Time Under Tension

While the health and fitness world is vast, we can find any number of opinions on the way to train. The truth is, our training method is entirely dependent on the results we desire.

Perhaps you had an injury which affects the strength of a major joint or its surrounding tendons. Maybe you experience pain in your lower back from years of wear and tear. 

Or maybe, just maybe, you are one of the rare few who can feel the significant effects of subtle Kinetic signals on your athletic performance. Anyone can benefit from the awareness brought on by Kinetic Flow. Quick and powerful movements are very flashy; they capture our attention as the focus of athletic competition. Type II muscle fibers are often the focus of athletic training, in reaching that “next level” of performance.

The truth is, muscular endurance is just as important. It is in the type I muscle fibers, where the foundation is built for power, where the oxidative reserve is hosted to maintain posture and increase efficiency. In between the moments of explosion, it is muscular endurance which facilitates good position and aides the central nervous system in recovery.

Many professional athletes struggle with chronic and nagging injuries. Everything from tendinitis, all the way up to legitimate ligament tears which have been masked by strong muscles and perhaps even performance enhancing drugs.

There is a yin and a yang to training. There is a time for powerful movements. There is a time for movements of maximal strength. However, when it comes to kinetic balance, and the adaptive triggers to recover from trauma, muscular endurance and stability training reigns supreme.

For the purposes of muscular endurance and stability, let time under tension be your guide.

In my opinion, people are often too focused on the number of repetitions they perform of an exercise. When I see someone pumping out repetitions with poor movement quality, to me it just looks like someone who is programming their nervous system to fire inefficiently.

The time under tension principle requires you to slow down a movement and actually control it. It aides you in targeting your tension into the correct muscle groups, and recruiting those muscle groups in the correct pattern.

Remember that muscle growth is a product of muscular tension and volume. There are different velocities in which you can train, velocities which produce different types of tension within the muscle fibers. Slower velocities emphasize the growth of type I muscle fibers, and these fibers are the building block in balancing your kinetic chain.

Training at high velocities without the previous development of low velocities is like building a house without a foundation. It leads to eventual overuse and breakdown.

According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine, a good tempo for muscular endurance/stability training is a 4 second eccentric phase, 1 second isometric phase, and 2 second concentric phase. This tempo is abbreviated 4/1/2.

For example, on a push up repetition, you would descend for 4 whole seconds, hold at the bottom for 1 second, and press up for 2 seconds. That’s 7 seconds of total work time! Talk about time under tension. One repetition in this manner produces more tension in the muscle than a lot of people can produce in five!

This is the secret to really carving out your movement patterns. This stimulates your neural pathways, helping you fit into a movement like a glove, feeling every nuanced firing required to do so. Time is work, time is volume. 

Time under tension training will help attune you to your muscular imbalances, and help you to rebuild the tissues responsible for imbalance. Time under tension training also produces significant muscle damage, so prepare yourself to experience some delayed onset muscle soreness in the post exercise recovery period.

Most importantly, prepare yourself to experience an increase in the quality of your movement, and the signaling of your central nervous system in making these movements more efficient and stable.