Today I’m going to share some valuable information that will help you in your conquest to increase muscle mass. This post will be about the amount of time each set should take.
To understand this post, you will need to know about changing the tempo of your reps (see this article to read up on it). If you haven’t read it yet, I really recommend it as it greatly increases the intensity of your workout.
Time under tension is just a catchy way to say the ‘length of your set’. Different TUT’s give different results, for example to increase strength or to increase muscle mass. Here’s a quick example. If the tempo of our rep is:
3 – 2 -1
This means that the negative part of the rep is three seconds, holding at the bottom or contraction is two seconds, and then the explosion upwards will be one second. (If you don’t understand this see the tempo article). This means the full rep is six seconds. If you do 10 reps in one set, 10 X 6 is 60, so the full set is sixty seconds, but is this good for muscle stimulation?
Neural adaptions means there is an increase in central nervous system functions such as increased co-ordination between different muscles, and a better ability to recruit muscle fibers. Neural adaptions can also be called strength training or power training (increases your strength but builds little muscle mass).
Metabolic adaptions means a change in body structure (such as an increase in muscle fiber size). It is a fancy way of saying muscle building, and is what you must strive for if you want to increase muscle mass.
If you want to increase muscle mass (metabolic response), and then you will want to have your set last around 50 – 70 seconds. If you want to increase your strengh (neural response), your sets should last around 20 seconds. Taking the example above (321), if each rep was 6 seconds and we performed 10 reps, that’s 60 seconds under tension. That will give us perfect hypertrophy (muscle development).
I hope you enjoyed reading and took something from this article.
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