Doing just the lowering part of an exercise, even in small amounts spread out over the week, can significantly boost your strength and flexibility. Skipping the pushing or pulling part might work your muscles effectively while keeping your heart rate lower and making workouts shorter.

Lifting extremely heavy weights or pushing your muscles to their absolute limit every day or almost every day can quickly make you stronger. This happens because your nervous system and muscles adapt to the heavy stress, giving you big strength gains without needing to spend hours in the gym.

If you do hard eccentric exercises like lowering weights slowly once a week for 10 weeks, your muscles stop getting sore and damaged—even though the exercise is tough—because they get used to it.

If you're new to working out and do leg exercises where you lower the weight slowly and quickly, doing it at a speed of 180 degrees per second might give you the biggest strength gains after 8 weeks — faster eccentric moves might just be the secret sauce for getting stronger.