I am a voracious reader, so I relish receiving books on athletic and physical fitness training for review. Often I come across pearls, such as Randy Roach’s two massive volumes of his series
Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors, sometimes duds (pretty much anything from a mainstream fitness celebrity), and sometimes peculiar books that the publishers ultimately regret sending me.
One of the problems in the strength and conditioning profession is the unwillingness of writers to pay their dues by fully researching their subject matter instead of just rehashing something they found on Wikipedia. To give you an example, just recently I received a pre-press copy of a book on workout programs for the general population.
Let’s start with the author’s credentials. His academic background reminds me of a bumper sticker that says “I got a liberal arts education – would you like fries with that?” As for experience, he has trained a lot of people and has had a lot of hits on a videos he posted on YouTube (not because of content but because he had a searchable title). However, this guy hasn’t trained a single notable athlete or celebrity, and he doesn’t seem to have any exceptional athletic accomplishments himself or a remarkable physique – strike one. Strike two, and what got me especially interested in this book, was the way the author uses tempo prescriptions.
Instead of using proper terms such as concentric, eccentric and concentric, which are standard in exercise science, he conjured up some bizarre name, something like “eccentric peak contraction.” And there were inconsistencies in how he wrote the formulas, suggesting that he did not have a good understanding of how to design tempo prescriptions. Further, he did not use the letter “X,” which is an important part of the formula and describes moving the resistance as quickly as possible; instead, he simply made notes on these exercises to move “as fast as possible.”
When I brought these errors to the attention of the publisher, along with informing them that the author didn’t credit me for developing the modern version of this formula, they got their researchers on the case to determine if I was the originator of the formula. All they could find besides my own work was one book published in the late ’90s in which the author used a tempo prescription, and I happen to know where the ’90s author came up with the idea – a few years prior to his book’s publication, he had attended one of my seminars. And what was interesting about this writer is that he used the same tempo for every exercise, from squats to wrist curls. Nice try.
I can’t be on the lookout for everyone writing (correctly or otherwise) about tempo, but at least I would like to get credit for coming up with the formula. But let’s look at some of the beginnings of tempo to see why I felt the need for it. In this case, let’s look at the second and fourth numbers of my four-digit formula (such as 41X1), which refer to the two isometric parts of any exercise.
Beyond Charles Atlas
If you dig deep enough, you will find others who have talked about tempo, although more indirectly as they focused on just one component of the tempo formula. The best known was Charles Atlas, whose advertisements were often found in the back of comic books. In these ads, this bodybuilder (whose real name was Angelo Siciliano) promised that young men who used his course on isometric training could develop a strong, muscular body and would never have to face the humiliation of having sand kicked in their face at the beach.
In a self-published book called
Functional Isometric Contraction published in 1962, Bob Hoffman says that the advantage of isometrics is that it achieves the maximal amount of muscle tension. However, this is not true, as the highest level of muscle tension occurs with eccentric contraction. But Hoffman did make the following astute observation: “One of the biggest reasons for the success of the Isometric Contraction System of Training is the fact that strength is developed where needed and desired. In basic weightlifting movements such as the press and the curl, the weight remains at the most difficult part of the lift, often called the sticking point, for a fraction of a second. The sticking point in the press is about at head level. That is the point where so many lifters fail with their maximum presses.” A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and Hoffman correctly concluded that isometrics is one way to focus on a lifter’s weaknesses.
Now consider that at the time Hoffman wrote his book, Olympic weightlifting competition consisted of three lifts: press, snatch and the clean and jerk. Because the overhead portion of the press is relatively slow compared to the snatch and the jerk, isometric work has more carryover to the press because the weightlifter has more time to apply force. Translated into a force-velocity curve, the position of the press would be to the left of the force-velocity curve, and the snatch and jerk would fall more to the right. Likewise, isometrics would be more applicable to powerlifting due to the speed of movement of the powerlifting competition lifts: squat, bench press and deadlift. Likewise with strongman competition.
One sport that has done considerable research on the application of transfer of strength to sport performance is swimming, as isokinetic training methods have been popular in this sport. In isokinetic exercise the trainee applies resistance against a device that only allows a single, predetermined speed of movement. During a single repetition you can move fast, slow or somewhere in between – but you can’t do a combination of two or more speeds. What researchers have found is that training at slow speeds makes an athlete stronger at slow speeds but not at fast speeds, whereas training at fast speeds makes an athlete stronger at both fast and slow speeds – although the strength training effect from fast speeds is not as great as the effect from training at slow speeds. As such, although practicing the snatch will make a powerlifter better at doing deadlifts, it is not as effective for improving deadlifts as practicing deadlifts.
On a practical perspective, in my tempo prescriptions I found that prolonging the isometric contraction at the mid-point of an exercise has value in increasing muscle tension, which in turn increases strength and muscle mass. If trainees performs the bench press in a “touch-and-go” manner, they will be able to lift more weight than if they pause with the weight on the chest, as doing so dissipates the kinetic energy that develops in the tissues during the descent; research done in Australia suggests that it takes four seconds for this energy to dissipate completely. So to improve the start of a bench press, I might perform a cycle that has the athlete using a 44X1 tempo prescription, meaning they would pause for four seconds with the bar resting on the chest.