You’ve Been Doing Reps All Wrong! (FIX THIS)

Should you do fast reps or slow reps if your goal is to build more muscle? In this video, I’m going to answer the question of whether one rep tempo is better than the other and show you how to make whatever rep style work best regardless of what you choose.

what’s up guys jef Cavalier aex. com so make your vote below fast reps or slow reps which one is better for building muscle Jesse you got to vote hopefully it’s fast reps because a lot of things I do are very quick um we’re talking about in the gym Jesse okay now I will reveal the answer here for you ready all reps are good for building muscle but that is only if you know how to apply the specific techniques that are needed to make slow reps work or fast reps work even very fast reps so what I want to do is use Jesse as an example here and take you through the different types of reps so we can talk about them right the first one up is going to be slow reps okay because I need to slow you down Jesse all right now here this is just an example of a repetition that’s done under much more control that’s the first thing that should pop out to you is there’s a lot more control there’s no momentum there’s good form I like to call these inefficient repetitions and I mean inefficient because as a trainer of athletes I usually want want them to utilize all the muscles that like to work together to perform a job and become a more efficient moving machine but when you’re trying to create muscle hypertrophy and growth being inefficient and forcing the lats to do this entire motion here is going to help to overload the lats and make them grow now if you want to make them grow even better when you do slow reps you’d want to employ a type of technique here that we call trap sets that actually is taken right from my brand new Warrior program available over at ais. com what a trap set looks like is the following when you do your first repetition Jess you go down for one and up for a count of one on the second repetition you go down for a count of two and then up for a count of two third repetition is down for a count of three and up for a count of three you get the deal Jesse four and four right so keep going four and four now how do you know if you’re going too heavy when you’re trying to be controlled on a slower repetition you should be able to stop that bar at any point in the range of motion stop good now keep going so if you can’t stop stop at some point you’re probably using too heavy a weight to get the benefits or the real benefits out of slow rep training now that’s five and five now when you reach five and five you got to go backwards do five and five again now this slow Temple will be taken over the course of 10 repetitions you’d use around your 12 to 15 rep max and ultimately what you’d wind up with is 60 total seconds of tension now what’s interesting about this is that only the first one or two repetitions was easy right yeah now we’ve talked about effective rep on this channel and there’s a whole playlist of 100 workouts that actually utilizes effective reps and I’ll actually link another video at the end where we talk about effective reps ultimately your body doesn’t know how much weight is here all it knows is the tension you’re driving to that muscle and if we can get to those more effective overloading type repetitions more quickly then we’re doing a better job at stimulating that muscle so what the best way to do that with is when you’re doing slow repetitions is to use this type of cadence where we increasingly slow down the repetitions so that by the third or fourth rep they’re already feeling productive oh they were definitely feeling prod right they’re already feeling difficult and challenging and so being able to incur more time under tension with a an inefficient exercise that’s really driving the tension through the latch is a great way to do that so that’s how I would attack the slow motion repetitions now if I wanted to grow from Fast repetitions here I’m allowing a lot more body English and movement okay but let me show you why you want to make sure that you got to draw the line you could do it you could do it okay so go ahead and increase the weight now I’m a big fan of utilizing momentum and and some some momentum on on the exercises that you’re doing to make the muscles work harder but when you get in this position get down now I want you to just simply lean your body back all the way just leaning back like that now what you see is I pulled the bar down to a certain degree with no work being done right maybe for your low back but that’s it now keep your hands here and bend your body back up to the bar okay now you’re almost in a laat pull down position y but you did no work to get here none okay go back up to the top see at some point if you just start throwing your body all over the place when you do faster more powerful repetitions you just going to let body positioning lift the weight for you and not the actual muscles right so we have to draw the line somewhere if you do a LP pull down you can explosively start pulling go ahead but you have to draw a line and most importantly I’ll show you in a second get it going cool draw the line by locking in place Lean Back boom lock in place this is the key though this part of the lift the Ecentric raising of that bar back up to the top Under Control this is the part of the lift that we know we incur the most stretch this is the part where we know we forc the muscles to do more work this is the part of the lift that actually is stronger than the concentric so we could do more repetitions this way so even if we cheat our way through the concentric we’ve got more room to grow here so if you’re going to do these fast explosive repetitions somewhere along the line you got to make sure that you’re not just bastardizing the exercise so bad that it’s becoming just a body moving through space exercise it still has to be the muscles that are driving this right albeit more efficiently because you get some help from some of the other muscles okay all right so that’s number two now let’s say you’re like my friend CT Fletcher who I love to death and I’ve seen so many workouts of CT and the guys and they do the repetitions a little bit differently right go demonstrate what you see when CT and those guys do the repetitions guys that built amazing bodies over the years by doing tons of repetitions that look like this right kind of stuck in this sort of mid-range area with a lot faster repetition in the middle here why does this work and how can you make this work well a couple reasons number one this is a partial repetition right a lot of it’s being occurring in the middle or towards the end of the repetition right we already know that partial repetitions can have additional benefit especially if they’re occurring in that length and range but what’s most important here and this is something that they all did if you’re going to perform these repetitions in this range at that speed then you absolutely have to take these sets to failure yeah I mean failure like failure can’t move it anymore can’t move it anymore where you’re just moving little tiny little repetitions think kind of like the Sam suik type repetitions at the end oh yeah just the sort of short little repetitions at the end you take that all the way to failure it’s very similar to when you’re using light weights you can use light weights and build muscle by going even into the 20 25 rep range 30 rep range as long as you’re pushing yourself through that burn and taking it to failure right so the answer to the question of whether or not fast or slow reps are better the answer is they’re both good and they both need to be done as a matter of fact I mentioned that Warrior program we have fast and slow reps being done together in the same workouts and throughout the same phases of training because we know that both of them are necessary control and ag