The most potent training technique known to man

This video presents a training method that focuses on “forcing the negative” during exercises to maximize strength and muscle growth. The key points are:

• The goal is to increase maximum strength, which will lead to more muscle mass and lower body fat. [00:53]
• The most effective way to stimulate muscle growth is to work at the threshold of your current strength capacity. [02:44]
• Forcing the negative, by lowering the weight slowly and with maximum effort, puts the muscles under more intense stress than the positive (lifting) portion of the exercise. [07:40]
• This method allows for effective training in less than 40 minutes per week by targeting the eccentric (negative) portion of each exercise. [03:29]
• I demonstrate the technique using a planche pushup as an example, and encourage you to try it and experience the intensity for yourself. [07:39]

When I tell people I do less than 45 minutes a week of structured exercise, I usually get a look something like this, followed by demands for an explanation. It has only been through the discovery of a very simple, yet insanely potent training method that I’ve been able to do this and help so many other people at all ages and levels transform their physiques as well. In this video, I want to show you how it works so you can try it for yourself and see just how ineffective all the sorts of training are in comparison so you can start implementing it and watch your body transform as a result. This works all the way up to advanced levels. It’s what allowed me to achieve my dream body, but if you’re just a beginner starting out with strength training, this is the most potent formula for rapid changes to your body that exists, and the less experienced you are, the faster you’re going to be able to see those changes.
First up, we need to understand the goal of training to change our bodies, to get them where we want them to be. We need to do one thing, and that is increase our maximum strength. More strength is what’s going to give us more muscle mass, allow us to therefore have lower body fat and also give us the functional mobility we want for daily life. So this before, but our physique is just a reflection of our relative strength or our strength as a fraction of our body weight. And so if we want to look really good, we want our strength to be as high as possible for our body weight, which means we have more muscle mass, less body fat. We look leaner. We have that defined tone physique. Think of this in terms of the people with the highest relative strength on the planet. The Olympic rings gymnasts.
They have no room for excess body fat, but they want as much muscle on their body as possible, which is why you look at them. They’re just jacked out of their minds. So to look good function well, we want as much strength as we can build. The one and only way that we do that then is by working at the threshold of our current strength. And so think of your strength being at this level. If we want to increase where that is, we need to work at that limit or very close to it in order to tell our bodies they need to change. Our body loves homeostasis. Staying where it is now, keeping things running as normal, it’s always in a state of equilibrium and it’s always trying to keep that equilibrium. It will only change IE build new muscle tissue, get leaner. It’s only going to make those changes if it is forced to by reaching the extremes of its current abilities.
You could do work that’s down here within the limits of your current strength or even up here. You could go be wrapping out exercises in the gym all day, but because this work is so far from your maximum strength threshold, you’re giving your body no reason to change. You flex your arm every time you go to brush your teeth or scratch your head or eat right, but it doesn’t mean you necessarily have huge rippling biceps, and that’s because all those actions are well within your current strength capacity and so your body’s happy. It doesn’t need to change. So if we want to tell it to grow, to build new muscle tissue to get stronger, we need to do work that is as close to this strength threshold as we possibly can. Now that’s the premise here is then the secret technique that this video is about.
The guarantees you get this right and is honestly by far the most important thing to make sure your training is not only effective, but allows you to max out results in less than 40 minutes of work a week and makes it incredibly potent. If you get nothing else right with your training but nail what I’m about to tell you, you’ll make progress. You’ll get results. It is that powerful. In short, the way we guarantee that we work at our strength threshold and stimulate our body to grow is by forcing the negative. What I mean by this is every movement you do, you have a lifting phase or concentric phase positive and you have a lowering phase and eccentric phase we call the negative. The key to making your training stupidly effective is by rather than lowering through your negatives, making them so difficult that you are forced down.
Now, I’ll explain why. I mean what this looks like and give you practical examples, but understand the concept first. Imagine when we talk about this limit of strength, our current threshold. Imagine we not only work right near the limit when we are lifting and able to exert that force, but if we then get to the top of our reps right and make the difficulty such that it is above the limit of our strength, that then is enough load to force us down to the bottom whilst we try and continue pushing up. If we think about the efficacy of our training as being how close it gets to this threshold, forcing the negatives literally puts us above our maximum strength capacity above our threshold. And so it is in a way the most potent stimulus we can possibly sound our body because it’s going beyond a hundred percent of our current capacity.
We’re trying to do a movement and actively failing the whole way. And so there is no clearer way of telling our bodies that they’re not strong enough. They need to grow than by experiencing that. I’ve used this imagery before, but imagine you’re holding a barbell in a bench press and you have a 200 kilo person sitting on you slowly putting more and more of their weight onto that bar. Imagine the experience of trying to hold that person away, stop their rear end reaching your face. All the effort you’ll be putting in at a certain point with enough of their 200 kilos of body weight, they’re going to start to force you down despite your best efforts. That is the experience of forcing negatives. That is what we can do every single time we reach the top of a movement and that experience of maximum effort to go up while being forced down is what it feels like to work above this threshold of your strength.
I remember when I first came across this concept, trying it for the first time, just realising how much strength that had in me that wasn’t getting used ever in my training. I would try really hard to implement progressive overload over time, do harder, heavier movements, but when I got to the top and just scaled up the difficulty and until I found myself being forced down, I realised I could work whole levels higher than I ever had because we’re literally just stronger in the lowering phase. It’s a physiological fact numbers in research range, but we’re roughly 40% stronger on the negative as opposed to the positive. So that’s a 40% difference between where we can control the negative and the max we’d ever be able to push up on the positive. So if we don’t use it, we’re leaving so much potential strength on the table and because of that, so much stimulation to our bodies to grow and change and build more.
Now that I’ve implemented this for some five years, it blows my mind that I would ever waste half of my training not even reaching anywhere near my strength threshold. Because if you think about it, if you’ve worked at a certain level, even if it’s very close to your limit, if you’ve worked at a certain level to get up the movement, if you’re then lowering and you’ve got 40% gap between the difficulty and what it would take to actually force you down, you are so far below your limit that it’s doing extremely little if not nothing to tell your body to change. And so half of all your training time, half of all your reps, you’re not only doing nothing, but you’re actually missing out on the most potent part of the training that you could be doing because the negatives are now where I go by far the heaviest.
It’s when I train the most intensely, get the most load on, do the highest level progressions of all the movements that I’m training, and it’s where I get to see my strength progress on. If I’m trying to test my maximum strength each week and see improvements, well the negative, I’m stronger by definition, and so I’m able to measure much higher levels of progression on the lowering phases than on the lifting phases. So to experience this for yourself right now, let’s do the experiment and I’ll run you through what this feels like for a really simple movement, the plange pushup, because you can do it without any equipment just on your floor right now at any strength level. So let’s do it. So all we need to do force negatives is a movement pattern and a difficulty variable that allows you to control how intense that movement pattern is as you train it.
So it allows you to just scale the difficulty up and down so that you can actually keep it at or above your strength threshold. For the plange pushup, we have a system with six of these movements. Each of them has one simple variable you can adjust, and basically the skill of effective training is learning to adjust it properly, train for range of motion for the plange pushup. The variable is simply how far forward you lean your shoulders in front of your hands. And so as you’re doing a pushup, the way that this movement gets more difficult is by leaning further and further forward, increasing this horizontal distance between shoulder position and hand position. And eventually as we scale this up, building more strength over time by using good force negatives, we get to the point where our feet can come off the ground and we can start to do plange push up variations more.
We extend our legs out, the more lean there is. That’s why planters are so incredibly difficult, but we can start with feet on the ground and hardly any load at all on our hands. In fact, we can scale all the way back to zero. There’s no strength level you have to be at to start effective training. Everything can scale down. My mom does this stuff at 62. You can do it. So to do this, get in a pushup position, whatever position you can do a pushup in if you need to be on your knees, go on your knees. What we’re going to do is get to the top of this movement, bend our elbows slightly, and start to lean forward, start to increase this difficulty variable, and I want you to try and stay at the top of that movement. Just slightly bend our elbows, try and stay there the whole time.
Don’t lower, don’t let yourself down. I want you to keep increasing the lean. You can do this right now. Keep increasing the lean of the distance of your shoulders in front of where your hands are placed on the ground until you find the point where it’s impossible and you start to get forced down. Imagine. Remember that metaphor of holding a broomstick in a bench press position with some enormous person’s ass slowly being forced down towards you. That’s what it should feel like. Don’t let them reach you. Try and push away, and if you’re able to hold it, lean further forward until you continue to be forced down. So you see, we’re always trying to push the ground away from us, push ourselves up, and we’re simply controlling the speed and the direction of the movement, whether it be pushing up or being forced down. We’re controlling that through the difficulty by how we position our body.
It’s not about going up and down. We’re always trying to do a horizontal push. That is what all of your training should feel like at every point in your training. That is how you maximise strength, muscle mobility gain in less than 40 minutes a week and get results reliably. Now, a word of warning with this, you’ll probably realise quickly, this is extremely intense. You cannot do this training for four hours a week through a lot of testing with a lot of people. We found your body generally caps out at under 20 minutes of actual work like this across all of your movements. So one weekly set of this training, a couple minutes until you’ve had enough and until you can’t do this max intensity happily anymore, that is ample, like ample. If you want to learn more about nailing weekly volume and maximising your body’s ability to progress, I’ll link a video here.
So that should give you an idea, an experiential idea of what this actually feels like to do. It’s probably utterly different to anything you’ve ever experienced before, especially if you’ve been stuck with your training and never really pushed anywhere near constant max intensity. And even if you have failing, a negative is another experience altogether. All you need to do to build the body of your dreams is apply this effectively once a week to each of six basic movement patterns because realise, as you get stronger naturally, the level of difficulty that you’re going to require to force yourself through the negative is going to increase. That’s going to happen by default if you just do this, right? So not only are you going to do the heaviest work you can, not only are you going to ensure that you train at constant max intensity, because if you’re not, then you won’t be forced down, but you’re also going to ensure that you progress as fast as possible because you are always going to be raising the level of difficulty that you use to be able to continue forcing yourself down.
It’s going to require more and more and more force every week. Eventually, you do this consistently for long enough. You’re going to find yourself reaching the six big strength goals, and by the time you get there, you’re going to have the muscle mass, the rippling low body fat, and the ability to move your body like an athlete that you thought were all completely unrealistic in the past. If you want to learn how to apply this to not just the plant pushup in more detail, but the other five movements we use in our system as well, from a complete beginner level all the way up to the end goals, watch this video. If you want to full deep dive into our programme, how it works, how you can start implementing the entire system yourself, free video training in the link in the description. Otherwise, thanks for watching. Chuck, your questions in the comments below, look forward to reading them. As always, see you in the next one.