The 3 Lower-Body Exercises Men Over 30 Need for Serious Muscle and Bulletproof Joints
If you want to pack on serious muscle, don't sleep on the eccentric phase of your lifts. While any form of resistance training will help you add size, research shows that the lowering phase, especially during high-intensity sets, is where the real magic happens for strength and hypertrophy. Take the squat, for example. When you control the descent, your muscles actually generate more force, allowing you to recruit and tear down the exact high-threshold fibers needed to trigger new growth. It's also particularly good at protecting the tendons, ligaments, and joints, which become less resilient with age. The tradeoff, however, is that you’ll probably feel it the next day. It maintains quite the reputation for triggering delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), especially if you're not used to this type of training. "Delayed onset muscle soreness is more pronounced with eccentric training, especially when it’s introduced too aggressively," says Tom Walters, PT, DPT, ...
