Lifting slowly is fashionable in some gyms.
If you manage not to fall asleep before the end of your training session, you may even get some benefits from it. Like everything, there is a time and a place for lifting slowly but how about lifting faster?
Few people use speed to their advantage and they miss out on a lot of strength and size gains as a result. In this article, you’ll learn why and how you should use speed to overcome strength plateaus and eventually build more muscle.
Muscle Fibre Conversion
We all know that fast-twitch muscle fibres have the ability to get much bigger than their slow-twitch counterpart.
One look at how big an endurance athlete is compared to a sprinter and the difference speaks for itself. Therefore, someone who wants to build muscle should be interested in increasing their proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibres.
While we all have a genetically predetermined proportion of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibres, your training can help convert fast-twitch fibres into slow-twitch, and vice versa. It is still controversial, and apparently you can’t change your fibre makeup easily, but what appears to have the most impact on the change from slow-twitch fibres to fast twitch is speed training.
Increased Neural Response
When you train for strength, you train your muscles and your nervous system.
In fact, initial strength gains are mostly the nervous system being able to recruit more muscle fibres simultaneously. Hypertrophy adaptations come later on. When you train for speed, the goal is to train your nervous system to recruit muscle fibres. After all, would you rather 100 muscle fibres to be doing the work, or would you rather 100,000?
If your nervous system is able to produce fast and effective muscle contractions, it later translates into more weight being lifted. Training for speed involves training with lower weights, which seems counterintuitive, but it carries over to heavy strength training since even with a maximum load, the intent should always be maximum speed.
Many people get this wrong. They slow down their concentric (the positive phase of the movement) tempo in an attempt to make the exercise harder, but more weight will automatically slow down the tempo as well.
Increased Stretch/Contraction Reflex
Strength can be improved by several mechanisms:
- Training the nervous system. The nervous system is more efficient, as explained above, which enables you to contract more motor units than you normally would.
- Changing your structure. More contractile units are built to make you stronger. This can also improve the elasticity of your muscles.
Your muscles are like rubber bands. Think about a thin rubber band. It is easy to stretch, and when you release it, it doesn’t generate much force.
Compare that with a thick rubber band and the amount of force it can generate when you release it. Your muscles respond the same way. When you stretch a muscle, it has an elastic component, which means that it can generate force just by coming out of the stretch fast. Jumpers, throwers and sprinters are the best example of athletes who have developed the “elasticity” of their muscles.
Anyone looking to build strength can benefit from an increased stretch/contraction reflex. Imagine how a weightlifter comes down into his squat to catch his clean and bounces to get back up. The stretch/contraction reflex helps him get up. If he paused in the deep squat position, he probably wouldn’t be able to get up. The same goes for a powerlifter when he reaches the bottom of the squat or the bench press.
Training Economy
Using maximum loads builds strength but it is very dose sensitive.
In simple terms, it means that too much can wear you down completely and be counterproductive. Finding other ways to increase your strength so that you maximize recovery will get you stronger much faster than lifting heavy all the time.
Speed work involves significantly lighter loads than maximum strength loads (usually in the 90% to 100% of your max). That doesn’t mean it isn’t dose sensitive either but switching between strength and speed is a great way to get the best from both training styles.
Using Fast Eccentrics
Yes, I know you were told to slow down the weight and not drop it so this may come as a shock.
There is a time and a place for slow eccentric lifting (slowing down the weight instead of dropping it), but if you are training for speed, a faster eccentric speed will force your muscles to contract quicker; allowing you to get the weight back up and improving the rate of force development.
Westside Barbell (the Disneyland of powerlifting) is well known for using bands for speed work. With bands, you increase your eccentric speed and you are forced accelerate the weight on the way up. With such methods, it is wise to use light weights at first, lower than 50% of your max and build up from there. You should never have to use more than 70% of your max, and that includes the additional tension provided by the bands.
Olympic Lifting
Olympic lifters are known to be extremely fast, technical, as well as big and strong.
Olympic lifting is seldom incorporated into peoples’ workouts because people think that “the Olympic lifts are hard to learn”. If you are trying to optimize these movements to compete in an Olympic lifting meet, then you need a completely optimized technique that takes time to master. If you are trying to use these movements to increase strength and muscle mass, however, then you don’t need perfect form. You need to do them safely and this isn’t difficult.
You don’t have to catch a clean in a deep squat position and perform a jerk in a perfect split stance position. Instead, you can do power-cleans and push presses. Both movements will require you to be fast and can be learned by anyone with the proper core strength and mobility.
My favourite shoulder and trap movement is the snatch grip high pull. It is explosive and can be done from the hang position or from the floor. Most of the power is generated by the hips but just the action of bringing a heavy weight up, even for a split second, activates your traps and shoulders like nothing else. The clean and press is also very effective at building these muscles.
Plyometrics
Plyometrics should be used sparingly. While technically, anything that uses the stretch/contraction reflex is plyometric in nature, we usually refer to plyometrics as jumps. Plyometrics are a great way to build power, but your joints can only tolerate so much.
When you start incorporating plyometrics, you already have a good base; which means that your joints are healthy and stable. If your knees cave in during a squat, work on that before you go jumping around. Once you have bulletproof joints and know how to land from a jump safely (knees out) then you can start playing with depth jumps to build eccentric strength and reactive jumps to work on the stretch/contraction reflex.
Volume is particularly important when using plyometrics. Depending on the height of your jump, you are placing a lot of load on your joints so don’t exceed a certain volume. Ten to twenty quality jumps in a session can be enough for a proper training response. As we say, “stimulate, don’t annihilate.”
Sprinting
When you look at the muscle mass of some sprinters, there is no doubt that sprinting can help someone get big and lean.
Like plyometrics, the dose is critical. It is best to start with short sprints and increase the volume as you go. Technique is also important. If you have access to a proper track and field coach, you will learn to optimize your sprinting technique.
With sprinting, it is very important to warm-up thoroughly and not exceed 800 to 1000 meters in a session. In the beginning, 10 sets of 50-yard sprints are sufficient. Overtime, your technique will improve, your time of contact with the floor will decrease and you will be able to run faster, which will carry over to the weight room – especially with movements involving the hips (deadlifts, hip thrusts etc.).
Fitting Speed into Your Training
You may be confused about how to fit speed into your regular training as you don’t want to ditch your regular strength and hypertrophy work. The idea is to add a little bit of speed work so that you can vary the stimulus and avoid plateaus. There are different ways to do that.
Have a Speed Day (Westside Barbell Method)
The Westside barbell conjugate method is the best known training system to keep both strength and speed year-round.
They have strength days and speed days. On their strength days, they do their regular powerlifts (or variations of them) with very heavy weights, and on their speed day, they either use bands or plyometrics to work on speed with a movement that can carry over to their main lifts.
A classic example would be with the squat. Let’s say lower-body day is on Monday. They squat on Monday and build up to a max. Then they do their assistance work. Only 20% of training time is spent on the competitive lifts, the rest is accessory lifts. In that case, the lower-body speed day would be Thursday, when the squat would probably be done with bands, not to a full range of motion, but a maximum speed on both the eccentric and the concentric.
Alternatively, if you want to bring your deadlift up, you can deadlift on Monday for heavy doubles, and use kettlebell swings on the Thursday. The kettlebell is a forgotten mass builder. It builds grip strength and uses a ballistic stretch with a lot of power generated from the hips. You just have to make sure to use a heavy kettlebell if you are already strong.
Speed Exercises
You don’t have to have a full blown speed day to get the results you are after. In fact, the assistance work is also incorporated on speed day at Westside and it is done like a bodybuilding session. You can incorporate speed exercises into your training. If you do so, remember that speed work is best done when fresh, and that quality is much more important than quantity.
To yield results from speed work, you have to go very fast. As soon as fatigue builds up and your speed reduces, the exercise must stop. It’s very difficult to maintain good form and maximum speed. Fatigue makes it impossible.
One overlooked speed exercise is the bench press. It can really teach you to accelerate a heavy bar. The secret is to lower quickly, but accelerate the bar before it touches your chest. This carries over very well to regular bench press, without putting as much stress on your shoulders than a heavy barbell.
The Power Cycle
This is generally done with athletes, as the competitive season is not a really good time for heavy lifting.
In this case, plyometrics, ballistic training and light corrective work will be prioritized to create as little fatigue as possible. This is typically called the power cycle or the carry-over cycle and unless you compete in a sport other than powerlifting, bodybuilding or weightlifting, it is not an ideal solution. Three weeks of speed work and no strength work won’t really affect you but after that, you may start losing strength so it is much better to incorporate your speed work into your regular training.
Wrap-up
Explosive strength is too often forgotten.
While manipulating tempo and lifting slowly to increase the time under tension has its place in your training, so does speed training. From a personal standpoint, speed work is what helped increase my bench press.
Countless powerlifters have overcome strength plateaus by including the dynamic effort method into their training. In the end, what helps you build strength will help you build muscle. Remember that neural gains precede structural gains. When you train your nervous system, eventually the body follows.
About the Author
Anthony Dexmier is a strength coach in the South of France. He enjoys deadlifting, kettlebells and Olympic lifting, despite a genetic predisposition for endurance sports. He helps people eat and train better both online and at the gym and his special areas of interests are prehab, rehab, strength and nutrition. He loves writing and can be found on AnthonyDexmier.com.
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