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Power Training

Power Training Workouts

Any bodybuilder who trains hard wants to make sure that the intensity of these hard workouts is rewarded with the predicted muscle growth over a 6 week period before changing the cycle. Eccentric training where the muscle lengthens has now proven by sports science to be a 60% stronger lift than a concentric lift.

When training to increase muscle mass we need to find a way of training that activates the most amount of muscle fibers in the targeted muscle group. Sports science tells us that the turnaround from the slow negative (eccentric) to the fast positive (concentric) activates the maximum amount of fast twitch muscle fibers.

It is vitally important to mention the jerk or the heave with a bounce with ANY momentum in it is just bad form and will only cause injury. The turnaround from the slow eccentric negative to the fast explosive positive needs to always be a very controlled movement with no bouncing or momentum involved.

As we know TUT (time under tension) is the reason a muscle starts any new sarcoplasmic muscle growth that might occur. Lowering a weight eccentrically for as long as 6 seconds followed by an explosive lift has shown in various studies to get the best results.

Any professional bodybuilder will explain the necessity to incorporate a wide variety of tempos over a year of training in order to keep the muscle in a constant state of adaptation. The professional bodybuilders use partial reps and rest-pause training to increase the TUT on a muscle as well as these explosive lifts.

It all depends on how advanced you are because if you have been training for less than a year then you will no doubt not be too concerned with training plateaus or sticking points where your strength has stopped increasing. Your first 18 months of regular weight training you will put on muscle as you get stronger simply because your body is forced to adapt if you are eating correctly.

For men and women who have been lifting weights for more than 18 months then you will need as many different alternatives to change your training cycle every 6 to 8 weeks. From changing the tempo to changing the rest periods between sets will all make a big difference to your adaptability to this new found strength that you have.

It will obviously depend on the movement one is doing as doing a 1-0-3 tempo, which means one second explosive lift with no pause at the top with a slow 3 second negative, is too fast for a movement like flyes or stiff-legged deadlift. One should always rather slow down than speed up to increase TUT by extending movements like this to a 1-0-6 tempo.