Repetition Time (3,1,3)

Hey Everyone,

This ones aimed at experienced coaches (Ok Coach!! you can answer it if you want), trainers and anyone with a good knowledge of physiology or exercise/sport science (someone like George).

Being the cheap skate I am, I haven't bought Pavel's Power to the People (PTTP) but I've looked at as many of the pages as I could on google books. He mentions more velocity less strength, less velocity more strength, that's paraphrasing but it's the general gist.

Anyway, I was pondering whether it would be best just to follow Coach Sommer's suggestion of 3,1,3 reps or could you do reps ridiculously slow (10,3,10 or something perhaps even longer) for 1 rep, would that be better? I was thinking at first according to the aforementioned "idea" in Pavel's book it would be but then I got thinking about CNS 'recruitment' and was thinking that that's about going through the range of motion of the exercise (sort of) rather than just huge stimulus, any thoughts?

well off to school for me, running late again :roll:

Ed

Pavel says that taking more than five seconds is unnecessary due to the fact that if you take ten seconds to say, lock out a bench press, than you actually have to hold back, and so aren't really producing maximum tension. I imagine the same idea applies to bodyweight exercises.

ok, thanks for that raizen. I guess it's more about no momentum. I guess I'll stick with 313 then

Yeah, what Raizen said!

Regards the pause at each end (for this purpose we'll use the pull-up) the pause at the top forces a strong contraction at the weakest point of the movement, and the pause at the bottom allows the stored elastic energy to dissipate, so that you recruit a lot more muscle fibres making your workout that much more effective.

For an example: Stand still. Try and jump up using just your calves, with your legs straight ...then do the same but bouncing up and down on your toes with legs straight...

Apparently with a one second negative it takes around a four second pause for the elastic energy to dissipate fully, however by lowering down more slowly the elastic energy is reduced greatly, and the same effect is reached by only a second or so pause if the negative is three or more seconds. I have also seen a slightly different protocol of 3:1:X used more to develop power and explosive strength. The X represents making the concentric portion of the movement as fast as you can manage (even if it takes three seconds because it's a high load).

Probably more than you wanted to know, but it might've been interesting

Cheers,

George.