Don't Rush Good Work ⏱️

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💡 Don't Rush Good Work

If you’re a fellow weight lifter, chances are you’re aiming to get stronger and build some muscle. The speed at which you complete each repetition (tempo) is probably not something you’ve given much thought to. You pick the weight up, do your reps, and put it down again; which is understandable. Tempo might not seem valuable, but you could be missing out on some serious gains by overlooking it.

Let’s change that! The two main areas I want to focus on today are the lowering phase and the deep stretch.

I’m going to use two examples: the humble bicep curl and the glorious squat. The lifting part of each exercise is straightforward. For the curl, it’s bending your elbow and curling the weight up. For the squat, it’s going from a deep squat back to standing again AKA the hard part.

Now, let’s focus on the next part: the lowering/lengthening phase. To complete another rep, you need to take your muscle back into a lengthened state. This is called an eccentric contraction, and it’s the strongest contraction we can perform. In other words, you can handle more weight lowering it back down than you can lifting it up.

So, let’s put that strength to good use and slow down that lowering motion increasing the challenge on that muscle. Instead of just dropping back down into the next squat, take a good 3-4 seconds to control that lowering phase. Feel your muscles slowly stretch back out.

Won’t that be harder? Absolutely! It’s going to be much tougher to perform ten slow and controlled reps than it is to do fifteen quick ones.

If that wasn't fun enough, let’s add the deep stretch. At the end of that lowering phase, your muscle will be in a deep stretch under load. We want to pause here for a solid 1-2 seconds.

For your bicep curl, that’s when your arm is straight with the weight stretching your bicep. For the squat, that’s the squat position where your glutes and quads are in a deep stretch.

Why? Research shows that exercises performed with a pause in the deep stretch position lead to better muscle activation, strength improvements, and muscle hypertrophy (building muscle) compared to those without.

Take home:

Perform a slow lowering phase on each exercise and hold the deep stretch for 1-2 seconds before performing the next repetition. This might mean dropping the weight, but the value and benefit from each rep will be much higher. No sense rushing good work!

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P.S. If you enjoyed this week's Thursday Three, please share it with a friend.

Thanks,

Jamie