Drew Baye’s High Intensity Training

Q&A: SuperSlow and Fat Loss

Drew,

First, thank you for your response in advance.

I am embarking on a 2 week trial of superslow. The trainer is roughly doing 10/10 with a 2 minute maximum w/no rest between the 8 exercises(I failed at approx. 1:45 on all exercises). The workout took about 25 minutes. He wants me to train only 1x week. My goal is to lose fat around my midsection (I have some fat due to inactivity after a car accident in which I was hit by a drunk driver as well as poor eating habits) and get stronger/more fit. I am 47 yrs old, 5? 8” tall and weigh 170lbs. with approx. 10% BF.

I thought of doing something close to Darden’s “a.s.a.p.” (1500 cal diet w/SS work). Do you have advice that might help me get the best result I can achieve?

BTW, I feel very tired after my 1st SS workout today. The studio has all Med Ex machines.
Thanks again and I appreciate your contributions and I look forward to your response.

If your body fat was accurately measured at 10% you should have very little fat around your midsection to lose. At 10% body fat most men’s abdominal muscles are starting to show fairly good definition. My first advice would be to have your body composition re-measured.

Assuming you actually are 10% body fat at 170 pounds, and are still relatively inactive, a rough estimate of your daily calorie expenditure would be around 2,300. If you start working out more than once weekly and become more physically active on a day to day basis this number would increase. An estimate of your daily calorie deficit for near maximum fat loss would be around 500 – your body can get roughly 30 calories per day from each pound of stored fat – so I recommend starting at 1,800 calories. If you eat less than that and your daily calorie deficit exceeds the amount of energy you can get from your fat stores the difference is going to have to come from other tissues, which could mean a reduction in muscle mass.

Without knowing your medical history and the nature of the injuries you sustained in your car accident I can’t give much specific advice. However, I do not recommend SuperSlow, two-minute sets, or starting at a training frequency of one workout per week.

Your SuperSlow trainer probably told you it is necessary to move as slowly as 10/10 to effectively load your muscles and to minimize the risk of injury – this is incorrect. Force gauge studies have shown there is little difference in either the resistance or the peak force the muscles encounter between 2 second and 10 second lifting movements, and there is almost no difference at all between a 4 and 10 second lifting movement. With a few exceptions, there is little benefit to moving any more slowly than minimally necessary to maintain proper body mechanics over the full range of the exercise. You may want to err on the slow side while learning a new exercise or if unsure how well a previous injury will respond to a particular exercise, otherwise a 2 to 3 second lifting and 2 to 3 second lowering movement is adequately slow.

One of the most important factors in stimulating increases in muscular strength and size, which is directly related to metabolic rate, is the load used. A lot of research and a large amount of empirical evidence suggests loads of 75% or more of a person’s one repetition maximum should be used for this purpose. Although it varies, most people will only be able to perform around 10 repetitions at typical repetition speeds with 75% of their one rep max, resulting in a set that lasts well under a minute, and nowhere near two. If you are capable of performing an exercise continuously for two minutes you are using a weight that is way, way too light. It may result in a deep burn and quite a bit of fatigue, but so will a lot of other things that will do little or nothing to stimulate improvements in strength and size.

Your trainer’s response to this would probably have something to do with how SuperSlow repetitions inroad the muscles strength levels more deeply and that this is the key to growth stimulation, which is also wrong. If you perform a set using only 10% of your one rep max – a weight that even a SuperSlow instructor would have to admit is way too light to stimulate any kind of strength or size increases – and you managed to get to muscular failure without quitting from boredom first, you would have produced an incredibly deep level of inroad of 90%. While this may stimulate improvements in the efficiency of the energy systems involved in that type of activity, it’s not going to do anything to build bigger, stronger muscles.

Rather than two-minute sets, I recommend starting out with a weight you can handle for 12 repetitions at a 3/3 speed without too much difficulty, and increase the weight over the course of a few workouts until you are failing between 8 and 12 repetitions. While the optimal repetition range varies between individuals, 8 to 12 seems to work pretty well for most people starting out.

Optimal training frequency varies significantly between people and is affected by many factors. While once weekly training may be necessary for some people under certain circumstances, research suggests a training frequency of two to three times per week works well for most people. I recommend starting at three times a week and only reducing your frequency from there if you find you are unable to recover enough between workouts to regularly increase either reps or weight on the majority of your exercises.

For more specific information on diet and routines, I recommend reading the articles filed under Fat Loss on this site.

References:

Alpert SS. A limit on the energy transfer rate from the human fat store in hypophagia. J Theor Biol. 2005 Mar 7;233(1):1-13.

Carpinelli RN, Otto RM, Winett RA. A Critical Analysis of the ACSM Position Stand on Resistance Training: Insufficient Evidence to Support Recommended Training Protocols. Journal of Exercise Physiology Online 2004;7(3):1-60