Training at a fast rep speed increases the pace at which your muscles can move a given weight. The faster you can move a given weight, the more power you have. Power is important for overall muscle strength because it helps you accelerate a weight, so increasing power will successfully increase your strength.
If you're looking to build muscle quickly, whether you've been training for years or are just starting out, then doing slower reps is the way to go. Workouts with slower reps cause your muscles to experience more time under tension, much more than with faster reps.
Basically, there's minimal or no resting time during the set. Pros of doing it fast: “Fast repetitions can help you gain strength and build muscle endurance,” says Khemani. Akshar is quick to add, “Weight training at a faster pace involves a greater overall muscle engagement and build muscle endurance.”
Slow down your reps. The time your muscles spend under tension matters. That's where progress happens. Whether you're trying to build muscle mass, endurance or strength, you have to load muscles over time to induce a training effect.
The main benefit of partial reps is that they allow you to keep constant tension on the muscle throughout the movement. This isn't normally a problem with heavy, compound lifts, which cause a large amount of tension through the full range of motion.
Ronnie Coleman wants to make sure that his shoulders are under constant time under tension throughout the whole set. And the only way to do that is to press with a partial range of motion. Of course there are other ways to use partial reps to build huge delts.
The other crucial point is to use partial or half-reps to keep the constant tension on the pecs. Wheels has to actually check his phone to see what exercises are coming up next.
Summary: Lifting weights with a fast tempo is superior to lifting weights with a slow tempo because this leads to a larger increase in strength, which ultimately leads to more muscle gain over time. As a general rule, aim for a 1—1—1 weightlifting tempo for all of your exercises.
The lowering of the weight, slowly or just under control, causes muscle trauma, which in turn leads to the birth or recruitment of nascent muscle cells known as satellite cells. Bring enough of them on line, and you've reconstructed your muscles to be bigger and badder.
Explosive movements increase muscle fiber recruitment. Simply put, the more muscle fiber you activate, the more fibers you can exhaust while training, increasing muscle size.
Lifting heavy weights with low reps won't help you lose much weight, but it will help you maintain hard-earned muscle while losing fat. High reps (12 or more reps per set) build muscular endurance but don't really build strength.
This is because performing an exercise in a slow and controlled manner reduces your reliance on momentum to move the weight. Reducing momentum increases the quality of contraction and increases time under tension, thus increasing the potential to stimulate hypertrophy.
Truth is, high-rep sets increase muscular endurance, but not necessarily fat-burning. You can actually get more ripped training in the 8-12-rep range, as this is what's been identified as the best rep count for adding muscular size. Where muscle mass increases, so does metabolism.
If the goal is to develop hypertrophy (muscle growth), then research suggests that one should stick to a cadence of one to two seconds on the concentric (lifting) phase and three to four seconds on the eccentric (lowering) phase.
Reps for muscle growth
In order to get bigger and stronger, you must ensure your muscles work harder than they are used to. Generally, between 6-12 reps for 3-6 sets will help to build overall muscle size.
Most people have a very high proportion of slow twitch fibers in their calves, so they're going to be particularly difficult to grow.
But how fast should you go and what's the ideal rep speed? Based on Schoenfeld's meta-analysis, between 2 seconds to 6 seconds per rep seems optimal for muscle growth.” “But closer to 2 seconds (faster reps) seem to be slightly more beneficial.
So, in general, low reps with heavy weight tends to increase muscle mass, while high reps with light weight increases muscle endurance.
For a lot of strength athletes an unloaded, 45-pound barbell doesn't feel like much at all.
Wheels is starting with 175 mg of TRT a week, noting that's “on the higher side of being a natural healthy male in his prime.” He plans to get blood work done and work with his doctor to adjust as needed.
Bodybuilders spend hours at the gym building large amounts of muscle mass, and they support that with regular feedings—this usually means six meal times a day. Of course, these aren't runs to Burger King. Bodybuilders typically have protein at every meal, some consisting of shakes.