EXERCISE TEMPO AND WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT
Exercise tempo is a hugely important technique to use with your training. It’s something I use in every workout and have done for many many years, much to my benefit! Since I started using it, I noticed a massive difference to my own strength and body composition. Plus it also correlates well with improving your Mind to Muscle Connection.
Tempo is a great way of varying your workout and a term used to refer to the speed at which you execute the movement – time under tension (TUT). It’s a good way of using your muscles to control the weight instead of using momentum – or letting the weights fall with gravity.
If you’re training from home and don’t have access to weights heavy enough to elicit a better training response, you can use tempo to slow down the exercise, keeping it under tension for longer, and therefore creating more stimulus.
To explain how it works…
If you were to do a squat with a tempo of 3010, this is how it would work:
- the first number represents the eccentric part, so lowering the resistance in the descent and putting the muscle into a stretched position, so 3 seconds in this case
- the second number is the time at the bottom of that movement, the pause in a stretched position, so 0 seconds is no rest or pause
- the third number is the concentric load, so pushing away the resistance contracting and shortening the So you would push away from the floor back up to standing in a time of 1 second
- the fourth number is the rest (pause in a shortened position) at the top of that movement (back at the start), so 0 would be no rest at the top
Varying your tempo can bring different results and a general rule of thumb can mean exploding through a movement will help you to train for speed and power, whilst slow and controlled movements will help with hypertrophy (building muscle) and strength.
You could look at it that longer tempos improve body composition and can ultimately contribute to muscle gain and fat loss because the muscle is under tension for longer. I tend to stick to a 2121 or 3010 tempo for a lot of my exercises but again it depends on the exercise I’m doing and what I’m working towards. Sometimes it’s great just to throw in more variety to my workouts each week to mix things up.
There are so many ways to use tempo and I like to include tempo for most of the resistance exercises in my workout plans (other than any HIIT or metabolic exercises which, most of the time, are done at speed).
If you want to read more on Tempo Training, read the article here.
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