Why Do Slow Repetitions?

Yesterday someone in a Facebook exercise group posted a video of himself performing the leg press and asked for comments. Like most of the people who post exercise videos in that group his form needed work. He was was holding his breath, moving too fast, locking out, stopping to rest at the end point, bouncing at the bottom, allowing his pelvis to lift and tilt/spine to flex, and appeared to be gripping the handles hard and forcefully extending his neck against the seat pad.

Understanding of and standards for exercise form in this group aren’t very high, and a few people commented that his form looked “good” or even “perfect”. Normally I don’t reply to posts in the group. I only follow groups like this because reading the discussions and watching the videos is a good way to find popular myths and misconceptions to address in articles. However, he was an older trainee and if he continues to train like that or follows some of the other advice he was getting he is likely to injure himself, so I offered some advice anyway. Trying not to be too harsh I wrote,

“Good effort, but need to work on form. Slow way down. Smoothly reverse about ten degrees short of lockout without stopping to rest there. Don’t hold your breath. Reverse direction more smoothly at the start. Worry less about how much weight you lift and more about how well you lift it.”

Why Slow Repetitions?

Within seconds someone was disagreeing with me, claiming that slowing down during the negative would “hamper building up overload” and be harder to recover from. It was almost time for dinner and I didn’t feel like explaining and told him so, but he said he was interested in learning so I wrote the following brief explanation. I’m sharing it here (with minor editing for grammar and readability) in case others find it helpful:

“Cool. First, it’s important to understand where I coming from. When I train people I have three rules:

The first is to make sure their program is based on their body, goals, and circumstances and not cookie-cutter. The general principles are the same for everyone but the best application varies between individuals based on these.

The second is not to hurt anyone. If there are different equally effective ways to accomplish the same goal always choose the one with the lowest risk of acute or overuse injuries.

Third is don’t waste their time. If there are different equally safe and effective ways to achieve the same goal, choose the most time efficient.

Consider that mechanical work and power during exercise isn’t very important. It’s not how much work you do that matters, or even the absolute force produced in most cases, but the relative effort.

Tension and metabolic stress matter. How many times the weight goes up and down doesn’t. You can hold a weight motionless, or move it up and down really fast, or something in between and stimulate comparable improvements in muscular strength and size over time, but moving more slowly allows you to reduce acceleration during the turnarounds avoiding potentially harmful increases in force and allowing better control over the movement. If you are training hard you can get decent results with a variety of speeds, but slower is generally safer.

Avoiding lockout increases the difficulty of the exercise so less weight is required to produce the same level of fatigue in the same time frame. Imagine performing squats in only the bottom half of the ROM with no bounce at the bottom, no rest at the top. It makes it much harder so the weight has to be reduced, meaning just as effective but less compression on the spine.

Contrary to what many believe, you don’t need to move fast during exercise to recruit the fast twitch motor units. Recruitment depends upon force requirements and fatigue, and even with moderate loads eventually all of the motor units – even the fast twitch ones – will be recruited even at slower speeds, even with isometrics which is as slow as you can get.

Power production in other movements improves as muscular strength increases regardless of the speed the strength is built at. Specific skill training for a particular athletic or vocational movement is a separate thing, and that is where movement specific speed is important. Since there is no general physical advantage to moving more quickly, and since moving slowly reduces the risk of injury, I have people move more slowly.

In a much, much broader sense, any reasonable strength training program – anything done hard, progressively, and consistently with a volume and frequency appropriate to the individual, will eventually get someone as strong and well conditioned as they are capable of. Lots of things work. However, not all of them are as efficient or safe.

Over a long enough period of time if you compare the potential results of different training methods the difference becomes zero since it is ultimately dictated by individual genetics. In the long run, as long as the programming is suitable for the individual and the volume and frequency don’t exceed what they can recover from and adapt to, they all work. However, the longer you do one program versus another, the larger the differences in time investment and risk become. What might be a small difference in weekly time invested, wear on the joints, and risk of injury becomes cumulatively larger as months and years pass. So, in the long run although there is no significant difference in potential results the difference in time invested and risk continues to grow.

Going slower doesn’t just make exercise safer though, it can also make it much harder thus more effective, especially if you move more slowly in those portions of the ROM that are more difficult that most people tend to rush through. Keep in mind the goal during exercise is not to do something to the weights with your muscles, it is to do something to your muscles with the weights. How much you lift, how many times, etc. doesn’t matter. How efficiently you create tension and fatigue in the target muscles matters.

Consider those guys at the gym who only do quarter squats or leg presses because they are focused on weight while ignoring resistance (weight x lever, mostly). It’s the same thing taken much further. Going the opposite direction, if you want to make the exercise as difficult as possible you should avoid positions in an exercise where there is little or no meaningful resistance, not spend much time where there is only moderate resistance, and take your time where there is a lot, because the goal isn’t to make the weight go up and down, it is to use the weight to challenge the muscles you’re working as much as possible, as safely as possible.

Pete Sisco leg presses a car two inches and claims he's working harder than someone squatting hundreds of pounds over a full ROM, demonstrating his ignorance of physics

One of the most important things to understand about this, and one that almost everybody gets wrong, is that it is about resistance, not weight. Too many people are too concerned with how much they can lift rather than how well they lift, how efficiently they create resistance against the target muscles with a given weight. Unless you are a competitive lifter, and even then it only matters for the competitive lifts, your goal during an exercise isn’t to lift as much weight as possible, it is to create as much demand in the targeted muscles as possible.

This can be done more safely and efficiently with less weight when you move in a way that increases rather than decreases the average lever against the targeted muscles. Often, when a person’s form sucks it is because they’re focusing on how much weight they can move instead of how well they’re able to move it. Slowing down improves your ability to feel and focus on the tension in the target muscles and to be able to adjust your positioning and movement based on that feeling, to keep the tension high.”

I then ended with a quote from Fisher J, Steele J, Bruce-Low S, Smith D. Evidence Based Resistance Training Recommendations. Medicine Sportiva Med Sport 01/2011; 15:147-162 which you can read about in my Evidence-Based Resistance Training Recommendations posts,

“Comprehensive reviews of this area of research have reported that resistance training at shorter repetition durations produced no greater strength or power increases than training at longer repetition durations [18, 129]. The latter study also considered the application of Olympic lifting and plyometric exercises concluding that there is no evidence to suggest that these techniques can enhance strength and/or sporting performance (including vertical jump and sprint) to any greater degree than traditional weight training methods.Also,Bruce-Low and Smith[129] specifically considered the risk of injury from ballistic exercises, reporting some disturbing statistics suggesting that explosive lifting such as that involved in performing the Olympic lifts can cause injuries to the wrist, shoulder, elbow and lumbar region.”

This morning there were a few replies, and while the original poster thanked me for the feedback (and I hope he applies it – his knees, hips, and spine will thank him) the commenter was incredulous. After expressing several misinformed opinions about mechanical work and exercise, volume, frequency, etc. he asked,

“Are you seriously talking about 5/5 and 10/10 cadences on your blog or are you just using these humongous numbers as examples?”

When I told him I was serious, he dismissed me entirely, saying he wouldn’t touch the subject “with a ten foot pole”. Considering how people accept without question all sorts of utterly ridiculous things from the fitness and bodybuilding media it’s odd some are so skeptical about moving slowly during exercise. I wasn’t going to waste any more time on it so I told him if he wanted to learn more in the future I’m easy to find. In closing I wrote,

“Just keep in mind what I said about the long term; any method of strength training done hard, progressively, and consistently with appropriate volume and frequency for the individual will eventually produce the same general physical improvements, but in the long run they’re not equally safe and time efficient. I value my long term joint health and mobility and I value my time. Anyone who does owes it to themselves to at least “empty their cup” and learn about safer and more time efficient alternatives.”

Will the original poster take my advice and improve his form? I hope so. Will anyone else who reads my comments do the same? I hope so, but I’m not optimistic considering the overwhelming amount of contradictory and misinformed advice given by other members of the group. I’d like to be able to help everyone, but consider something I recently told a reader who was frustrated that someone ignored his advice against overtraining:

“Keep in mind almost everybody else is telling him the opposite, that more is better. It isn’t enough to tell someone they need to do less, you need to explain why. Even if you explain it effectively he may not change for various reasons. He might not believe you because of blind faith in the bodybuilding media. His ego might be too invested in what he’s doing. He may have other, non-physical reasons for wanting to exercise more frequently.

Maybe he will give it a try eventually when he accepts what he’s doing isn’t working. Maybe not. You definitely can’t help everyone, but don’t let the ones you can’t help discourage you from continuing to try to help others.”

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  • Teo Oct 15, 2017 @ 13:17

    Great post as always Drew. I’ve been training influenced by you for the last 6 years and it was a life changer for me, especially when I started doing brazilian jiu jitsu because it allowed me to be stronger than everyone else in my bjj school without having to be 4 days a week in the gym, which is crazy if considering the overtraining related to bjj. Also, now moving from Brazil and starting my Phd in Canada I only have time to exercise because of my brief workouts. So, I don’t have to chose between being strong or doing bjj, I can do both. I consider HIT a secret weapon. I really think this kind of workout could get really popular with bjj/mma praticioners. Cheers!

  • Trace Oct 15, 2017 @ 14:32

    Thanks again, Drew, for your educated and experienced comments. In reference to this individual’s blunt rejection of slowing down the speed of movement – inspite of your attempt to explain it carefully and truthfully – I’m beginning to think that most people are incapable of analyzing a concept without an emotional attachment. Also, some of the outright rejection might stem instinctively from an inborn unwillingness to really work hard. (That would not be surprising since most people in the world don’t exercise in any meaningful way.) But of course those individuals who like to show off by performing with heavy loads (albeit ineffectively and inefficiently), will be the last to admit it to others or to themselves because that would compromise their fragile egos. They would rather believe in the illusion of strength training as presented to them in the gym mirrors. This appears to be the collective human condition at the present time. It’s not very logical or even sane, but there it is. And I sense that many intelligent instructors are trying to figure out a way to break this evil spell, so to speak.

    • Drew Baye Oct 16, 2017 @ 11:12

      I’m not a psychologist but I believe you’re right and much of the resistance to this has to do with ego. People tend to be more skeptical of things inconsistent with their current beliefs, and when they believe they are knowledgeable about or publicly claim expertise on a subject they tend to react very badly when confronted with information to the contrary.

      It is difficult to do, but in situations like this it is important to be aware of our own biases and try to recognize when they influence our thinking so we can more objectively evaluate the evidence and competing arguments and make logical, informed decisions rather than emotional ones.

      None of us knows everything. We are all ignorant of a great many things and we don’t even know how much much we don’t know (our unknown unknowns) about even the things that interest us. Rather than being upset about learning we are wrong about something we should view it as a gift: an opportunity to correct errors in our understanding or thinking about a subject, an opportunity to improve our knowledge and our ability to make better decisions.

  • Jeff Holt Oct 15, 2017 @ 14:48

    Explained very well and thoroughly!

  • Dean Curtis Oct 15, 2017 @ 18:21

    Really nice article Drew. Hope this guys listens to you.

  • Tim Oct 15, 2017 @ 21:57

    Drew, I have been following you for awhile and just appreciate greatly what you teach, preach and apply.
    I was very fortunate to have Mark Asanovich as my strength and condoning coach in the mid to late 80’s. He is a trends HIT advocate. He rocked my young 18 year old world with training and I have never looked back. Besides begins great coach, he is an incredible person and has greatly influenced me even outside my passion for strength training.
    Now at 50 yrs of age, I still train classic HIT 3x a week, always listening to my body when it needs additional rest.
    I sincerely believe my strength is just about the same as it was in the 80’s. Just need to listen to it a bit more when it does require more rest. Plus suffering and digging deep is just plain fun…
    Thank you for teaching the truth of evidence based strength training. I encourage you to keep doing so. There are a lot of people who want to train properly but get caught up in the lies. Hopefully over time more folks will get it before they either burn out or before getting injured. Thank you again. Always look forward to your posts. Take care. Please keep doing what you are.

    Tim

    • Drew Baye Oct 16, 2017 @ 10:46

      You’re welcome, and as long as there are people interested in learning how to do this more effectively, efficiently, and safely I’ll keep writing and talking about it.

  • Jono Wilks Oct 16, 2017 @ 6:02

    Truly excellent article. As lifter in my mid fifties coming off yet another back re-injury this really matters to me. The upside of injury, it has given me way too much time rethink what I am doing and this article has come at a time when I am more open to things than I have been. So for me this means moving in a slower, more controlled, deliberate and pristine on my lifts and saving the more explosive movement for kettle bells. I am also leaving behind things that have always bothered me like most of the olympic lifts that I am not all that good at and saying goodbye to CrossFit after many years (too often CrossFit has been a lethal combination of speed and repetition on moves that were never meant to be done that way). Anyway, thanks for helping me clarify my thinking even more. Appreciate it.

    • Drew Baye Oct 16, 2017 @ 10:44

      You’re welcome. Dropping the Olympic lifts and CrossFit significantly reduces your risk of acute and overuse injuries, and I wouldn’t bother with explosive movements in general or kettlebell exercises either unless you are specifically training for kettlebell competitions. They provide no general physical benefits that can not be obtained more effectively, efficiently, and safely with conventional exercises performed in a slow and controlled manner.

  • Richard Oct 16, 2017 @ 6:15

    Great article, Drew.

    I, of course, know this stuff already – but only because I have (and read) your High Intensity Workouts book (excellent book!) and Body by Science before it. Still great to have a refresher, though – and learn something new.

    So glad I bought your book – at Doug McGuff’s suggestion – full of very useful, and detailed, information.

    Your comments about the easy part of the ROM have got me thinking about skipping them (the machines I use unfortunately aren’t consistent throughout the ROM) – and just using the hard(est) parts of the range instead.

    Cheers!

    • Drew Baye Oct 16, 2017 @ 9:56

      This would depend on the exercise, the equipment, and the alternatives available, but in most cases if the resistance is disproportionately low relative to the strength curve towards one or both ends of the ROM I would avoid those positions.

  • Andy Oct 16, 2017 @ 8:46

    Congratulations Drew … a really great article!!!!
    Andy

  • Frank Oct 16, 2017 @ 11:59

    Another first rate article by Drew. Shared to my Facebook feed, wherein their are more than a few “Bro” Science PhDs roaming about. I hope they read this so I can start reading less about their injuries sustained in the gym.

  • ad ligtvoet Oct 17, 2017 @ 14:33

    Drew,
    You nailed it!! It”s up to the individual for understanding!!

  • Jordan Oct 18, 2017 @ 10:32

    It amazes me the number of people who just don’t understand or are to ignorant to listen to facts and truth. I have friends and acquaintances that see my level of fitness and know how short and infrequent my workouts are, yet they still over train, and they still strive to move more weight rather than use the weight create safe resistance.
    I myself have struggled with the idea of lowering the amount of weight I’m lifting. It seems counter productive and almost like a slap in the face dropping weight off the bar, but it makes complete sense to use less weight, and slow the cadences down to still effectively provide resistance in a safe and effective manor.
    Not to mention, I don’t want to spend my days and my time in the gym, so why would I not employ a workout regime that requires me to spend less time in the gym, is just as effective if not more effective than those regimes requiring daily trips to the gym, and protect my long term health? Everything Drew says is meaningful and valuable. People just need to open their minds, and listen.

  • Steven Turner Oct 18, 2017 @ 22:54

    Hi Drew,
    Great article and well written. I am 62 and have had a few injuries in my time so I am extremely careful with what I lift. Over the past couple of years I have reduced my training weights and focused as much as possible on my form, muscle contractions. I am somewhat lucky that I have access to a full range of MedX equipment. This morning at the gym I thought that I would test how much weight I could lift in good form. To my surprise I found that I can lift significant heavier weight on all exercise machines than I normally train with. I think that I could have easily lifted heavier if I wanted to. My take is to get as strong you do not need to lift heavy weights. You could say that you don’t get strong in the gym when training you get strong when your not in the gym (recovery).

    I am sure that most people don’t know what good form is – you have to work on improving your form. It is something that you should do every time you do an exercise – can I do the exercise better, can I improve my form. That is what people who train should be asking themselves. The best professional athletes do that every time they train – they try to improve their skills it should be the same with exercise.

    Kind regards
    Steven

  • Mark Oct 20, 2017 @ 22:10

    Hi Drew
    As an avid follower of your posts and videos your take home message appears to be: Proper exercise is about building strength, not demonstrating it.
    Because one of the central tenets to muscle hypertrophy is overloading, this obviates the use of indexed weights and/or an indexed weight system. The temptation here is for an individual to ostensibly progress by increasing the weight used by not strictly adhering to proper control and form during the movement. Unless a trainee has favourable base pairings in the double helix, most hypertrophy will be slow but ultimately rewarding.
    I understand your frustration with people who “just don’t get it!” To loosely quote the late Australian art critic Robert Hughes “The greater the artist the greater the doubt, perfect confidence is only granted to those less talented (or informed) as a consolation prize”
    Hope you safely survived the storm season in Florida.
    Cheers,
    Mark.

    • Andy R Nov 5, 2017 @ 10:44

      Very informative article. You state “. How efficiently you create tension and fatigue in the target muscles matters” and ‘ your goal during an exercise isn’t to lift as much weight as possible, it is to create as much demand in the targeted muscles as possible.” Wouldn’t that necessitate the use of direct movements and render compound movements less effective?

      • Drew Baye Nov 8, 2017 @ 14:07

        In the long run the greater time efficiency and metabolic and cardiovascular conditioning effect of compound exercises would outweight the slight increase in efficient loading of simple exercises. If you know how to perform compound exercises efficiently the difference is not as big as many people probably believe.

  • Shane Nov 28, 2017 @ 1:41

    Drew,
    If memory servers me right, in your books and articles I have always heard mention of the standing barbell press and little or nothing of the seated barbell press. So my question is why should we opt for one over the other?
    Thank you,
    Shane

    • Drew Baye Nov 28, 2017 @ 10:32

      Either works fine. The reason I usually include the standing barbell press in free weight workouts is because most people who train at home don’t have a dedicated overhead press station and it’s quicker to just do it standing, while most people who train at a commercial gym will have a shoulder press machine available and should use that instead of a barbell (unless the machine is very poorly designed).

  • Paule Mihajlovich Jan 20, 2019 @ 13:58

    Mr. Baye do you still recommend the 3 seconds up and 10 seconds down cadence?

    • Drew Baye Mar 7, 2019 @ 21:41

      I have gone back to using SuperSlow 10/10 and recommend either that or TSC for most people. I’ve discussed the reasons for this in my private FB group for HIT List members and will be writing about this in more detail in Elements of Form which will be out later this year.

  • Samuel Jun 14, 2019 @ 12:23

    Hello Drew, thank you for your informations. I have a question: I heard some trainers say two ideas against HIT:
    1. Neuroscience says, only with heavy load (1-6) RM or moving a lighter weight fast you can recruit the FT musclefibres, which are the most important for size. Usually after 10 seconds these FT fibres are exhausted.
    2. If the HIT- idea would be right that after a long enough TUL the FT fibres are recruitet you would get stronger during a set, which does not happen.

    What do you think about this ideas. Thank you and with best regards.

    Samuel

    • Drew Baye Jun 14, 2019 @ 15:26

      1. No, neuroscience does not say this at all and I already explained it in this article and others. Even with moderate loads and regardless of speed of movement you will recruit all the motor units in the targeted muscles once they have been fatigued enough.

      2. No, because the fast twitch motor units are recruited when the other motor units have already been fatigued.

      Whoever you heard say these things shouldn’t even be trainers if they don’t understand this.