P.E.D.'s
February 16, 2018
“Strange, what being forced to slow down could do to a person.” Nicholas Sparks
In almost every area of our lives there’s an underlying current - an invisible hand if you will - compelling you to move faster. Maybe you only feel this in your professional life, or maybe there’s a personal desire to be ahead of your current position. As that pressure builds you might find yourself feeling short on time, rushing everywhere, and unable to focus. But what if I told you that you might be making a huge mistake by rushing your workouts and, more specifically, movement.
In 2003 I began training with The Strength Sensei, Charles Poliquin. One of the first changes he made in my training was to slow things down. He wasn’t expecting me to spend two hours in the weight room every day. He was expecting me to spend 60 minutes. He was going to optimize my time in the weight room by manipulating the speed of each lift and the duration of my rest (We’ll discuss rest period later). When I joked that he sounded like my mother or maybe the neighborhood lifeguard when I was 12- “Slow down, Adam.” He had a slight grin like he was about to teach me a lesson. For the next hour (actually, quite a bit less) he took me through an arm workout. Twenty minutes into the workout I ran to the toilet and released everything in stomach. I exited completely humbled and more than a little humiliated that an arm workout made me puke all because Charles slowed me down. Charles won me over with that workout and piqued my interests in the science behind tempo training. 15 years later and I see instafamous trainers and fad workout writers preaching the benefits of tempo training (and completely misapplying it). Done properly tempo training can increase muscle mass and strength and optimize hormones for performance. Yes, it may actually optimize growth hormone, testosterone and cortizol response to training. Done improperly, you’ll probably only experience soreness that may cross over to something more severe like Rhabdo (we can talk about that later too). The objective for this series is to educate you on Tempo training.
Next week, I'll share workouts and the science supporting this break through in strength training.