Why I Care SO Much About Rep Speed… (FAST vs SLOW)

Should you do fast reps or slow reps if your goal is to build more muscle? In this video, I’m going to answer the question of whether one rep tempo is better than the other and show you how to make whatever rep style work best regardless of what you choose.

That said, it is important to point out that both fast reps and slow reps have a place in your training program.

When to do each and how to apply each rep tempo is critically important if you want to get this training variable to work for you and help you to build more muscle.

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Let’s start with slow reps.

The one thing we know about performing reps more slowly is that your form should be perfect when doing them. What people don’t know is that the actual cadence of the reps is important and can be manipulated to get even better muscle growth. This is where a technique called trap sets comes in.

When performing a trap set, you want to do your first rep with a one second concetric and one second eccentric. The second rep should be performed with a two second concentric and two second eccentric. The third rep would be three seconds both up and down. Keep doing this until you have reached a 5 second concentric and 5 second eccentric. From here, you are half way done.

Now, reverse the order and once again perform a 5 second rep in both directions and work back down to 1 and 1 on your final rep.

By the time the set is done you will have performed 10 reps (using a 12-15 RM load) and accrued 60 seconds of tension on the set.

Now, the only reps in this set that are likely to be too easy to contribute to overall muscle tension are the first couple. That said, by the 4th rep you will already start to feel much more work being done by the target muscles and the degree of intensity is going to go up significantly. This helps to get to the more “effective reps” of a set more quickly even when using lighter weights and slower rep speeds.

If you choose to use faster, more explosive reps then you have to be conscious of drawing the line on form at some point.

For example, on a lat pulldown, if you use momentum to initiate the movement of the bar that is fine. We see this all the time on exercises like the barbell cheat curl for biceps or the cheat lateral for the delts. On a lat pulldown however, you want to stop the backwards movement of the torso at some point, lock it in and then use the lats and back muscles to pull the load the rest of the way (taking advantage of the momentum used to start the motion in the first place).

The key to this working however with fast reps is to control the eccentric on the way back.

You cannot speed through the concentric portion of a rep, or perform a rep explosively and then simply swing the weights back to the starting position. You have to control the weight back.

It is within this range that you get the benefits of the eccentric lengthening of a muscle and the stretch that subjects a muscle under load to damage that promotes growth through recovery.

There is a third way to perforrm reps as well and this is fast up and down and usually within an abbreviated range of motion. You can see this style of repetition performed by a lot of old school incredibly successful bodybuilders like CT Fletcher or former Mr Olympias. The keys to making this fast rep cadance work is two things.

First, the majority of this abbreviated range is occurring in the lengthened range of the rep where again we see hypetrophy benefits when under sufficient load. The second factor here is that these sets are performed to all out muscle failure. Without the intensity of the set being high enough you will not see enough of a stimulus for growth when performing reps this quickly.

Be sure to take these fast rep sets all the way to failure and beyond with some small partial reps in the terminal range at the end.

If you want a complete program that shows you how to mix these tempos for ultimate muscle growth, be sure to head to athleanx.com via the link below and get the new Warrior program.

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