the way up.

The load needs to be heavy enough that standing the weight back up is physically impossible without some spotter assistance. Works even better with movements that finish with the eccentric like trap bar deadlift.

Try this on your next lower body day. Load the bar. Put forty seconds on the clock. Demand a perfectly consistent speed on the descent. Once they hit the floor, give them ninety seconds to recover, and then attack the work sets from there.

Stop programming half assed warmups at 95/135/185 just to get a sweat going. Demand extreme execution before the real workout even begins.

Keep the Fire Burning,

Leech