Negative vs Positive: Which Actually Matters Most For Gains?

Jeff Nippard

A recent meta-analysis reveals that while emphasizing the negative phase offers a slight muscle growth advantage for the upper body, both phases generally produce similar overall gains. Consequently, controlling the negative is recommended, but both the positive and negative portions of a lift remain essential for maximizing hypertrophy.

Which matters more for muscle growth: the positive, where you lift the weight up, or the negative, where you lower the weight back down? For years, most lifters assumed that the negative was more important because that’s when the muscle is lengthening. And you’ve probably heard science-based lifters say that it’s really important to “control the negative.” But what does the latest science say about negatives and muscle growth? Does the negative actually cause more growth than the positive? Well, a brand new meta-analysis of 26 studies and over 600 subjects (da Silva et al, 2025) compared muscle growth from emphasizing the positive to muscle growth from emphasizing the negative and they found that for the upper body, there was a small but significant advantage, showing more muscle growth when you emphasize the … negative! But, for the lower body both the positive and negative led to similar growth and overall, both built similar amounts of muscle. So if your goal is to maximize gains, you should control the negative, but the idea that the negative is drastically more hypertrophic than the positive isn’t really supported by the latest data.