Safety is paramount at NET. Unlike many other types of exercise, we do not use explosive force. The NET method is specific; movements are slow, deliberate, and machine-guided to prevent injury to muscles and soft tissue.
By moving weights slowly and continuously against resistance for approximately 90-120 seconds, a muscle is kept under constant tension until it is impossible to complete another repetition while maintaining perfect form. This is extremely safe, because you do not have the strength at the end of each exercise to produce the explosive force that can cause injury to joints and connective tissues.
After all, force = mass x acceleration. When you move weights slowly—with very low acceleration—the force is also low.
Why the machines we use at New Element Training are safe and effective:
The machine’s “resistance curve” is matched to the muscle’s “strength profile curve,” by design. This ensures that the muscle remains under proper tension throughout the entire motion, from full stretch to complete contraction. This builds well-balanced muscles and corrects imbalances.
Multiple settings can be adjusted to fit the machine to your body for proper muscle-joint function, regardless of your body type or height. This is an important safety consideration for lifelong joint health; it’s harder to do the movement “wrong,” and therefore the risk of injury is extremely small.
The padding, support, and structure of the machines serve to better isolate the targeted muscles and provide a proper stimulus to them.
Because the machine is so well-designed, our brains don’t have to go through a long learning curve to figure out how to perform the exercise; the movement is relatively straightforward. This allows you to start building pure strength from the first few sessions onward.
There is very low friction, enhancing the negative (eccentric) phase of strength development. Strength training is more effective when it properly stimulates this negative phase, which produces about 35% more force than the positive (concentric) phase.
You can progress in incremental steps because of how the weight stack is designed. In physics, work is defined in foot pounds as mass times foot distance. If 100 pounds on the weight stack travels for one foot distance, you’ve done 100 pounds of work. If the same weight travels half a foot, you’ve done 50 pounds of work; if the same weight travels two feet, you’ve done 200 pounds of work. All NET machines are designed to offer no more than one foot of travel distance. This means that when we increase the weight by 2 pounds, we are increasing the work by 2 foot pounds or less—a small increase that’s not possible on many traditional machines. This allows clients to make micro progress on their training.