A Matter of Tempo

Tempo in lifting is somewhat of an interesting topic. When I first saw some of the tempo prescriptions that some elite strength coaches were recommending, I was amazed. Whenever I am in the weight room, all I ever want to do is push heavy weight as fast as possible, and tempo is usually the last thing on my mind. It would probably take somebody pointing a loaded gun at me to get me to perform a 4:1:2 tempo set-up. Aside from my personal preference, the literature, both scientific and practical shows several “positive” effects of using tempo in lifting.

An increased safety factor, reduces bouncing in lifts.
Along with increased safety, tempo makes the muscles do the work rather than tendons, ligaments, or joint capsules.
Varying lifting tempos in a yearly plan causes an extension of the training effect of lifting, which in turn, should lead to higher levels of strength at the end of the strength phase of training.
Tempo allows a greater time under tension, which will change the metabolic effect of the training, as well as increase hypertrophy (if this causes time under tension to rise into the 30-70 second range, which is proven the most effective for hypertrophy)
Since lifting will never exactly replicate dynamic sport movement, it should be performed safely and for the purpose of increasing the available, usable muscle tissue for sporting movement (at least the HIT camp would say this).

The college which I coach at makes a good deal of use of tempo for training our sprinters (at least in the pre-season phase). Our sprinters have been very, very successful over the years (national champions and Olympians) and apparently I would say that tempo in lifting certainly is not hurting them. A typical tempo recommendation in the fall might be a 3:0:2 tempo, or a 5:0:3 tempo for squats.

Now that I have that out of the way, I will state what I personally hate about tempo in training. There are always two sides to the coin of any argument of course!

De-emphasis on explosiveness in training. I have never seen the use of tempo in any elite/international track coaches training plan (of course, I haven’t come close to looking at all training programs).
Submaximal recruitment of motor units in lifting. When was the last time you ever saw an Olympic lifter doing squats with any sort of tempo? Olympic lifters are athletes we sometimes or often model our training after, and they demonstrate no appearance of tempo on their squats, they even bounce! (say it ain’t so!) It is just about the same story with powerlifters…powerlifters have two primary types of lifting days, dynamic and maximal effort days. You certainly won’t see any sort of tempo except for all-out speed on the dynamic day, and the max effort day is full-blast of the concentric portion of the lift as well. If your desire is to increase the maximal amount of available motor units (your CNS pool) the concentric portion of the lift must be performed as fast as possible!
Time under tension can also be achieved by increasing the reps of the lift. In the preparatory period of the season, which do you think would be a better way of increasing hypertrophy in the fast twitch muscles: doing 3 reps of an exercise as an extremely slow tempo with 150lb, the set taking 30 seconds or doing 15 reps of the same exercise with 150lb in 30 seconds. I would put my money on the 15rep/30 second set. Think of JoeDeFranco’s “50rep rhythm squats” on this one. In addition to the muscle factor, the higher reps in this case may also be a positive factor in explosive tendon development.
Some athletes do not need any more hypertrophy development! In this case, tempo would probably not be a good idea, even if it is superior to higher reps at the same set-time window for hypertrophy (which doubt it would be, at least for functional hypertrophy).
Instead of trying to prolong the training effect of lifting, why not just switch to explosive/ballistic methods outside of weights instead of messing around with tempo?
Other methods of increasing the time-under-tension in a given set exist, including one of my favorites, the pause-explode method. I will get into this more in just a bit.

The dichotomy: Here is the problem….research is somewhat mixed on this issue, and perhaps even favors HIT style tempo training. While the idea of HIT (1 set, slower tempo training for failure) makes many coaches cringe, it does work for a lot of people. The only thing about HIT that makes me want to cause bodily harm to Arthur Jones is the fact that you don’t have to be “smart” to implement it effectively. You can be the dreaded “weight room Nazi” style strength coach, who stomps and yells incessantly and appears to have ridden the “short bus” as a kid (Not that these coaches are all bad!) and still get a decent training effect out of your workout (or at least make people feel tired when they are done).
Some studies have shown that lifting at high speed will bring about the same increase in vertical jump as lifting with a slower tempo. The only difference between the two is that the faster lifting will bring about a higher peak torque in loaded conditions. Basically, lift weights fast, and you will become good at lifting weights fast, and not necessarily jumping higher, due to the amount of processes that go on in vertical jumping which bring tendon elasticity and static-spring proficiency into play.
Personally, I don’t like a lot of research studies, and most of the subjects are un-trained athletes who will respond well to any kind of training. There are a few studies which make me cry “uncle” though, and these are typically the type of study as listed above. So what is the bottom line then? Well, tempo might be good because it is safe, and can extend the training effect of lifting out if it is varied, BUT, at the very best, it is no better than fast, heavy and explosive lifting. With that in mind, here is my official, mostly anecdotal opinion on lifting tempos.

If you are a speed-athlete, don’t bother with lifting tempo. I would recommend keeping the eccentric phase of the lift controlled, but besides that, the concentric portion should be fast.
For the same set-time, 15 fast reps are better than 5 slow ones with the same weight. Tudor Bompa’s classic book, periodization training for sports also takes this view.
If you want to prolong the training-effect-window of your strength training, try the pause-explode method! Lower yourself to parallel in a squat or similar lift for 2-10 seconds and then explode up. Repeat up to desired set-time. Jay Shroeder over at Evo-sport does lifting like this, and it is very effective in improving explosive power. Isometrics as a training method kind of go in and out, but this is a variant that you certainly can’t go wrong with. Mel Siff also talks about this as a great training method in his “Supertraining” text.
A fast-tempo in lifting is only really dangerous is you are a new lifter, and haven’t learned how to keep your core tight and aligned during the lift. I would say the more back-oriented the lift, the more I would use a controlled tempo, but not to the point where you would have to count. As with everything there is a learning curve. Tempo is something which is built to “injury-proof” the lifting process for the inexperienced.

Well, that’s all for now, I will say that I am not completely bashing tempo work through this article, I am just saying that there are probably better ways of doing things than tempo work, especially in light of Olympic lifters and powerlifters.

Good luck, and happy training,
Joel

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