Time Under Tension: Building Your Potential (Slizz Please Check This)

[Fluidity]

Hi everyone, I want to give you guys a thread on using the training methodology of using time under tension in your training. For those who don't know time under tension training is basically manipulating the time you use during reps in your sets for your goals. When it comes to the goal of strength/power you want the total time of your set to be between 1-20 seconds. Also when doing TUT for hypertrophy you will always want to be going until failure and by that I mean until your form fails every set for the best muscle stimulus. So keeping good form is a must here in order to reap the benefits and going until true failure way past when your form fails will end up in injuries in the long run. Now for the goal hypertrophy anything around 25-60 seconds will lead to excellent hypertrophy gains, and in anything beyond 60 seconds you will be in the pure endurance zone. Now when it comes to whether you are doing your reps at a fast pace of 1 sec going down 1 sec pause 1 sec going down (1-1-1) or a slow pace such as 5-0-5 or 8-0-8 depends on what you want to affect in your training. If you do your reps at a slow pace then it will lead to you targeting and using more of your stabilizer muscles and both your lower threshold fibers(slow twitch muscles) and your the higher threshold fibers, since in the end you will be fatiguing your whole muscle when doing to failure. Now if you do your reps at a faster pace such as 1-1-1 then you will be using more of your prime movers muscles and high threshold muscle fibers (fast twitch). So if you do 40 seconds of total TUT (Time under tension) in your reps with a fast tempo then your will be strengthening your prime movers more, and high threshold fibers, while doing 40 seconds at a slower tempo will be strengthening your stabilizers and slow twitch muscles. Now the slower tempo will have many benefits besides having much better hypertrophy compared to faster tempos, and strengthening stabilizers/slow twitch muscles.

 

Slow training TUT is an extremely useful tool to use in your training. The other benefits you can get from it, is building your connective tissue(ligaments and tendons) and this is due to the fact that the slow TUT bring in a lot of blood to your muscle-tendon units, and this will accelerate in healing and building your connective tissue. Along with that the output forces from slow TUT are low so you won't be straining your connective tissues at all. Along these benefits, the other things slow tempo TUT can bring is that it allows you to strengthen your mind-body connection, and be aware of your rep's movement while you do it. So in a way you will be using your kinesthetic sense, to know how you are moving. When doing this you can find out flaws on the way you may be moving in your squat, bench, push up, pull up, etc and fix them. Muscle efficiency is also improved since when moving slow with good form you will be ingraining good movement patterns, and you will be learning use only the muscles that are necessary, and not use any other muscles that are unnecessary or unproductive to the movement, an example would be excessive tension in antagonists. TUT has also  been used in martial arts such as Tai chi and Bagua for hundreds on year now for building the connective tissue and movement efficiency in one's body as well. Along with all of these benefits when you go into the endurance zone of doing slow time under tension for more than 60 seconds the exercise will be more metabolically taxing, and thus promote more fat loss. Like I said before if you go into the endurance zone of TUT in your set, faster tempo will use more prime mover strength, while slower tempo will use more stabilizing strength. Also don't ever expect your slower tempos to be the same load as your lower tempos. Whenever you do any set with a maximum low time under tension of around 15-20 secs you will be exerting yourself with high output forces(usually your strength/plyometric work), that load will be higher than your sets with more TUT like 30 seconds and up which have lower output forces exerted by your muscles. For people who are coming off injuries, I would highly recommend TUT, due to the fact that the output forces are really low in the connective tissues, and heals your connective tissue with all blood flow and nutrients directed to it.

 

Now I am going to talk about programming TUT into your workouts. You can generally cycle between strength training, and TUT hypertrophy training. Just a quick note, once you cycle from TUT training to pure strength make sure you do at least 2 TUT a week in order to maintain the stabilizing strength, and mass you have gained from your TUT training.  Now when starting TUT training for hypertrophy you will have 3 variables to play with when programming your training, and that is your load, TUT per rep, and total reps, and all of these will vary as your change the total TUT in a set.

 

For example when you want to do 40 seconds of TUT you can increase the load, however when increasing the load you will have to decrease the TUT per rep, so if you usually do 4-0-4, here you may have to do 2-0-2. Along with that as you decrease TUT per rep your reps will increase, and this is due to the fact that you will be hitting your goal of 40 seconds per set of TUT with a fast tempo thus demanding more reps. If you on the other hand decrease your load for 40 seconds, then you will have to increase you TUT per rep, and decrease your reps in order to hit failure since you are trying to hit failure all the time when doing TUT training. Now if you  decrease TUT per rep expect to increase your load, and increase in reps, while when increasing TUT your load and reps will become decrease. Also remember that compared to doing TUT with fast tempo vs slower tempo you will get a better hypertrophy effect with slower tempo compared to the fast tempo which won't give the same hypertrophy effect. So I hope you get the relationship here between load, reps, and total TUT per rep. Also remember the scale of different total TUT ranges, where 25-30 seconds of TUT will bring a really good amount of myofibrillar/sacroplasmic hypertrophy and a little strength, and the load for this will usually be pretty high compared to 35-60 seconds of TUT training, where you will be working for only hypertrophy. Now regarding people with injuries I would always recommend slow TUT with the lowest tempo being 4 seconds up and 4 seconds down. From there on people recovering from injuries can increase their TUT per rep, and do 10-0-10 or even 10-10-10 if they are will to challenge their stabilizers and the load with have to be low since going to failure with this tempo wont take long, and you can go beyond 60 seconds into the endurance zone where you will be increasing blood flow and healing connective tissue. When doing really high TUT like 10-0-10 for hypertrophy you will want to keep the reps really low in order to still build hypertrophy,since 20 seconds of TUT per rep will only need 3 reps in order to stay in the muscle building hypertrophy window, anything beyond will be endurance, and that isn't a bad thing if you are working to recover from an injury, however when working for hypertrophy you want 60 seconds or less. When doing metabolic conditioning work beyond 60 seconds is recommended and you can either do it with high TUT or low TUT per rep depending if you want to work stabilizers or prime movers.

 

When programming TUT you will generally want a whole body workout, with all of the exercises covering the whole body with TUT, or you can work a specific muscle or joint with TUT on an easy or off day if you have any injury. When progressing in TUT training, you can either choose a certain total amount of TUT per set increase load(adding weight or choosing harder progression), and keep reps and TUT per rep the same, or you can keep the load the same, and increase either the TUT per rep or total reps. If you keep doing that you will eventually hit 60 seconds of total TUT, and then you will want to increase the load and then you can start over at a lower total TUT per rep around 30 , 40, or 50 seconds seconds(it can be anything you want). When you are doing TUT training make sure you take your PWO meal, and eat A LOT if you are planning on gaining mass. When putting this together for a weekly schedule, you can either do it 3 times a week Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Or do it 4 times a week Mon, Tues, Thurs,Fri, and you can experiment with different weekly schedules based on your recovering ability, and what works best for you. Along with all of this you can keep your FSPs (Fundamental Static positions) in before your workout. Like I said before once you get off doing your TUT cycle you can go back to max strength training, and then keep doing TUT 2 times a week, 3 times would be best, and do a minimum 5 seconds of going up and down in your reps for one set either before your strength work set or after your strength work set. 

 

Ok so that is my thread on putting TUT in your training. TUT is definitely a valuable training tool, and it it has been mention for some time now by other reputable sources such as Charles Poliquin. Here are some links, 

http://www.charlespoliquin.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/646/Top_Five_Reasons_to_Vary_Tempo_in_Your_Workout.aspx

http://www.charlespoliquin.com/Blog/tabid/130/EntryId/1187/Tip-341-Manipulate-Time-Under-Tension-To-Lose-Fat-and-Get-Stronger.aspx

http://www.charlespoliquin.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/898/Ten_Things_You_Should_Know_About_Tempo_Training.aspx

http://www.charlespoliquin.com/Blog/tabid/130/EntryId/1567/Tip-436-Vary-Tempo-to-Gain-Muscle-Lose-Fat-Count-Tempo-to-Get-Results.aspx

http://www.charlespoliquin.com/Blog/tabid/130/EntryId/1339/Tip-376-Recover-Faster-By-Manipulating-Time-Under-Tension.aspx

I really hope this thread gets pinned for everyone to see so they can reap the maximum benefits out Time under tension training in their workout and training sessions. So I just want to ask Slizzardman(Joshua) if he can keep this pinned for everyone, since he was the person who got me into TUT training, and he is the most knowledgeable source I know of in TUT, and has a bunch of other threads in the forum talking about it. Finally I wish you all the very best in your training 

[Connor Davies]

A question about TUT an connective tissue.

 

Is total time under tension the signifigant factor or time for individual reps?  I've recently started doing high rep exercises every day in order to open up my joints and flood them with sinovial fluid (mostly in an effort to prepare my body for high resistance work.)  would it be better conditioning for my joints and tendons to do high reps quickly or less reps slowly, assuming TUT was the same.

 

Also, you reccomend TUT for people coming off an injury, stating that output forces are low in the connective tissues.  I'm not really sure what that means, but in my experience slow eccentrics of chinups have caused me tendonitis in my biceps tendon.  Not sure if i'm unique in this one, but I thought people should be aware that not all slow tempo work is created equal.

 

I thought it was a very good post, definately has me considering adding some TUT work to my routine.

[Fluidity]

For warming up I would recommend doing a warm up in a TUT fashion to it where you start slow and finish fast regarding the tempo of your reps. What I mean is that you start 10 secs going down 10 secs going up then 9-0-9, 8-0-8, then 7-0-7, and then you keep quickening your tempo until you hit a quick tempo of 1-0-1. You can skip a certain tempo when going from 10-0-10 to 1-0-1 or you can spend more than one rep on a tempo when going from 10-0-10 to 1-0-1. The reason behind this is to warm up your stabilizer muscles which can be only done with a slow tempo, and are very important for resistance training, and in the end you warm up your prime mover muscles with the faster tempo.

 

As for eccentric causing tendonitis, you should NEVER do TUT with a high load after an injury, in fact don't expect  any slow TUT to be done with your heavy 3-5 reps since its generally the same low intensity load you do your higher reps(6-20) with until failure. Going to failure at with a total TUT of 30 seconds will always take a higher load than what will take to make you got to failure at 50-60 seconds. What I mean by that is that you should never take your 3 or 5 rep max and start doing slow eccentrics over many reps since the total force put on the muscle is going to be high due to the high load over the many reps, and because of that you will likely damage your connective tissue since the volume is going to be too much, and you will fatigue quickly due to the amount of tension you have to produce.  If you try doing this then yes, tendonitis will be very likely, even though you aren't applying force explosively you are still going to be putting your tendons under high loads from the force your muscles generate. What I meant by output force is the force your muscles generate and your connective tissue load up on when performing any movement. Output forces are high in max strength training since you are moving a really heavy weight with a lot of force, and in plyometric training, where the weight you load may not be high, however the explosive force that your fast twitch muscle produce will be high, and your tendons are going to be loaded with that force(thats why you need to prepare your connective tissue for plyometric work with a max strength training to strengthen them and slow TUT for helping connective tissue heal and grow).

 

 So slow TUT will generally have a low output force on your connective tissue since you aren't moving explosively and you aren't moving a really heavy load(anything you do for 1-5 reps) using your muscles. Hope this helps

[Nic Branson]

Keep in mind a couple concepts with TUT is that developing explosiveness is a different animal. You will not activate every high threshold fiber while training to failure. Yes you get most but not rate limited upper threshold fibers. You also miss out of neurological adaptation. Training should be balanced with slight leans one direction or another depending on your level of training and desired goals.

GTO and muscle spindle adaptation also require speed. Take external rotators for example, these are typically very explosive and respond well to some added speed once trained. Look at the movements where they really need to be effective and this becomes clear.

I cannot and will not ever advise training to true failure. Once form goes, you're done period.

I'm not discounting your post at all, just add some perspective. Balance your training. No one methodology will get you there. If you take a look at the GB system you will see progressions from one phase to another and the inclusion of fast and slow.

[Fluidity]

I totally understand Nic, no one should ever depend on TUT as their only training methodology. Developing explosive power is definitely a whole different subject that could probably take up another post to explain in terms of training methodology. When training with TUT one should have at least some training once or twice  during the week where they work on low intensity movement explosively or at a moderate pace just so they maintain their speed and explosiveness (especially if they do an explosive sport such as sprinting/boxing/Olympic lifting) since TUT won't train them to use their fast twitch muscle fibers(type 2 b fibers).

 

Oh and thanks for pointing that out, training up until failure of your form is the way to go, I'm gonna edit my post and mention that specifically since I don't want to confuse people with training until true failure and training until your form fails. 

[Connor Davies]

Ah I see where I was going wrong on the chin ups, it was too near my maximal load.  Goes to show that not everyone on the internet knows what they're talking about, slow negatives are often suggested as a way to train chinups, both when you can't yet pull yourself up and even when you can, to get the most out of the rep.

 

I'm not so sure a slow eccentric at over 100% of your one rep max would go hand in hand with tendon health, although it would be a very good way to stress them!

[Fluidity]

Yeah when it comes to eccentric work, studies show that it is beneficial to do eccentrics that are LIGHTLY loaded in order to treat tendonitis, here is a good example, http://www.cadets.com/files/content/files/track_achilles.pdf it starts with doing the eccentric phase  of a calf raise off the edge of something (which is a light load of course) and then later on thats when they add the load, but it still has to be a light load in order for you to do 15 reps of it consistently over 3 sets.

 

Oh yea I forgot to mention that  yes people do recommend, Coach included, to do eccentric for exercises such as pull ups if you can't do any at all, however the VOLUME is low, so you don't ever really go beyond 3-5 reps. The reason behind this is because you don't want to stress your tendons too much so that you cause strain due to holding down the load repeatedly. Here is something Joshua mention in another thread,"Tendons and ligaments respond best to extremely short duration, very high intensity loads. Basically, elastic stretch-and-release elements. Pitches, plyometric work, stuff like that. Of course you have to scale the work correctly, if you are working so hard that you cause strain instead of stress you will be headed right for tendonitis land!"  he said that over here https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/topic/4284-how-to-strengthen-ligaments/ You won't be able to take a high load such as your 1-3 rep max and perform a controlled 10 second super slow eccentric of it, that slow of an eccentric would a a light or moderate load at most, its usually going to be around 1-3 seconds, but doing it over A LOT of reps is what will cause the strain.

 

So it is possible for you to do a lot of eccentrics with a heavy load of something along your 3-5 rep range and proabably even with your 1 rep max, such as a pull up, and  beyond since you don't have to bring it back up, however that would be a bad idea since not ony would you be going beyond your typical strength rep range but the total volume would be too much since you would be doing your heavy strength work for over a large amount of volume when it is typically low due to the 3-5 rep nature. If you do an eccentric with a load in the 1-5 rep range make sure you  stay in the 3-5 rep range per set and not go beyond even though you probably could, that should keep things safe and prevent strain for the most part.

[Connor Davies]

Thank you very much for pointing out that thread to me.

 

In regards to my slow eccentrics, I had a 3 rep max chinups but i'd do 10+ sets in a workout, slow eccentrics on every rep.  It tore me up pretty bad.

[Joshua Naterman]

Ah I see where I was going wrong on the chin ups, it was too near my maximal load.  Goes to show that not everyone on the internet knows what they're talking about, slow negatives are often suggested as a way to train chinups, both when you can't yet pull yourself up and even when you can, to get the most out of the rep.

 

I'm not so sure a slow eccentric at over 100% of your one rep max would go hand in hand with tendon health, although it would be a very good way to stress them!

 

The following is for education only, and not intended as a suggestion or prescription for exercise. If you decide to implement any of this in your training, I cannot be held liable for any injury.

 

Considering the fact that individual muscle fibers are doing about twice the work during an eccentric contraction that they do during a concentric contraction, and considering that this is what causes muscle damage (due to strain passing into the plastic region of the stress-strain curve), if you were to perform an eccentric contraction with more than 100% of your concentric max, you would cause massive damage. Massive. Your body doesn't like to let you do things like that, because it is simply producing forces beyond our design specifications, if you want to think of it that way.

 

Your body never even lets you truly reach 100% of your concentric threshold, even in the most highly trained athletes, because at that point you end up causing severe damage and stronger individuals simply rip tendons off of bones.

 

Lighter eccentrics are used for tendon therapy because there's usually already damage at the muscle-tendon junction. and trying to use anything approaching "real" weight will start recruiting heavily damaged areas too strongly, which would undo the healing process by causing extra damage. That's why you are generally told to only go to a max of 5 out of 10 on the pain scale, and to stop if it seems like it is going to go beyond that. It appears that this is a good subjective method by which to limit the potential for re-injury during therapy.

 

As for the ballistic stuff,  it helps to to try and think of things like this:

 

 

To keep things simple for this example, let's pretend we are using a machine that is producing a constant resistance throughout the full range of motion for a lateral raise. This is called isotonic, meaning unchanging resistance, exercise.

 

15 kilos lifted one meter in 1 second during a lateral raise would require ~ 15 newton-seconds of force (or joules, same thing), meaning 15 newtons were produced, and that force output was maintained for 1 second.

 

1.5 kilos lifted one meter in 1 second during the same movement requires ~ 1.5 newton-seconds.

 

So far, so good, right? 10x less weight, moved in the same time, uses 10x less force, 10x less total energy used.

 

Ok. Stay with me here:

1.5 kilos lifted one meter in 0.2 seconds, which is a totally reasonable time to be able to lift a small load one meter, you actually use the same amount of energy, 1.5 newton-seconds. However, the force is 5x higher and is applied for 5x less time. In this case, it is 7.5 newtons applied for 0,2 seconds.

 

Example 2:

 

If you move  a two pound dumbbell 10x faster than you move a 20lb dumbbell, say lifting it in 0.2 seconds instead of 2 seconds, you just produced the exact same amount of force. You produced it for less time. one tenth of the time, to be exact.

So, why does this matter?

 

Simple: Damage takes time, under constant tension. A force that causes injury in 2 seconds, may not cause any injury at all in 0.2 seconds.

 

This is why stress-strain curves are an important part of structural engineering (and modern medicine), and they apply to our bodies just like they apply to a piece of wood, metal, or a rope.

 

The short duration of force application allows the force to be dampened by the tendon stretch. A constant load of the same force is exerted on the fully stretched tendon, which then begins to tear if the force is applied longer than the tendon can handle.

 

The reason this can be used for rehab is that it allows us to expose the tendons to progressively greater forces, without crossing the threshold for damage. Of course, you have to be very careful with this... a five or ten lb weight can easily be used to produce more force than even a large muscle can handle.

 

You generally use your own arm, or leg, or whatever, and slowly build up speed until you can move at the same maximum speed, pain-free, on both the injured and uninjured side. From there, you may add a quarter to half a pound to the injured side, and start slow again, exploring to find the speed that is appropriate for the new load. You have to make small increases in load each time, because you are moving so quickly that the forces are very high, but very short. This is what the tendons respond best to simply because they can be exposed to higher forces without damage compared to slower movement.

 

Faster movement also recruits more muscle fibers than slower movement, even when the applied force is identical. It is extremely unlikely that anyone would recruit 100% of their muscle fibers without a rapid movement.

 

To try and understand why that is so, imagine that you are a part of a 20 person group. You start off standing still. At any moment, everyone has feet on the ground. This is an isometric contraction. Now, you start walking. At any given moment, less than 100% of the available 40 feet are on the ground, but there are still quite a lot of feet on the ground. Now you start jogging. At any given moment, there are even fewer feet on the ground. Now you start sprinting! At any given moment you have the fewest number of feet on the ground.

 

Now for the bait and switch: Your group is a muscle fiber. Each foot on the ground represents a myosin head, which all produce the same amount of force (within a given muscle fiber type). Let's say you need to produce 35 lbs of force, and that requires 35 feet to be on the ground. That means 35 of your 40 myosin heads are engaged. As long as you're doing this isometrically, all you need is that one muscle fiber. As soon as you start moving fast enough to cause less than 35 out of the 40 feet to be in contact with the ground, you need another muscle fiber. If you start moving so fast that you only have 20 feet on the ground, on average, at any given time, then you need two whole muscle fibers, working almost at their maximum, in order to produce the same force at a faster speed.

 

That's why, as we move faster, we see intrinsic muscle force production drop rapidly. This is what gives us our practical limits on movement speeds with external loads. That's why you can move faster, with a lighter weight, and actually recruit more muscle fibers. In fact, you can even produce higher peak forces with sub-maximal weights than you can with maximal weights. This has been proven multiple times in research studies.

 

 

 

 

This is also why a heavyweight Olympic lifter was measured as producing a peak force of over 1000 kg when cleaning or snatching competition weight. I believe it was closer to 1700 kg, or somewhere between 9,800 Newtons ( if it was "only" 1000kg) and 16,000 Newtons. That's immense, but this peak only existed for a very small fraction of a second. Not long enough to cause damage.

 

If he had produced that same force for a few seconds, he would very likely have torn multiple muscles.

 

The same thing happens every time we run. Forces over 5x our bodyweight go up just one leg, but they are there for such a short time that we don't tear anything. In fact, we get stronger. If you took that total time of force application and put it into one continuous contraction, there would almost certainly be significant damage.

[Fluidity]

Excellent Post Josh!!! By the way what did you think of my TUT post in general?

[Nic Branson]

Josh said:

"Your body never even lets you truly reach 100% of your concentric threshold, even in the most highly trained athletes, because at that point you end up causing severe damage and stronger individuals simply rip tendons off of bones."

 

Pay attention to this. Probalbly the most important and overlooked piece of training. The average individual only has access to about 64-67% of their fibers, the elite of the elite get to about 92-96% fiber access. You have to train your nervous system to gain more access. Much of this is also about training smart and building the connective structures so your body learns you can handle the extra force. Also keep in mind those higher percentages are only done for short durations. Explosive take off and even more so during landings. Not going into more detail, simply too much for general conversation. Just remember that you cannot expect to move upwards quickly without consequence or for it to be reliable. Take your time and train smart.

[alec_ar]

VERY educational and informative post, that. I'm interested in concentric-eccentric similarities and differences as I feel it applies particularly to my style of training. For some reason, I've always assumed that concentric reps are always more intense and the potential for damage is greater than with eccentrics.

So if I would do concentric movements with an easier version of a given exercise, I would then do a more difficult eccentric version of that same movement, since my body was capable of pulling it off. Would the eccentric, even if I am able to complete a full slow rep, be doing more damage than the dumbed down concentric?! Yikes if so...

[Connor Davies]

I've always heard that eccentrics break down the muscle fibers more, so bodybuilders like to work fast concentrics (lifting the weight) to activate maximum muscle fibers and slow eccentrics (lowering the weight) to break down the muscles more.

 

Is TUT really necessary if you're working the same movements on an unstable surface (like rings?)  Surely you would have to concentrate very hard on good form to complete the movement successfully and it would hit all the stabiliser muscles....

 

Mind you, I've seen 30-0-30 pullups and 30 second muscleups, and they're pretty hardcore o.0

[Fluidity]

A 30 second muscle up??!!! Thats inhuman! Was this done on rings or on a bar?

[Fluidity]

I also recommend everyone to check this thread out, Joshua explains the faster movement vs slower movement perfectly

https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/topic/8728-a-question-of-tut-and-reps/

[Connor Davies]

Haha it was done on a bar.  I don't know if it was exactly 30 seconds, but even watching it was excruciating.  Before I saw it I didn't even know slow muscle ups could be done