2624: Slow Reps for Muscle Growth: Does Super Slow Training Work? by Christian Finn of Muscle Evo

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[00:01:08] Slow reps for muscle growth. Does super slow training work? By Christian Finn of MuscleEvo.net. And I'm Dr. Neal Malik. Hey there! Happy Monday and welcome back to Optimal Health Daily, where I act as your narrator of the

[00:01:22] best health and fitness blogs all for free, and always with a bit of my commentary at the end. Now we have a bunch of shows covering different topics. Just search for Optimal Living Daily

[00:01:32] in any podcast app to find all of them. But for now, let's get right to it and start optimizing your life. Slow reps for muscle growth. Does super slow training work? By Christian Finn of MuscleEvo.net. Some say that super slow training is the fastest,

[00:01:54] most effective way to make your muscles bigger and stronger. In a traditional weight training routine, you normally take 1-2 seconds to lift a weight and a little longer than that to lower it. With super slow training, each rep lasts somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds.

[00:02:11] One set of each exercise, and then you're done. Fans of super slow training claim that because it puts your muscles under constant tension, you don't need much of it to see results. A typical workout lasts less than 30 minutes and you do just 1 or 2 each week. This, apparently,

[00:02:28] is all the stimulus your muscles need to grow. It all sounds too good to be true. And that's mainly because it is. Super slow training – the research The idea that very slow lifting speeds will help you get faster results in less time than regular

[00:02:44] training seems to go in and out of fashion every few years. And there was one paper published back in 2001 that reported greater gains in strength with super slow compared to regular speed training. In both studies described in the paper, subjects trained on a 13-exercise

[00:03:01] nautilus machine circuit which involved one set of 8-12 repetitions. Each repetition lasted 7 seconds. A second group did half as many repetitions but spent twice as long on each one. The result? In both studies, super slow training led to a 50% greater increase in strength

[00:03:21] compared to regular training speeds. However, drawing conclusions about anything based on the results of one or two studies is never a good idea, especially when most of the research out there shows that super slow training is no better than regular speed training when it comes to making

[00:03:38] your muscles bigger and stronger. In many cases, it's performed substantially worse. When researchers from George Washington University Medical Center compared slow speed with traditional speed training, they found significantly greater strength gains with the latter. In fact, trials conducted at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Ohio University,

[00:04:00] and the University of Oklahoma all show that super slow training fails to deliver faster strength gains than regular training speeds. Super slow training and muscle growth If you could take a closer look at a slice of muscle tissue, you'd see that it's made up of

[00:04:15] many smaller muscle fibers. Your muscles get bigger when those individual fibers become thicker, a process called hypertrophy. In order for that to happen, your muscle fibers need to be both activated and stimulated for a sufficient period of time when you train. However, research shows

[00:04:33] that muscle activation is reduced rather than increased with slow training speeds, which has a knock-on effect on muscle growth. And when we talk about slow training speeds, we're talking about 10 seconds per repetition. In one University of New England study, researchers compared

[00:04:49] traditional training with slow speed training. And again, traditional training requires 1-2 seconds to lift and lower the weight. Slow speed training, 10 seconds to lift the weight, and about 4 seconds to lower it. In the traditional speed group, muscle fiber size

[00:05:06] increased by an average of 39%, compared to an increase of just 11% in the slow speed group. In other words, despite the big difference in time under tension, the slow speed group gained less muscle than the group using a traditional lifting speed. A follow-up study also shows that

[00:05:24] satellite cell and myonuclear domain adaptations, both of which play a key role in muscle growth, were substantially greater with traditional compared to slow speed training. In 2015, a team of US scientists published a meta-analysis on the subject of repetition speed

[00:05:40] and muscle growth. A meta-analysis involves pooling the results from multiple trials on the same subject. Instead of lots of small experiments, you end up with one big experiment, conducted on lots of people. As a result, you're left with a conclusion that's more reliable than

[00:05:56] anything that could have been drawn from each of the smaller studies. The researchers found no evidence to support the idea that slower repetitions will improve your results, concluding that, quote, training at very slow speeds is suboptimal for maximizing gains in muscle hypertrophy,

[00:06:13] end quote. Articles published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research also show that super-slow training has a smaller metabolic cost than traditional lifting speeds. Subjects completed two workouts designed to train all the major muscle groups, one using a traditional

[00:06:29] training speed and the second using the super-slow method. The super-slow workout involved one set of eight repetitions of each exercise, with each repetition lasting 15 seconds, 10 seconds to lift the weight and 5 seconds to lower it. In the traditional workout, subjects took about 2

[00:06:47] seconds to complete each repetition. Both workouts lasted 29 minutes. The result? During and immediately after the super-slow workout, subjects burned an average of 116 calories. That's 56 calories less than they burned during the traditional workout. When it was measured

[00:07:06] almost a day later, resting metabolic rate was no higher following the super-slow workout than it was after the traditional workout. Final thoughts In short, most research shows that super-slow training fails to deliver superior gains in muscle size or strength compared to regular training speeds. Taking 10 to 20 seconds to

[00:07:27] complete a repetition may very well make your workout feel a lot harder but it's not going to help you get in shape any faster. You just listened to the post titled, Slow reps for muscle growth, does super-slow training work? by Christian Finn of MuscleEvo.net

[00:07:47] and I'll be right back with my commentary. Dr. Neil here for my commentary. I want to go back to something today's author Christian mentioned about resting metabolic rate. Christian said that after completing a super-slow workout, individuals' resting metabolic rates were

[00:08:03] the same as those that completed a more traditionally paced workout. You may have heard that high-intensity interval training, for example, can increase metabolic rate for hours after the workout is over. What this means is that after, say, performing a 20-minute sprinting workout,

[00:08:21] the number of calories burned would be higher than if we had gone for a more moderate intensity jog. Same thing applies to weightlifting. If we're moving through the weights really quickly with very little rest time in between each set, then we can burn a number of extra calories

[00:08:38] after the workout is over, which is again all referring to an increased metabolic rate. And a systematic review found that this is in fact true. The authors of this review found that higher-intensity exercise increases the number of calories we burn after the workout has ended

[00:08:56] when compared with more moderate intensity activities. And they found that this extra calorie burn seems to last for over 3 hours after the workout has ended. So, this is just another added benefit to moving a bit more quickly during our workouts.

[00:09:12] Alright, that'll do it for another edition of Optimal Health Daily. Thank you so much for listening and being here every day. I hope you have a great start to your week, and I'll see you back here tomorrow where your optimal life awaits!