How to find the correct lifting speed for your weight training workouts
Lifting speed is an important component of your weight training workout. Find out the best lifting speed for muscle and strength results.
Before going in to the details of concentric and eccentric muscle movements, I would like you to discover a very important fact about muscular tension.
The more time the muscle is under tension, the better the stimulation. This applies both to muscle building and strength training.
This brings us to the all important rep speed.
"The best rep speed for muscle and strength gain is to perform the given exercise in a slow, controlled manner, taking at least 1 second to lift and 2 seconds to lower the weight".
This ensures that your muscles are maximally stimulated. I assume that you are training with adequate load which allows you to fail in the recommended range of repetitions.
Its the quality and not necessarily the quantity of the lift that create results in mass and strength. Quality reps produce quality results.
P.S. - If you are training for explosive power , its best to train with faster speed and condition your muscles and nervous system{ neuromuscular system} to produce power faster as required in some sports activities like shot puts and sprinting.
This does require you to do exercises as fast as you can. Remember Rocky Stallone training before his boxing match. He was training for power as shown by his rep speed.
What is an concentric and eccentric movement?
A repetition involves two moves.
The positive move also called concentric moves is when you actually lift weight using your muscles as in bench press exercise when you lift the weight off your chest.
Concentric Move
An eccentric move is when you lower the weight towards your chest in a slow, controlled manner. It is also called as the negative.
Eccentric Move
Its best to perform your negatives slowly as studies show negatives promote maximum micro trauma and thereby more stress. Some people do take negatives to extreme wherein they ask the spotter to provide manual resistance during their negative move. More on this in the advanced section.
2 more points to remember
Sometime if the weight is easy you might train with faster rep speed. You need to add more weight for a better workout.
On the other hand if you are unable to maintain the above rep speed formula you might be training with heavier weight than you can handle. It time to reduce the weight and concentrate on your rep speed. This is an excellent intensity technique. Try it and you will email me just to thank!
Please remember slow negatives may be responsible for muscle soreness as I discussed in the DOMS section.
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