It’s a quality that has lagged far behind as I’ve sought to improve my maximum strength, my explosiveness and the size of my muscle mass.
Another method for increasing your oxidative capacity is to increase the ability of your muscles to use oxygen as a fuel.
Tempo training or continuous training, is designed to specifically target those muscle fibres which are best adapted at using oxygen – the Type I slow twitch muscle fibres.
These muscle fibres are much more efficient at utilising oxygen for energy in comparison to Type II fast twitch fibres, which are better at using ATP/Creatine-Phosphate and glycogen.
The muscles are in constant tension throughout the set, no matter how many reps you do.
My focus is on using big multi-joint movements, such as the squat, bench press and shoulder press, to target the maximum number of muscles.
Effects of tempo training After only four weeks of tempo training, it is hard to tell what effect this mode of strength training has had on my muscular endurance.
Only slow movements, which cause the Type I fibres to be under tension long enough can cause adaptation in these fibres to take place.
In it, Pipes takes muscle biopsies of an athlete before and after pre-determined training microcycles.
Pipes found that following a routine in which 8 reps were used, the fast twitch muscle fibers of the trained muscle hypertrophied.
This time the muscle biopsy showed that hypertrophy did in fact take place, but that this time it was in the slow twitch muscle fibres.
Bodybuilders have long used the principle of TUT to increase overall muscle hypertrophy.
The result is muscles which are capable of a remarkable degree of endurance but poor maximum strength in comparison to other weight trained athletes.
He used electromyography to study muscle recruitment order of muscle fibre types in the quadriceps of a trained athlete during execution of a one repetition squat with progressively increasing loads.
Starting with 60% of 1 RM, O’Shea found that the slow-twitch fibres contributed 60% to the effort and fast-twitch fibres 40%. At 100% maximum effort the percentage of slow-twitch fibres involved was found to be only 5%, while fast-twitch fibres contributed 95%. So lighter loads have been shown to target slow twitch fibres better than heavier loads.
Using tempo training you can effectively target slow twitch fibres, increase their cross-sectional area and make your muscles better able to utilise oxygen as a fuel.
Generally with more muscle hypertrophy the same workload’s lactic acid can be spread over a larger volume, and not affect PH locally as much.
Since muscles generally have mixed fibre composition, and faster twitch are known to hypertrophy more easily and more than slow twitch, there is a good chance this has something to do with it as well.
” There are articles which I’ve seen that say that hypoxia can lead to hypertrophy, so the continuous training, i.e. sets performed with no pauses between reps, can deprive muscles of oxygen long enough to cause hypertrophy.
This is how slow twitch muscles are targeted, not just because you’re ‘going slow’ exactly.
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