Rep Speed Is Key To Muscle Gain: Part 1
When you’re going for muscle gain and increased strength with body weight exercises, the constant challenge is finding ways to keep up the intensity, every rep, every, set. It’s not like you can load up plates and blast out some heavy bangin’. So the trick is all about technique, fellas. In my previous posts I’ve covered destabilization and exercise sequencing, now it’s time to focus on repetition speed.
First, the principle: when you’re strong, “go blow” or “go slow”. In other words, once you’ve mastered the form of a given exercise and have a good level of foundation strength, you want your reps to fall on one of the two ends of the speed scale: fast and explosive, or slow and deliberate. This time around we’ll tackle go slow”.
The theory behind slow reps for muscle gain is simple: exaggerated, deliberately slow repetitions eliminate momentum so that the target muscles and their synergists are heavily stressed. What matters here is doubling or tripling the time under tension (TUT). In addition to generating more overall force, especially during negative reps (lowering your body more slowly actually requires more force than if you lowered it more quickly, which – you guessed it – increases strength faster), your muscles will also struggle to cope with the extra lactic acid created from a much greater number of muscle fibers recruited and cycled through to complete the set. And high lactate tolerance and clearance is a big marker of strength, power, and endurance, so you want a lot of that.
There is a warning, though: this style of training is painful! But it yields great results in strength and size. Here’s how to get started:
For your pushing and squatting-type exercises, begin by doubling your normal rep time. So if it takes you two seconds to drop into a squat, and two seconds to return to the top, double it to four seconds each phase. Same with all your push-up variations: most guys do a full rep (positive / negative) in a little over a second, so try doing each phase for a full second (count “one-one-thousand” on the way down, and the same on the way up) and build from there.
With pull-ups you have a challenge. You can easily perform Incline Chins with your feet elevated on a chair or bench and apply the technique as described. But when doing full free-hang Chins, you might get only 2 or 3 positive reps before your arms are toast. But this is no time for quitting! Solution: 1) Have a chair handy and perform the remaining reps as pure negatives, taking a small hop to the top of the bar and slowly lowering. 2) If you’re using an adjustable chin-up bar, reposition it lower until you’re at a level where you’re able to assist with one leg to complete all the positive reps for the full set, then gradually raise it higher as your strength increases.
Training with slow reps will give you rapid gains in strength and a boost in muscle size, but it takes a lot of heart and attention to technique. But, that’s what makes a bodyweight trainer a warrior. Until next time, keep bangin’!
