Adapt or die. It is true in business, culture, and for the purpose of this article, training the human body. Keep training the same way for a few months with no changes, and you will see your gains stall and start going the wrong direction. The human body thrives on maintaining it’s nice comfortable state, so it is up to you to figure out ways to induce adaptation and reach an athletic state others thought impossible!
Since we know that we have to eventually change our program, we must be educated on the principles of variety in training. There are two basic ways that we can do this: Switch the exercise itself, or switch the volume/intensity that goes into the exercise that I am currently doing. Most of us are familiar with cycling in and out various exercises into our program.
 The key I want to share with you today however is:
“There are many options in changing the variables of a single exercise; enough to ensure continued adaption throughout the training year without taking the exercise in and out of your program.”
In layman’s terms, that means that you don’t have to switch exercises all that much in your training program. There are a lot of ways to change the ways that a single exercise is performed. For example the barbell front squat to “femur parallel” is a staple of my training programs. I like keeping this exercise in my program the majority of the year. What changes is the way that me and my athletes perform the exercise. The sets, reps, tempo, resistance type, and rest periods of the lift can be constantly altered to change muscle tension, CNS strain, metabolic development, mTOR stimulation, speed and power.
There are four main ways you can change the dynamics within an exercise itself:
- Speed Variability
- Tension Variability
- Repetition Variability
- Intensity Variability
For the first article in this particular series, I will be talking about variability of speed in lifting, how it affects muscle tension, and why it is such an important part of training to recognize.
Variable Speeds
The rate in which lifts are performed can and should vary.
When I first encountered the thought of variable training speeds for anything aside from injury prevention, I thought it was a stupid idea. I was a “compensatory accelerationist” all the way. Basically, I thought that every lift needed to be performed with an all-out speed on the up phase to ensure maximal neural recruitment for any athlete training for power. Any slow or moderate speed wouldn’t achieve maximal recruitment and was therefore a waste of time. I now realize that I was wrong on several levels.
Lifting weights at maximal speeds has a nice sound principle in terms of neural adaptation (and is great for some maximal strength and explosive adaptation), but we need to remember that in training, weightlifting has three main purposes.
Purposes of Strength Training
- Improving the number of motor units recruited in basic skills such as squatting, pressing, or hip extension.
- Improving the amount of muscle tissue available for a specific action (increase the motor pool)
- Reducing chances of injury by increasing joint stability and muscle/tendon unit strength.
After considering the point of weightlifting, we must remember, is that all training, including lifting is complementary. We can’t rely on lifting for ultimate neural efficiency in our sport as much as we do actually performing our sport. If you want to jump higher, you will achieve the ultimate neuromuscular adaptation through maximal jumping. If you want to sprint faster, you will achieve your ultimate CNS profile through actually sprinting. What strength training will do is help to raise the ceiling of your performance, and keep you safer and more injury free while you get there.
Remember, we are athletes who lift, not lifters who happen to be athletes.
Lifting fast does have benefits though, and actually… a lot of them. Quick and powerful lifting will really improve neuromuscular gains. For short bursts, it will ensure that the body is recruiting all available muscle fibers, including the important type II fast twitch. This is important to consider, especially when you make sure you are moving heavy weights as fast as humanly possible. In short term, 3-week study, fast lifting has destroyed slow lifting performance in terms of strength gain (Padulo 2012), but the problem is that it won’t help much with the metabolic development of a muscle. (After all, you can only lift heavy weights fast so much before your CNS rebels!) In order to improve in both the size and strength realm, metabolic adaptation is also necessary. Strength guru Charles Poliquin puts it well when he says, “Explosive ballistic contractions such as Olympic lifts bring about more central nervous system adaptations, while slow-speed lifting with varied eccentric and concentric time phases bring about more metabolic adaptations, such as increases in muscle glycogen, creatine phosphate, ATP, PFK, and Krebs cycle activity.”
Mel Siff notes in “Supertraining” that adaptations and performance increases brought about by muscle hypertrophy are longer lasting then those brought about by neural increases, so it is especially important to make sure you are getting some metabolic, hypertrophic improvement in your training in your early season to carry you through your highest levels of competition.
An important concept is that we can get maximal motor recruitment for sport, in a specific manner through jumping, sprinting, plyometrics, etc. When slapping a barbell on our backs, we can only come so close. It therefore makes sense to remember that the metabolic adaptation of lifting is pretty darn important, unless you are in a position where you absolutely can’t gain any weight.
Speeds in lifting can vary greatly. The typical prescriptions are anywhere from “as fast as possible” to around 10 seconds per repetition depending on what the goals are. Tempo is written out in a 3 number format: E-I-C. For example a 3-0-2 tempo would indicate spending 3 seconds on the eccentric (down part) of the lift, zero seconds at the bottom, and then two seconds on the way up. A quick note… most athletes strongly dislike tempo (it is an ego hit, you can’t lift as much! and it is harder! Most athletes by nature will pick easy, ego boosting work over harder work that might make them look like a sissy!).
Research noted by Yuri Verkhoshanski in his “Special Strength Training Manual for Coaches” has shown us some valuable information for the practice of lifting tempo in our traditional lifting. A Soviet study spanning 45 training sessions showed the strength gains of groups using 4 different speeds of lifting in the squat: Fast, Medium, Slow, and Very Slow. There was also a group that combined all of these methods together in their training program.
Each group saw fairly similar gains during the first 15 training sessions, but it was the following 30 training sessions that made the difference.
The moderate speed training group was found to further improve strength in the second 15 training sessions, where all other speeds, including the fast speed training group either stalled or went backwards. The fast training group actually recessed the most after the initial 15 sessions, perhaps due to a bit of CNS overreaching. The moderate speed training group ended up with almost 100% better strength gains than the high speed group after 45 training sessions.
The kicker though, was that the combined group, the one that used the four different training speeds throughout the training program, gained more than any other group that used only one training speed. In fact, it blew the other training groups away in results! This leads us to assume that in order to make maximal gains in strength, a variety of rep speeds need to be utilized. Poliquin has stated, regarding the combination of methods: “A combination of high and low velocity training produces greater strength and body composition results than either one alone.”
The “Evil Russian”, Pavel Tsatsouline recommends slower reps due to higher amounts of tension that can be built up in the muscle during these exertions. It takes a few seconds to reach maximal force in any movement, so performing lifting a bit more slowly will allow higher tension to be maintained in the muscles for longer. Pavel also reminds us that athletes with the most superb muscular definitions are those who are involved in sports requiring slow exertions, such as gymnastics. So when it comes to building size and strength, think moderate/slower forceful exertions, and for speed, power, and minimizing size gain, think faster reps.
Practical Application
Training tempo is important to consider, but we must remember that training needs to be as simple as possible. Going crazy with the tempos involved in lifting can lead to a bit of confusion. I think that tension in lifting can be made simple by utilizing either slow eccentrics or isometric holds at key points in the lift.
I will often employ moderate or fast tempo lifts, combined with isometric holds in the pre-season training of my athletes. I feel like this allows athletes to enjoy the feeling of moving weights quickly, but it also allows for the benefits of the stability and tension that the isometric can generate in the lift. My favorite lift for this is the squat, where we will often do iso-holds at the bottom of the lift prior to exploding up. We also make use of barbell hip-thrusts and glute bridges with mandatory iso holds at the top. This iso-hold work often preludes faster tempos seen in the competition period. My athletes make good use of slow eccentrics as well in early training, and if you want a real hamstring blaster, try 5 second eccentrics on the glute-ham machine.
Bottom line: Try and put some slower “high tension” work in the early phases of your yearly training plan. See…. simple! Also realize that squats and deadlifts by nature will be slower and create more tension than your Olympic lifts, so if you are using both in your program, you won’t be that terribly far off of the optimal balance.
Check out this picture of some practical programming including tempos for long jumper Dwight Phillips to get an example of the use of tempo in a training template. This is a June training phase, so it is an early outdoor competitive phase. The specific tempo here is 4-0-X, with “X” meaning as explosive as possible.
In Summary:
- Fast lifts boost the nervous system with limited metabolic improvements
- Slower lifts maximize tension and time under tension and improve metabolic and size gains in muscle
- For best results in strength training, both fast and slow repetition speeds should be used
- Practical periodization would involve slower lift tempos transitioning to faster lift tempos.
Thanks to my references:
Easy Strength. Dan John and Pavel. 2011 Dragon Door Publications
Effect of different pushing speeds on bench press. Padulo J, Mignogna P, Mignardi S, Tonni F, D’Ottavio S.
International Journal of Sports Medicine. 2012 May;33(5):376-80. Epub 2012 Feb 8.
Periodization Training for Sports: Tudor Bompa. 1999
Power to the People! Pavel Tsatsouline, 1999. Dragon Door Publications
Supertraining. Mel Siff. 2000
Tran, Q. Docherty, D. Boehm, D. “The effects of varying time under tension and volume load on acute neuromuscular responses.” European Journal of Applied Physiology. 2006. Nov 98(4). 402-410.
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