50 TOP TIPS FOR FAT LOSS – TIP 26

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Mix Up The Tempo Phase Speeds

For those of you who have no idea what tempo phase speeds are, here’s a quick lesson.  Imagine squatting down to pick up a baby off the floor.  In the gym, we would call this a dead lift.  In everyday life we call it, everyday life.

From a purely musculoskeletal point of view, your pulleys and levers had to bend a variety of your joints, in order to perform the movement.  Bend at the hips, bend at the knees, bend at the ankle etc.  In the exercise world, we like to break things down so the whole act of picking up the child can be broken down into two sections, the bending down bit and the standing up bit.  In technical mumbo jumbo, it’s called the eccentric and the concentric phase.  Eccentric means get longer, concentric the opposite, get shorter.

If the child weighed 6 kgs then chances are no amount of thought would be put into the lift at all.  You’d simply bend down, pick up the child and stand up.  However, if the child weighed 160 kgs, then there would need to be an awful lot of mental preparation in order to carry out the lift successfully and if the lift had to be carried out repeatedly then maybe consideration would need to be given to having a little rest or a pause either at the top of the lift, or at the bottom.

So now we have 4 phases, the eccentric, a rest at the bottom, the concentric and a rest at the top.

When experienced trainers provide their clients with resistance programs, not only should the program provide the client with the exercise, sets, reps and rest period between sets, but it should also detail the tempo for these 4 phases.  (Note if your program doesn’t do this, or your trainer hasn’t clearly explained to you the tempo, then find yourself another trainer)  Here at PRPT we write this tempo as a 4 digit number, e.g.: 2:0:2:0.  (2 seconds eccentric, 0 pause, 2 secs concentric 0 pause)

Right, so now you understand tempo phase speeds, if body fat loss is your goal, mix them up.  This is where you can have a lot of fun with your training regime.  The tempo I’ve shown above is pretty standard.  But imagine if the tempo was 5:1:1:1?  A 4 second repetition suddenly became an 8 second repetition.  If you were doing 7 reps a set, that’s almost 1 minute of continual movement, albeit with some slow eccentric and explosive concentric phases.

So the question I bet you’re dying to ask is this?  How does this affect body fat loss?  The answer is threefold: Firstly, the variation in tempo is a great way to provide added stimuli to your body and this creates shock.  Anything that shocks your body (does something different), places your body in a state of stress and the body adapts to this change.  Remember if you train the exact same way over and over again, your body becomes accustomed and you won’t change.  Secondly, mixing a slow phase with a fast phase in the same  is a great way to stimulate growth and thirdly, the constant change in tempo means that you never become accustomed and as a result, you are more likely to remain on track because you’ll never get bored!

So, once again, if body fat loss is your goal, mix up the tempo phase speeds.  Tomorrow we are going to take a slightly different tact and look at how you can think yourself lean.  Till then, have a great day!!!