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REPETITION TEMPO

Recommended reading
What repetition tempo should I use?

Below is a research review of some of the topics touched upon during the lecture.

Muscle activation and total work

Henneman's size principle states that your motor units are recruited in an orderly fashion,
from slow-twitch to fast-twitch, to meet force production demands. Slow-twitch muscle
fibers are always active and the fast-twitch fibers only kick in when things get tough.

Since you can consciously decide to move a weight faster, this acutely increases muscle
activity. However, if you take a set to failure, the net total muscle activity over the set is not
inherently affected by repetition tempo, at least not during simple exercises like the leg
extension, because you’ll exhaust all motor units anyway.

Still, training with a faster tempo does allow you to perform more total work, at least up to
the point where you’re not sacrificing form or performance to be more explosive [2, 3, 4, 5
– you shouldn’t have needed these references to know this is true!]. Keogh et al. (1999)
found that to complete a 5 RM on the bench press with a 10 second repetition tempo, the
load had to as low as 55% of 1RM (compared to ~85% with an intuitive tempo) and muscle
activation in the pecs and triceps was lower throughout the entire set compared to a
traditional 6 RM set.

In turn, higher force outputs when training with an explosive tempo can increase anabolic
signaling in a muscle, at least during isokinetic eccentric contractions.

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Muscle growth, power and strength

But does the extra work and force produced during training with a faster tempo result in
greater muscle growth? During isokinetic, eccentric contractions it does [2]. This is likely the
result of the greater mechanical tension.

But what about during free-weight, dynamic contractions?

Young & Bilby found that concentric rep tempo did not affect the development of strength,
size or power in a strength training program. However, the authors noted that statistical
power was low due to high variation in the data. Notably, rate of force development
increased by 68.7% in the explosive tempo group compared to 23.5% in the slow tempo
group, but this difference did not reach statistical significance.

In other research it did. Using an explosive concentric tempo during the bench press
resulted in greater strength and power development in first division football players and in
untrained men.

In strength trained men, training with an explosive tempo during the bench press even made
the difference between good and virtually no progress in strength. Muscle activity was also
higher with the faster tempo. Remarkably, these major differences occurred despite the slow
training group training to failure and the explosive group only training until a 20% decrease in
speed was achieved every set. Similarly, even when equated for time under tension,
explosive bench pressing results in greater muscle activity and metabolic stress than using a
slower tempo.

Moreover, the eccentric tempo was slow in both groups of Young & Bilby. This meant
neither group could make good use of the stretch-shortening cycle (that’s recommended
reading). The most important point here is that the stretch-shortening cycle is not simply a
result of elasticity and passive energy storage. A fast muscle stretch potentiates muscle
activity during subsequent contractions. The stretching-shortening cycle is why you’re
stronger and muscle activity is higher during a regular squat than during a box squat (even
when the squat’s 1RM was used to determine box squat intensities, which in fact made the
box squats being performed at a higher intensity). So you can move more weight by making

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use of the stretch-shortening cycle and this is accompanied by a greater amount of active
work done by the muscle tissue. That can benefit muscle growth, strength and power.

Sampson & Groeller did not find any advantage to utilizing the stretch-shortening cycle
compared to controlling the eccentric contraction for 2 seconds in terms of strength
development or muscle growth. However, they equated training volume between the
groups, which defeats the entire purpose of utilizing the stretch-shortening cycle: being able
to do more reps. Moreover, their program consisted of solely simple biceps curls, not
compound exercises.

Fast eccentric contractions can also increase muscle length, which in turn can increase how
much the muscle can grow. The longer the muscle, the bigger it can get.

Thirdly, the exercise program of Young & Bilby consisted of half squats. During full squats, a
fast tempo will help overcome the sticking point midway in the squat and thereby match
your strength curve to the exercise’s resistance curve (discussed in more detail later). This is
the premise of the concept of Compensatory Acceleration Training (CAT). This is likely the
reason for why leg extensions and half squats don’t seem to benefit from being explosive,
while the benefits in the bench press are unquestionable.

Pareja-Blanco et al. (2014) studied the effects of a full squat training program performed with
a fast vs. a slow tempo. The explosive training group had a strong trend towards greater
strength gains in the squat, 86% more in fact, and greater jumping ability, a measure of
power. Similar results have been found during isokinetic leg pressing. Another study also
found that a more explosive tempo during the squat increased power and some measures of
strength in women. Metabolic stress and neuromuscular fatigue are also higher when
squatting explosively. Other research confirms that squatting more explosively increases
muscle activity and that explosive squatting induces greater neuromuscular fatigue even if
volume is equated between groups.

So there are clear mechanisms for increased muscle growth during explosive free-weight
exercise: increased mechanical tension and increased metabolic stress.

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Munn et al. (2005) studied the effect of training tempo on strength and size development
during isokinetic biceps curls. The faster tempo led to significantly greater strength gains.

This was likely due to the greater work done in the group with the faster tempo, as other
research has found that equating volume during slow and fast free-weight biceps curls
reduces the difference in strength and power gains. Similar results have been found for the
quads.

There was also a negative interaction between volume and tempo in Munn et al.’s study. This
makes sense. We know there are diminishing returns to volume and the positive effect of an
explosive training tempo is primarily the result of being able to do more work. So in effect,
sets with a fast tempo count extra compared to slow sets in terms of training stress. If
you’re already doing enough total volume, there’s likely little extra benefit to using a fast
tempo. In fact, it may in that case cause overreaching (discussed in the course topic on
periodization).

Muscle hypertrophy was unaffected in Munn et al.’s study. However, just like in Young &
Bilby’s study, muscle growth was measured by limb girth and there was no diet control. This
is not only inaccurate, it is also biased against the faster training tempo. The faster tempo
will result in a greater training volume and thereby slightly greater negative energy balance.
You wouldn’t expect this to have a major impact, but looking at the results below, there
indeed appears to be a trend for greater loss of fat on the arms in the more explosive
training group. This makes it difficult to say anything about the magnitude of muscle growth
other than that the effect of explosive training is not large.

Schoenfeld, Ogburn and Krieger performed a meta-analysis about rep tempo, showing no
effect on muscle hypertrophy. It can be argued that these results imply rep tempo does not

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matter for muscle hypertrophy, but this interpretation is confounded by not controlling for
training intensity in all but one of the included studies, which was the above Young & Bilby’s
study. The lower intensity will cause a greater training volume, which can outweigh the
benefits of training with a faster tempo, since the whole benefit of training explosively is that
you can do more work.

At very low intensities (below 60% 1 RM), like that used by many of the studies for some
unfortunate reason, it may even be the case that a slow tempo is more beneficial than a fast
tempo [2, 3]. This is likely because the slow tempo keeps your reps within a reasonable
range, whereas a fast tempo will shift the training stimulus too far into the endurance realm.
Intuitively, a deliberately slow tempo is required to make a low intensity weight difficult
enough to control.

However, in late 2015 Herman-Montemayor et al. came out with a high quality study on
repetition tempo (a more comprehensive publication of Schuenke et al. (2012)’s data). 34
Previously untrained women performed an 8 week strength training program for the lower
body. They performed 3 sets of 6 – 10 repetitions to failure, either with a traditional tempo
of 1 – 2 seconds per concentric/eccentric contraction or with a slow tempo of 10 second
concentrics and 4 second eccentrics. Both groups progressed as fast as they could in weight,
so this was a practically relevant study design. Moreover, muscle growth was measured
directly via biopsies.
The traditional training group achieved a greater increase in satellite cell number and
myonuclear domain size. They also achieved significant growth in the cross-sectional area of
all muscle fibers, whereas this only occurred in type IIa and IIx fibers for the slow tempo
group. The mean total increase in muscle fiber area did not differ significantly between
groups, but the increase in the traditional group was almost 4 times as great and significant
at a lower p-level (see graph below).

As such, these findings strongly suggest that a traditional tempo is better for muscle growth
than a very slow tempo, even in untrained women.

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All in all, it is quite clear that an explosive repetition tempo benefits high intensity strength
and power development. For muscle growth, the trend is in the same direction, but the
research is less convincing. The reason for the lack of greater muscle hypertrophy in some
of the research may be because of the lack of greater muscle activity during simple isolation
exercises. The actual recruitment and exhaustion of muscle fibers is ultimately all that
matters, not time under tension or total work.

It is probable then that during exercises like full squats and bench presses, an explosive
tempo will result in greater growth, because here this can increase muscle activity via the
stretch-shortening cycle and compensatory acceleration training. The importance of these
mechanisms is supported by the finding that when training the bench press and squat with a
constant repetition speed (as opposed to explosively pushing through your sticking points),
training faster no longer develops greater strength. Isotonic machines keep the force
constant throughout the movement, making the use of CAT impossible.

And there’s an additional mechanism by which training with a fast rep tempo could increase
muscle growth. Training for strength and power can increase your nervous system’s ability
to recruit motor units. This results in higher levels of muscle activity during training. As such,
it is likely that the greater strength and power increases when training with an explosive
tempo will over the long run translate into increased muscle growth.

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Given the potential benefits, an explosive training tempo should be the default repetition
tempo for most strength trainees. The research is clear for overall tempo and the
concentric phase of resistance exercise. However, during isotonic exercise the research is
more conflicting for the eccentric phase. Pereira et al. (2016) found a trend towards not
only greater muscle growth but also greater strength development when performing Scott
curls with 4 second eccentrics compared to 1 second eccentrics. In spite of what the title of
this unprofessional looking publication from Brazil suggests, however, neither difference was
actually statistically significant. There was a trend in effect sizes, but there were only 6
subjects per group and no power analysis was performed. And again, the Scott curl was
studied, not a technical compound exercise that would plausibly benefit more from the
stretch-shortening cycle or compensatory acceleration training. Moreover, in private
correspondence with Menno, Paulo Eduardo Pereira clarified that “The total work was
equalized between the groups.” This would suggest that the faster tempo group was not
allowed to train with heavier weights, rendering the study results irrelevant for practical
purposes where heavier weights are the very goal of a faster tempo. He unfortunately
stopped responding when asked to confirm whether total work or only repetition volume
were equated.

A final interesting thing worth mentioning is that training with a slower eccentric may reduce
IGF-1 production. As you’ve learned, the relevance of acute anabolic hormone elevations is
questionable, but since IGF-1 directly links mechanotransduction to mTOR activity after
resistance training, it could be an indication of inferior muscle growth. Other hormones are
generally unaffected, though the increased work during explosive training can increase
cortisol production to mobilize energy.

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Practical application
Training with an explosive concentric movement allows you to perform more work and
develop more power and strength. Making use of the stretch-shortening cycle and
compensatory acceleration training to overcome sticking points can also increase muscle
activity, metabolic stress, mechanical tension and IGF-1 production, particularly during free
weight exercises. These advantages are likely to result in greater muscle hypertrophy over
the long run, but the benefit will probably be small based on the current research.

These benefits seem to apply specifically to the concentric phase of movement; for the
eccentric phase the research is more ambiguous. As such, more control of the movement is
advisable for bodybuilding type training during eccentric muscle contractions. This makes
sense in the light of accommodating resistance training. Since you are stronger during the
eccentric phase of movement, slowing down the movement here allows you to effectively
reduce your strength to match the resistance, resulting in high levels of mechanical tension
during the entire exercise. To benefit from controlled eccentrics but also the stretch-
shortening cycle, you can implement what Menno calls Accommodating Tempo Training
(ATT). ATT instructs that repetition speed should be explosive during difficult portions of an
exercise and more controlled during easier portions of an exercise. During the difficult
portions and particularly the sticking point, compensatory acceleration training should be
implemented and you should take advantage of the stretch-shortening cycle.

For example, during the bench press, starting at the top of the movement, you slowly lower
the weight to your chest. A good cue is that ‘you should be able to pause the movement
during any part of the eccentric phase’. During the very last part of the eccentric, you
accelerate the descent to potentiate the stretch-shortening cycle. As soon as the bar
reaches your chest, you then explosively push it up past the sticking point. Once you’re
passed the sticking point, you can more gently push the weight out to full lock-out. (This
example assumes the sticking point is just above the chest, as it is for most people during the
bench press.)

ATT is difficult to coach, however, particularly online. For simplicity’s sake, you may simply
want to instruct your clients to simply focus on performance and not worry about the exact
movement cadence, certainly not count it. An alternative instruction is to let clients perform

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the concentric phase with the intent of maximal performance and the eccentric phase with
more control, enough to be able to pause the movement at any point.

When instructing your clients, beware of the difference between explosive movement and
maximal performance. For men there is often very little difference. However, for women a
maximally explosive tempo often does not result in maximal performance as you’ve learned
in the course topic on gender differences. Since most people are intuitively very good at
maximizing performance when they don’t have to think about anything else, it is generally
preferable to instruct people to think of maximal performance rather than being explosive.

Injuries pose an exception to the above recommendations. When injured or when injury risk
is high, training with a controlled tempo is an effective method to avoid aggravating the injury
while still stimulating the target musculature. We’ll get back to this in the course topic on
injuries.