Many athletes believe that if the muscles are under load for a long time, they grow faster. Is it so? Find out your time spent under stress? Very often from bodybuilders you can hear the opinion that the muscles do not understand the weight of sports equipment, but only respond to growth stimuli caused by the load. This training approach has been very popular for several decades. If someone still does not understand what we are talking about now, then we are talking about muscle tension during the exercise. For example, you perform 10 sets in 40 seconds, and this time is the duration of the load.
At first it was one of the many theories, but then one study was carried out, and the hypothesis turned into a direction of training. After that, many specialists and the athletes themselves began to believe that the time that the muscles are under load is almost the most important growth stimulator. At the same time, the need to progress the load, as it were, disappeared. The only thing that needed to be paid attention was the time of the load on the muscles.
All of this led to a super slow paced workout technique. As conceived by the creators of the technique, this was to help gain mass and do it very actively. But then it became known that this method can only be used as an addition to the main program, and now we will talk about why it is useless to withstand time under load in bodybuilding.
Scientific Research on the Effect of Exercise Time on Muscle Growth
Everything should be based on scientific facts, including in bodybuilding. But first, let's just reason. Everyone will agree that if you do the exercise at a slow pace, maintaining a certain time under load, then the number of repetitions will decrease. Depending on what speed you use at the same time, the volume of training will be reduced by about half. This fact is the main disadvantage of this technique.
The main growth factor for muscle tissue is load progression. Your working weights have to get bigger and this is the only way to achieve muscle growth. If you increase the time under load, then the amount of work will decrease, which will automatically lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of the exercise in terms of muscle growth. The main question is, is it possible to effectively combine the progression of the load and the time during which it affects the muscles? According to many studies, the answer to this question is no. There have been a lot of studies on this topic, and we will only remember a few of them. Scientists in Sydney found that the classical training methodology allowed to significantly increase the strength indicators of athletes in comparison with those who used slow training.
Scientists from Connecticut found that slower paced exercise decreased peak strength when compared to conventional exercise. In the next experiment, even novice athletes were unable to make progress using a slow pace. All this says that the principle of load progression, familiar to all athletes, remains the most effective.
The whole point, again, is in the amount of work performed by the athlete, and here slow training has no chance of winning. All studies show that muscle growth can only be achieved with fast exercise and constant progression of the load.
How to train properly?
Three factors have the main influence on the progress of the athlete: intensity (the pace of the exercises should be fast, but controlled), frequency, volume (the sum of the weight lifted during the lesson).
To maintain muscle growth, it is necessary to exercise frequently, but at the same time pay due attention to rest so that the body has time to recover. In training, work with weights that are 80 to 90 percent of the athlete's one-rep maximum. And the last factor that will allow you to progress is performing the optimal number of repetitions. If you stick to these principles, then the time that the muscles spend under load will not matter much.
Learn more about time under load in this video:
