What is Tempo?

Transcript

Alright, and then tempo. So tempo is something that’s gaining a lot of popularity in the training realm. So tempo, what is tempo? So, and why would we use tempo is another good question as well. So, tempo, tempo just basically manipulates the speed of which you move throughout different portions of a lift. So the first number in tempo, here, this represents the eccentric phase. So this is the lowering phase, or as the muscle is lengthening. So let’s use a squat, for example, at twice lowering would be a three second eccentric lowering. Okay, so three seconds down three, two, one, you’re now at the bottom of the squat. Okay, the second number is a pause at the sticking point, you can think about this as the 90 degree joint flexion point. But this basically is the bottom of the movement. Wherever this individual bottoms out or end-range, there is the pause. So a second number is a pause. So this is a one second pause. Third number is the concentric or muscle shortening, this would be the way up from a barbell back squat. And the fourth number is a pause at the top of a lift. So what tempo does is it provides a lot of instruction into how the athlete should move. So a lot of, a lot of people when they lift and train would just go through the motions aka, okay, I’ve set of 10, down and up, down and up, down and up, and so on. But if you manipulate tempo, so tempo can increase or manipulate the time under tension that an individual has. And it also can add purpose to power as well. So to add some specificity and purpose to train, so you can see the x here, the third, third variable in the sequence. So the x stands for move as fast as you can. So this individual in this, in this specific tempo, would be lowering themselves slowly for three seconds, pausing for a second at the bottom, and then having an all out acceleration to back to the top of the lift, and immediately going back into another eccentric portion, three seconds down and back up, let’s hit for five repetitions. So what we know about muscle hypertrophy, there’s really three ways to stimulate muscular hypertrophy in a general sense. You can either apply a lot of tension to the muscle, aka a lot of shear tension strength training, you can increase an individual’s time under tension or their volume, or you can imply a bioenergetic stress and demand. Okay? So what you can do with tempo is you can really manipulate the time under tension. You can, for example, this set that a person would do if they did five repetitions here, with three segments down one second pause at the bottom, and let’s say it takes another second for them to get to the top. That’s a five second repetition, whereas if somebody’s just going down and up, right, maybe it’s two seconds, one second down, one second up, and so on. So you can manipulate the time under tension to improve the hypertrophic adaptation and improve someone’s muscle size through tempo training.</span></span></p>