New 2025 Gains

How to get more gains from your strength workouts for 2025...keeping it simple!!!

Have you tried changing your exercise tempo? The exercise tempo for hypertrophy requires you to slow down your exercise on the negative: 'four, two, two' is a simple yet effective old school training tool you can bring in. For example, when performing a bench press the negative (on the way down) would be a four seconds, then hold for two seconds at the bottom of your bench press and then push up for two seconds...this is the protocol for hypertrophy building, which means building muscle.

There are many different tempos you can adopt into your exercises but this particular 'four, two, two' protocol is a slow challenge, bringing it back to basics with your foundation exercises. To just tweak the tempo to a slow rate provides a whole new stimulus to the muscle while still following your same strength training programme - it is an easy change!

Generate more force in your workout through a small pause as an example, will recruit more muscle fibres and therefore build stronger muscles, however a slower tempo may require you to push lighter than usual (this is not a bad thing), going a little lighter with slower rep speed will give you better results and you are less likely to get injuries.

This is not a new method of training, slower tempos were in fact popularised in World War 2 by people training to be body builders, when there was less gym equipment available, so this meant that body builders would take 30 seconds to complete one rep at a lighter weight to build stronger muscle.

So you don't have to change your programme necessarily, instead maybe try changing the rep speed for a few weeks, then as you start to plateau move to another rep speed - keep it simple!

If you would like help with your strength training programme, please email lucy@bodyreset.je