Programming & Periodizing Tempo & Momentum
-: It tends to be easier to gain strength
at slower speeds, than it does at faster speeds,
and there's a couple reasons for that.
One is, there's just simply
more neurological coordination
and execution required to do an explosive thing,
because you basically need to be able to handle
a super-high intense position,
and it's really your potential is, what can I do
in that first couple millimeters,
or that first tenth of a second?
What is my potential there?
Whereas when we're going slow
and the tension is relatively constant,
one, it's gonna be easier to execute,
because I don't have that huge amount of inertia
to overcome, and two, I get to take advantage
of the entire range of motion,
meaning that every inch of that range of motion
is a chance for me to maybe produce
a little bit more force or a little bit more tension.
It's not just how good can I be,
in that first bit of contraction.
I have the whole contraction to work with.
So I essentially have more of a chance
at getting more of that muscular tissue to fire,
and I could take advantage where I'm already
kind of neurologically more efficient,
or my body is used to training there,
so I have a little bit better execution, maybe,
in the mid-range, little bit better mind-muscle connection
in certain positions.
Basically, I get to take advantage of that whole
range of motion.
Otherwise, what you have to overcome that inertia,
that becomes a limiting factor.
So if you're not pretty balanced,
if you're not really good at creating stability
before the contraction, if you're not really good
at recruiting muscle on demand
when you need it, like immediately,
you're gonna be very limited to the amount of inertia
that you can overcome,
which means the loads that you're gonna use
are not going to be proportionate to what they should be,
in terms of the loads that you would need
to get the same strength benefit training fast,
versus what you can do slow,
because you just simply have more range of motion
that your body's gonna learn from and apply stimulus to.
So if we look at that, that doesn't mean
that you can't get fast, or strong,
training fast, that's actually the opposite.
If you need to get really strong,
you're going to also need to be able to train fast,
but from a skill perspective, if you're just starting out,
if you're trying to get strong,
you don't start training fast, you start training slow.
You learn how to execute, you learn how to stabilize,
you learn how to contract,
and then you start training faster
as your body can actually take advantage of it,
'cause your ability to overcome that inertia,
your ability to recruit more fast-twitch fibers,
and just more fibers in general, on conscious command,
without having a longer contraction
or a lot of external influences to make that happen.
Your potential for improvement is higher.
If we look at the eccentric,
I said that's the most unsafe portion to train fast, right?
So we wanna make sure that with that,
the speed of the eccentric is proportionate
to the range of motion, meaning
the bigger the range of motion,
the more important it is to control the eccentric,
because that's that much more space,
that's that much more range of motion
that that weight can generate momentum over that eccentric.
So doing a calf raise, it's a very small range of motion,
so even with a ton of weight
it can't generate that much momentum
unless you're completely dropping it.
In a squat, however,
or a pull-up, as you're going through that,
because it's a large range of motion,
there's a lot of potential for that weight
to all of a sudden start generating a lot of momentum,
whether it's your body in the pull-up,
or the weight on the bar in the squat.
So proportionately, a one-second eccentric
in a calf raise, might be the same
as a three-second eccentric on a squat.
And a six-second eccentric on a squat
might be the same as a two or three-second
eccentric on a calf raise.
So it needs to be proportionate to the amount
of range of motion,
and when you're using machines,
make sure you account for the momentum
of the weight on the machine,
not just how far your range of motion is.
You look at the range of motion that the weight
is going through, whether it's on a torque arm,
whether it's on a weight stack,
you take that into account, in terms
of how much that weight is moving,
'cause the greater those weights are moving through space,
the greater their range of motion is, right?
So if you see the weights and they're moving fast and far,
lot of momentum.
If they're not moving fast, not moving far,
not a lot of momentum.
If we look specifically at the concentric,
you'll see there are different options that we can
put in there, other than just numbers for the time duration.
The most common number you'll see in there is a one,
like a four zero one zero tempo,
three zero one zero tempo.
You'll see those a lot, where it's a one-second concentric.
But other things you will see is, you will see sometimes
an x prescribed, which means
that there's now an explosive intent.
So it's not about time,
it's actually saying the intent is explosive.
We're not getting a time, we're getting an X.
When we calculate this for time,
some coaches will still count that as a second,
other people will count it as zero.
Really, it should kind of be based off of what you're doing.
If it's speed work, and you expect
that this is gonna be a fraction of a second,
well then maybe you don't even count it.
If you're doing heavy work, but you want people
to be trying to move it fast,
but it's still gonna take a little bit of time
'cause you're working it like really high percentages
of like one R-M, or whatever,
well them maybe you count the one,
or you count the X as a second still.
If you just needed to calculate it for the time
under tension, which we're gonna get to
in a couple more slides, couple more topics.
The A is something that's not really often used.
If fact, I don't know if anybody uses it outside of us.
But that's for an acceleration-based intent,
where the goal is not necessarily to explode
from the beginning, but the goal
is to pick up intensity throughout the range of motion.
And what I like to equate that to,
especially if you have a good exercise,
like I really like doing this with the Prime equipment,
because you can setup the resistance
to increase as you're trying to accelerate into it.
So imagine that somebody was pushing on you,
and you were just trying to hold still.
The harder they pushed,
the more rigid and harder you would contract
into what they were pushing,
but you wouldn't necessarily be moving.
So we're looking at applying a similar concept
to weight training, so you are moving,
but what's gonna happen in certain exercises,
because of the resistance profile,
the weight is going to become heavier.
Alright?
Because of either mechanics,
or because of the machine, or whatever it may be.
So as that weight comes on stronger,
your intent may be to push harder into it.
So it's the idea of matching the resistance profile
with your intensity of contraction,
or sometimes we actually do want you
to start moving the weight faster,
but we want you to get through a specific part.
So an example of that would be something like a leg curl.
We're gonna talk about the mechanics of this in detail,
but what I'll tease you with is that the very bottom
of the leg curl, so like a lying leg curl
where your leg is straight,
the calf is gonna do a lot of the work,
but once you get to about 15 degrees in knee-bend,
so it's like you're here, and you get
that little bit of knee bend,
the hamstring starts to pick up, and the calf
starts to drop off.
So if we're trying to bias the hamstrings,
instead of using an X where you would explode
out of this position and the calf would do a ton of the work
because its got great mechanics there
and the hamstrings don't.
So your brain is gonna use whatever can do the job best.
But if instead, we allowed you
to get to 15 degrees knee-bend,
in that like nice, slow, and controlled,
and then we had you try and accelerate the weight
after that point,
all of a sudden what you would do
is you would jack up the amount of hamstring work
being done there.
So you'd kind of bypass the calf with nice control,
not generating momentum,
and then try and accelerate.
So you'd essentially be trying to peak the resistance curve
right where the hamstrings start gaining advantage.
And that would be the way we could get the most hamstring,
if we were trying to bias that.
And this is something that you can use
through a set, through a workout,
where you can start somebody off with one type of an intent
on the concentric, and then essentially perform
like a mechanical drop, by having them switch
where they're trying to create momentum from.
So you might have somebody start doing reps
slow and controlled, in an exercise that's very hard
at the end of the concentric,
so say like a leg extension.
You have them going slow and controlled,
and squeezing at the top, but as they fatigue,
they may not be able to get to the top anymore
unless you have them switch from this type of an intent
to an A or an X, where they're generating
a little bit of momentum,
to kind of counteract that resistance profile,
and allows them to extend the set
without having to lower the weight.
If anything, you actually added intensity
while still being able to go further,
simply because you changed
where that intensity was within the rep.
You changed it from being at the top, towards the bottom,
without even having to move a pin,
without even having to take a break.
So these are powerful tools that you can use
for extending sets, changing the resistance profile,
or biasing what tissue you're trying to use,
as long as you pick the appropriate intent
for what your goal is.
Back to our slides here.
So as you can see,
a lot of other things are gonna affect that, right?
Load, resistance profile, all of those things
you need to take into account with, to determine
what you need to apply, when you want to apply,
an X, an A, or a one.
And then how you would want to account for that,
in time, under tension, if you wanted
to have that as a variable.
It does affect the amount of time under tension,
but it affects it beyond just time,
because what we're gonna get here,
is that this is going to affect
the overall average intensity of a rep
and a set as well.
So it's gonna affect more things
than just the time of rep completion.
So in terms of math, yes, it affects the time under tension,
but in terms of volume and intensity,
an X, an A, or a one,
applied to a different resistance profile,
different exercise, may jack up the intensity,
may change where you're being loaded, or other things.
It's often said,
this is a Charles Poliquin quote, actually,
from the "Poliquin Principles", is that the brain's intent
determines the outcome of the stimulus,
not the actual bar speed.
So I'm gonna go a little bit further than that.
I'm gonna say the brain's intent determines
the neurological signaling today.
So what I'm doing today in training,
whatever my mental intent is, is gonna affect
how my body is trying to recruit that tissue.
And that's gonna be based off of what adaptations
I've gotten, how my body's learned to use that muscle,
and how I'm able to control that.
So it's my settings today,
with my intent, that's gonna affect
the performance of today.
However, the adaptations that I am going to get
do also depend on whether or not
I generate momentum or not.
And when we get into Course Two,
when we talk about neurological program design,
we will dig deep into why that's the case.
But I just wanna tell you that bar speed is important
for the adaptations, and when I say bar speed
it's not the actual speed,
it's whether or not a significant amount of momentum
is generated, so there is a difference
between having the intent to move something fast,
but it's so heavy that you can't generate momentum,
versus having the intent to move something fast,
and throughout that range of motion,
because of the momentum it actually becomes easier,
because those are two different pieces of feedback
for your body.
One is, I tried to move it hard,
and it was still frickin' hard.
And the other one is, I tried to move it hard,
and then it got easy because I created momentum.
Those are kind of two different stimuluses,
or two different levels of feedback
for the nervous system to go off of.
And we'll go into that, like I said, in detail,
in the later courses.
When we look at variation in tempo,
how important is it that I change tempo
within a program, within periodizing programs?
It can be very important.
I kind of touched on this at the beginning.
When you're using a lot of similar lifts,
so like if your program is built
around a lot of squatting, or a lot of dead-lifting,
or just any time that you have to repeat the same exercises
where making modifications to those
is not drastically going to change the resistance profile.
You might change the range of motion a little bit,
you might change some joint angles and stuff,
but relatively, the individual muscles
are experiencing a very similar resistance profile,
even though the range of motion may have changed slightly,
or the positioning may have changed slightly.
So okay, there's some different stabilization, whatnot,
that's all important, it's all good,
but changing the tempo then becomes more important
because you need to do something
to change the effect of that resistance profile.
So you need to change the tempo,
or use accommodating resistance or something,
in a more advanced person, to have an even greater effect.
And when we get into program design,
we'll talk about well, okay,
another way to accomplish this
would be doing pre-exhaust and post-exhaust,
and things like that.
But then we have to get into the biochemical side.
So without getting too far ahead,
it becomes more important to take advantage of the variables
that can influence the resistance profile,
and your performance in these exercises,
if you're having to rely on a lot of similar exercises.
So switching from squats to front squats,
or to high bar, to low bar,
or from heels elevated to heels, like,
all of those are variations of squats,
but they have the same resistance profile,
not a significant enough change without also probably
making some adjustments to the tempo to exaggerate
the small changes that those variations
in the exercise provide.
It becomes less important to change that
when you have a greater number of exercises
that have a large variation in the resistance profile.
So what it really comes down to, when you
can pick exercises that have a drastically different
resistance profile, then your tempo variation
needs to be whatever you need to actually get the stimulus.
If I'm working on a metabolic stimulus
versus a neurological stimulus,
that's what I'm gonna be basing my tempo off of.
Again, that's gonna take into account the number of reps
and the load, and all of those things,
the type of rep scheme that I'm doing,
am I doing super sets or straight sets or whatever.
So in that case, I'm not having to change the tempo
just simply because it's a different tempo than what I did,
I'm picking a tempo based off of the exercise
and the stimulus.
I'm not having to use a tempo of a way
of changing a very similar exercise.
So why I'm using a tempo variation here,
would be optimize the stimulus based off of whatever
that exercise may be, whereas here,
I'm having to change the tempo to make up for the fact
that these exercises just don't provide as big of a change
to that resistance profile.