topic of the week -Do you use a specific repetition timing

I think your post should be deleted Hammer!

0ni said:

TL;DR was that you need to lift with maximal effort to get the best motor unit activation then lift with enough volume to full fatigue them afterwards - to which a steady tempo would probably be best (coming from what other people ITT have been saying)

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(I cant remember your point in this thread, if you were negative or positive towards rep cadence, anyway)

And for bodybuilding purpose's to stimulate hypertrophy, usually the eccentric should be emphasised, as its capacity for endurance and strength is much greater than that of the concentric phase of the muscle. Think of how many times you've gone to do your last rep and lower it successfully and controlled yet unable to bring it back up.

In order to maximise time under tension and stimulate as much hypertrophy (for muscle size purpose's only, not strength), emphasising the negative allows the lifter to induce much greater stimulus past the limiting factor of his/her ability to lift a weight positively.

For example, if a person can only press 40kg dumbells for 8 reps, with a 1 second negative and a 1 second positive, then his time under tension will be roughly 16 seconds. His limiting factor would be his concentric force of his muscles.

However, to get much more from that set, if he does the same 8 reps with a 3 second negative (and his muscles will easily have the capacity to do so) and a 1 second positive, he will get roughly double the amount of time under tension and maximise the stimulus for inducing hypertrophy. He is still limited by his muscles ability to generate concentric force, yet able to do much more work.

I agree with that dreadlift but (as far as I am aware) taking an exercise to eccentric failure doesn't increase the number of motor units fatigued, it just fatigues the ones that have already been activated even more so.

What I was saying is really you need to be waking your muscles up to their full potential before you fatigue the shit out of them. I had a read around a few places and the general consensus is that full muscle activation happens at 82.5-85% of 1RM (and above) but obviously this would depend on person to person.

So drop-sets, supersets, eccentric reps and so on are all good "intensity" raising techniques, if you're working with 60-70% of your 1RM you're not training to your full potential. I think GN1 in a post on here said that you need to maximise your volume over 85% to get the best gains. By all means go to eccentric failure but do some heavy (or fast I guess) shit first so that your body learns to activate more muscle over time leading to better hypertrophy in the future

DREADLIFT said:

For bodybuilding/sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, its all about time under tension, so negatives are emphasised, contractions are held and the positive is relatively explosive. For example with most chest exercises, 3 second negative, 1 second positive, and a 1 second peak contraction depending on if full range of motion is used or the exercise.

For strength/myofibrilar, its all about strength and weight lifted, so its lifted as quickly yet safely as possible, with the negative controlled and momentum eliminated to reduce the potential for injury.

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More or less what i stated earlier. To produce the greastest net hypertrophy, training needs to be suited to the proportion of fibres within the muscles, in being generalised most people have a greater proportion of type II endurance fibres, hence why you get bodybuilders who are big, yet lack any significant strength, and vice versa for those who train exclusively for strength, lacking significant muscle mass compared to a bodybuilder who trains exclusively for mass.

Yeah
Incidentally, type IIa fibres can be converted to type IIb by heavy training and also have the best potential for hypertrophy!

I'm in, who's with me?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o8vsU0Dw-4&feature=youtube_gdata_player]Fantastic voyage - YouTube[/ame]

Little Hammer said:

I'm in, who's with me?

Fantastic voyage - YouTube

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Yeehah! I'm there man!
Is lunch provided and can we make a pitstop past the type IIa muscle fibres, I have a calling to convert them!