Hi, does the time taken to do one rep matter, and how long should I be taking for one rep?
Good Question! Not a lot of people know, but changing the tempo of your lifting can seriously change the intensity of your workout.
The first thing to discuss is whether you want to increase strength or muscle mass.
To increase strength, we use what is called a giant set. This consists of a very heavy weight (90% of your one rep max) and few reps (2 – 5).
To increase muscle mass, we use what is called a crash set. This consists of lighter weights (60 – 70% of your one rep max), and more reps (6 – 12).
F (force) = m(mass) x a(acceleration)
Being a physics and maths mechanics student, I always love to bring equations and physics into the gym. So I’ll explain why the above equation is important.
To stimulate muscle growth we need to put a lot of tension of the way down, and use a lot of force on the way up. This is why people performing crash sets (see above) use the tempo 301 (I’ll explain later). Basically this means that the negative part of the rep (going down) is three seconds, the pause in between in no seconds, and then lifting the weight back up in 1 second. This is because on the way up we want to increase the force to stimulate maximum muscle growth, of course, using the equation above there are two ways to increase force:
This is why using a heavier weight, and a faster positive rep will always stimulate more muscle growth than going slowly!
This is really simple to understand, but is used a lot by bodybuilders and so is important to understand. The rep notation system is just three numbers used to say how long each movement of the weight should be in seconds. There are usually the push, hold and release stages of exercise.
Example: If I do a rep of chest press at 301, here’s what it means:
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