09/20/2026
Last week I talked about the brace, and mentioned the negative as the place you can actually train it. Here’s the part I didn’t have room for — how to program it.
The slides have the numbers. What they don’t have is the thing that sinks most people before they ever get to week two.
The Weight.
Over the years I’ve noticed some people develop a strange relationship with how much they’re lifting long before they’ve gotten good at the movement.
Almost as though the number on the bar is a piece of their identity. If I ask that same person to drop the weight by 15% and take five seconds to complete each negative… they may nod, but then proceed to use the same weight they always do and rush the bottom half of each rep.
The problem this creates: some of the benefits we’re training for are missed and the risk of injury goes up. Many times, the outcome is a worse version of their normal working sets.
If you take one thing from this, take that first point. Pull back the weight a bit. Get your patterns dialed. Everything else follows.
A few more things to note:
Which set should you be doing these on? If you’re training that lift once a week, put the negatives on your first working set when you’re new to this.
Fresh means you’re more likely to hold the brace and keep everything where it belongs. Once you know your own limits, patterns during fatigue, and you’ve been through this before a time or two, move it to the last set.
That’s where becomes more difficult, but with purpose.
For your bar path — while you’re slowing everything down, this is a great time to pay attention to where the bar is actually traveling.
Straight up and straight down, in most cases. You’ve got five seconds to notice. Use them.
One last thing… don’t put negatives on every exercise in a session. Treat them like a specialized training tool.
We don’t need those for every exercise on every set. That’s crazy talk. If you’ve got deadlifts and rack pulls on the same day, pick one. Doing it on both guarantees a lot more fatigue, but doesn’t necessarily mean twice the benefit.
Save this for your next session.
