Rep Speed for Power, Strength and Size

The speed in which you execute a certain movement refers to term tempo or rep speed. The tempo being used can determine the after effect the lift has on the muscle group. The movement can be of two things when you lift a weight. It can be mere work that tires out the muscle or it can be a means of stimulating more muscle mass. The main difference between these two movements is the rep speed. For now, we’ll concentrate our interest in the dangers of what tempo you use during your workouts.

When you are simply just working out and not training for muscle growth is when your main interest is satisfying your ego of lifting a heavy weight, or even finishing a particular number of repetitions for a given set. This type of training is dangerous as poor form while working out can cause a lot of injuries to your muscle tissue and connective joints. Poor form during exercise includes, swinging, jerking the weight around, using body momentum to get the weight up any way you can.
And last but not least, let’s get down to the training aspect of applying rep speed to your exercises. You might not think it, but it’s important to know how you apply rep speed to your exercises as it can determine whether or not you meet your goals that you are seeking out. If you want to train for power and strength, then you want to generally apply an explosive type of rep speed. Let’s take the bench press for example. When you are in position to go down with the weight, you want to go down with the weight in a controlled and slow manner. And then once you touch your chest, push the weight back up in a explosive manner.

To be more specific, we can use a time ratio for your workouts. For the example I have just set, you can use the ratio 3:0:1. The first number 3 represents the number of seconds it takes for you to go down. The number 0 represents the number of seconds when you touch your chest. And the last number represents the number of seconds it takes for you to push the weight back up. As you can see, applying the right tempo for your exercises is very important when going about achieving your goals.

So let’s say you want to apply a ratio that promotes size while bench pressing. You can use the ratio 2:0:2, or even 2:0:3. The concept of it is the slower you go while repping out, the more muscle fibers you’ll contract which will result in more damage to the fast twitch muscle fibers. At the same time, you have to pay attention to how much weight you’re using. That general way of thinking or saying does not always result in muscle mass, as you still need to apply a certain stimulus to your muscle when trying to gain muscle mass. As training for power also results in muscle size. Finding the fine line of gaining muscle size and strength is not something you can figure out on the first workout. It will take a lot of trial and error as you find out soon within your training.