Tempo training is a very powerful weapon to have in your strength training arsenal. It provides many benefits to a lifter when used properly and with a clear intent such as strength gains, hypertrophy and injury prevention. It is also very useful when writing a program to have your tempo pre determined to allow a clear progression from training block to training block. Lets get into the details.

What is tempo training?

Tempo training is simply a pre-determined lifting pace delegated to a particular exercise. It is broken down into 4 numbers representing seconds and presented as eccentric/bottom position/concentric/top position

Example

              Bench 2/1/1/0

This means if you are bench pressing you should lower the bar for two seconds before reaching your chest, pause for 1 second at your chest, lift at a normal 1 second pace back to starting and wait 0 seconds before begining the next rep.

Sometimes when the exercise doesn’t start with an eccentric lowering portion it gets a little confusing, but it is still used the same way.

Example:

              Deadlift 4/2/1/2

Even though technically you are starting at the 3^rd number you do not change the order of the tempo. So this is read as lift as normal, lower for 4 seconds leave on floor for 2 seconds, lift at a 1s pace, hold at the top for 2 seconds, and repeat.

One last thing worth going over is the use of the letter “x” this means lift as fast as possible or explosively. This is used when trying to train the power of a certain movement.

Example:

squat 2/0/x/1

Lower at a 2 second tempo, no pause at the bottom, explode out of the whole, 1 second to reset at the top.

What are the benefits

You will read all types of benefits for tempo training I typically use it for only a couple specific reasons.

Training the neurological system

When first starting out with lifting or even just a new exercise the first couple months of training your body is learning how to best do the movement. Your body is learning new motor patterns and deciding which muscle should be turned on and which muscles should be turned off.

This is a prime time of training because this is an opportunity to learn good habits or bad habits. Either one will stick with you and be reinforced for years to come. This is my chance as a coach to set you up for success. I find that using tempos early on in a lifters career allows them to feel the movement and correct any bad habits a lot easier than if they were haphazardly bouncing through the reps without much thought.

Done correctly and with patience through my experience this produces a better movement pattern that has the potential to lift much heavier weights in the future.

Increasing eccentric capacity

As a client advances it may come a time that they are strong, but struggle handling large weights. This is because of several reasons, some fear based some neurologically based. I may prescribe for a short amount of time heavy eccentric only blocks where we overload a movement on the eccentric portion only.

Your muscles are 10-50% stronger eccentrically than concentrically. This means you can lower much more weight than you can actually pick up.

Training this phenomenon has two key effects

1. Desensitizing the body to increase its ability to handle load.

Human muscles contain organs know as golgi tendons that sense the load placed on it. When these organs sense too much force they inhibit the muscle from contracting any further as a natural protective mechanism. Gradually overload training causes these organs to increase there threshold for load.

2. Increasing the eccentric capacity of a particular lift.

In other words increasing the body’s ability to absorb force. Heavy eccentrics and high speed eccentric (plyometrics) produce high eccentric forces that when trained increase the body’s ability to absorb force and then act against them.

Caveat to heavy eccentrics.

It will not inherently increase your 1RM. Meaning if you test 1RM, implement this into you program for 4 weeks, then retest your 1 RM. It will not increase solely because of heavy eccentrics. But I feel as though a short stent of this type of training is important before the use of overspeed eccentrics such is jump squats to prepare the tissues for damage to come.

Injury prevention/Hypertrophy

I almost always prescribe tempos in the early phases of training for two main reasons. To increase muscle hypertrophy and to decrease the chance of injuries.

Hypertrophy

This one is easy. If you want more muscle you need to increase your time under tension. Tempos by the very nature of the concept, increases time under tension. Don’t get carried away here there is a ceiling effect more is not always better, but in general the more time your muscle is under load the more gains you will get.

I will deep dive into this subject in a different article.

Injury prevention

This one is less obvious, but some research has shown that eccentric training and isometric training both strengthen the tendons of muscles.  It is also claimed that eccentrics increase hypertrophy of the more distal ends of muscles, so for example eccentric squats and lunges will increase the bulk of tissue around the knee joint providing more stability. This is important when you are strength training. Injuries to long time lifters are commonly seen as some type of tendon inflammation or tearing.

By taking a proactive approach and training the body to be resilient to future beatings you set yourself up for long term and ongoing success. Injuries are no fun they are demotivating and take away precious time that can be better served getting strong. Plus who doesn’t like some more muscles.