How Fast Should You Lift?

biggerstronger

Feb 21

Written By Adam Fisher

Takeaway Points:

It’s commonly believed that slower reps produce better results, though recent research strongly contradicts this old school wisdom.
While high speed reps generally produce better results, there are still some caveats and nuances to understand. Understanding these nuances will help you understand when to apply purposefully fast reps, and when it may help to slow things down a bit.

How fast should you lift?

I’ve covered previously how you can’t just “lift weights faster” for cardio - doing high repetition, low intensity lifting certainly does provoke a decent cardiovascular effect, but it generally won’t be as efficient as simply doing a bit of cardio.

But aside from that, there’s the more general question of “how fast should each rep be when I’m lifting weights?” Today, I’ll answer that.

Lifting With An Even Tempo

When I was first learning to lift, the rule I always heard was that you should lift weights with a slow, even tempo. Tempos were even often a common prescription in training programs - for example, 2-1-2-1 tempo would mean two seconds lowering, one second pause, two seconds raising, and one second pause, then repeating with each rep.

This was so common, that the machines that I used in my first gym even had little “tempo trackers” which would beep at you if you were lifting too quickly, so that you could stick to their pre-prescribed tempo. Slower tempo reps are more controlled, and tend to “feel” a bit more effective because of a greater amount of time under tension, another formerly popular training theory.

However, as far as I know, there’s never been much research supporting this concept. Further, there’s more recent research that shows that purposefully moving reps slower results in inferior results, suggesting that the entire methodology behind slow tempo is flawed.

Lift Weights As Fast As You Can

A while back, Greg Nuckols put out an excellent post about a 2014 study which examined the effect of rep speed in training. In this study, participants were given a very carefully controlled training program - half of them were assigned to bench press as quickly as possible, and half of them were instructed to bench press intentionally slowly.

The results were pretty drastic - the group which bench pressed as quickly as possible, also found that they gained about twice as much strength in the bench press in the process. Similar studies have also shown that lifting weights as fast as possible seems to produce superior results both for strength and size, when it comes to major movements.

This also tends to jive with some of the knowledge I already had with training. For example, Westside Barbell’s Conjugate Method relies heavily on the use of “speed training” days, where lifters use bands and chains to focus on helping to build explosiveness in their lifting.

So, for a long time, I tended to fall into this camp, recommending that all my clients lift as fast as possible. However, with more experience with training, I did begin to develop a more nuanced perspective.

Some Caveats and Nuance

There are some problems when it comes to lifting as fast as possible.

In general, speed is a very different quality than strength, and it’s more closely related to explosiveness and rate of force development - key factors in being able to move quickly in demanding circumstances, like you’d find when playing a field sport. Over time as we age, different fitness qualities decay at different rates, and interestingly, speed and responsiveness go very quickly, along with our reaction times. This is why sports which rely heavily on speed tend to favor younger athletes, while sports which rely less heavily on these qualities, tend to feature the participation of older athletes.

Speed also decays very quickly when we get tired. When our energy levels are compromised, it’s one of the first things to go.

So, the problem is partly that after a certain point, you can’t really continue to lift things as fast as possible. When a set is taken to near failure, your reps start to slow down until you’re ultimately moving a rep as fast as you can, but still unable to complete the rep very quickly, or at all.

This especially happens when you are dealing with very heavy weights. If you were training for strength and you were lifting weights greater than 85% of your one rep maximum, speed starts to become less and less of a concern, because you are putting all of your effort into just keeping the weight moving. There’s no extra energy left over to move the bar faster.

It helps to understand the concept of muscle fiber activation, in order to understand this effect. You have a great number of muscle fibers in each muscle, and your body only uses as many as it actually needs to complete a given task, to avoid causing unnecessary fatigue to other muscle fibers. So, when you bench press with a weight that you can complete for ten reps, for example, your pectoral muscles only use the minimal number of fibers required to move the weight for the first rep.

However, as they get used, those muscle fibers will tire out, and not be able to move the weight any more. No problem at first, your body can simply use some of the other (still unused) fibers. But let’s say that you’re now nearing rep 8, 9, or 10 - getting closer to your limits. Now, it’s starting to run out of muscle fibers that haven’t been fatigued, and ultimately you’re going to fail a rep if you continue to keep attempting more reps, because all of your muscle fibers have been used and fatigued.

This helps to explain why training to failure (or at least, to near failure - since training to complete failure has some drawbacks) is so effective - because it forces your body to engage all available muscle fibers, rather than simply using a small portion of them.

Likewise, when training at higher intensities like a powerlifter, you’re already engaging a lot of muscle fibers at once, because you have to in order to move a really heavy weight. The initial threshold for fibers engaged is much higher, because the weight moved is much heavier. So, when moving a heavier weight, a greater percentage of fibers will be engaged by default.

To bring it back to speed - choosing to move the weight faster, is like a method of artificially engaging more fibers at once, making each rep a bit “harder”. However, much like you run out of available muscle fibers when taking a set to complete failure, or when lifting a very heavy weight, there is only so much that you can “choose” to move the weight faster before you effectively run out of additional muscle fibers to recruit and simply can’t.

Thus, speed as a method for enhancing muscle fiber activation, will only work well in some circumstances - namely, when working with lighter weights.

You Can Only Get So Fast

Another problem is that you can only lift so fast when you’re working with a lift that has alternating concentric/eccentric phases (which is basically, all lifts). This is a bit of a confusing concept, so I need to explain a bit about how lifting movements work.

All lifts have alternating phases of concentric and eccentric - raising, and lowering. Concentric is what most of us think of as the “lifting” part of the lift (pushing, pulling, or raising a weight) while eccentric is what most of us think as the “lowering” part of the lift (partially or minimally resisting a weight while gravity pushes it in the other direction). In between these two phases, isometric can occur - a phase in which the weight is not moving at all, such as when reversing direction. Remember the above “tempo” recommendation of 2-1-2-1 - that maps on to the eccentric, concentric, and isometric phases in the lift.

All typical lifts are made up of these three types of movement - raise, stop, lower, stop, repeat. Lifting can be contrasted with what we call “cyclical” movement - movement without such corresponding phases, in which activity is constantly repeated without stopping. When going for a run, for example, the body is in constant motion forward without stopping, because each leg alternates continuing to push the body forward. Cyclical movement is often, quite simply, cardio.

When it comes to lifting, there’s ultimately a limit to how fast you can go. You can lift a bench press as quickly as possible on the concentric phase of the movement, but every increase in speed has to be met by an equal amount of deceleration in order for the bar to stop at the top of the movement - in part because the joint is locked out and can no longer continue moving the bar forward. One can imagine a bench press which does not have to stop, in which you bench press so fast that the bar rockets off of your hands and shoots through the ceiling - but of course, such a thing is not a practical training concept.

In contrast, cyclical movement doesn’t have the same limit, so you can continue to make it faster and faster - not indefinitely, but still, a lot more than you can with lifting movements. A sprinter, for example, can continue to get faster and faster so long as their reflexes, strength, and explosiveness can continue to improve. Meanwhile, super strong bench pressers can’t just bench press faster and faster forever, because there’s the inherent limitation in speed that happens due to the limited range of motion and constant need to reverse movement to continue completing more reps.

So, while you can intentionally “lift faster”, there are limits to how fast you can lift, and beyond that point it’s unlikely to cause much benefit to try to lift faster.

Speed Can Compromise Form

In general, form is a concept that most people overthink, and tend to assign almost magical powers to. However, good form is generally important all the same.

When it comes to lifting for strength, lifting sports generally require very specific form in order for lifts to qualify in competition. Thus, powerlifters and weightlifters will generally be careful to train with good form in order to ensure that they don’t risk injury, wasted training, or ingraining bad movement patterns.

When it comes to training for size, it is generally shown that training with greater ranges of motion is superior to limited ranges of motion, meaning that it’s often ideal to perform reps strictly to ensure that you’re getting the greatest possible range out of each rep. Thus, while bodybuilders don’t have to be so careful about “good” competition bench pressing form, for example, they still want to be sure that they’re bench pressing with as big of a range of motion as possible.

Speed, on the other hand, tends to make us sloppy. When you’re trying to complete reps as quickly as possible, this often means that form breaks down, reps don’t quite hit full range of motion, and so on. It’s also especially a problem for beginners, who likely don’t have good movement patterns drilled down in the first place.

So while speed is a good thing when it comes to movements that we’ve mastered, and can still move in a full range of motion, it’s possible that the application may be a bit limited if it means we’re compromising form or range of motion in exchange for speed.

Different Exercises May Benefit Differently

Another caveat arises from my personal experience with training with fast reps for a long period of my training history - that some exercises are simply a bit more “speed tolerant” than others.

For example, calf raises and shrugs are two exercises where it gets notoriously easy to cheat by going too fast. These exercises both use relatively small ranges of motion compared to most lifts, and so there’s a tendency to run reps really fast, “bounce” from one rep into the next, and use cheating to move the weight as much as possible. This leads to overuse of the stretch reflex to move the weight, putting minimal effort on the muscles themselves. Over time, this doesn’t produce good growth for the calves or the traps, simply because you get used to bouncing those reps and this tendency grows worse and worse over time.

In this case, what’s often best is to take things slower. Slow reps, full range of motion, a slight pause at the bottom, and then an explosive concentric rep, followed by good control on the way down - this approach tends to help protect against cheating, and ensure that you get a good stimulus out of the exercise and can continue to develop strength and size sustainably.

I find the same thing tends to occur with other, smaller muscle group, accessory type exercises - so, bicep curls, tricep extensions, lateral raises, shrugs, calf raises, and similar all tend to benefit from taking things a bit slower and more controlled, because going fast just doesn’t tend to be worth it.

With these types of exercises, speed can still be a beneficial variable to manipulate, but you have to be a lot more careful to do so only in the context of full range of motion - and for many of us, we simply have to take things a bit slower.

My Recommendations

Overall, I think that speed is still a useful variable to manage, provided you understand the above limitations.

In general, I don’t recommend super fast reps when it comes to smaller accessory movements, where it is likely to do more harm than good while teaching bad movement patterns.

For larger compound movements (bench press, deadlift, squat, overhead press, rows), I do recommend trying to move as quickly as possible. However, this is with the caveat that you’re still able to maintain good form and full range of motion throughout, without speed compromising your ability to maintain these qualities.

Beginners should probably not worry too much about trying to move reps quickly. Instead, they should be focusing on learning good form and control throughout a full range of motion.

Bodybuilders and those with significant experience with the movement in question, can likely benefit the most as they work at lower intensities which make speed more natural. Powerlifters, weightlifters, and strongman athletes training at heavier intensities can still benefit, but probably to a lesser extent than bodybuilders.

For smaller muscle groups and accessory exercises, control and range of motion is the name of the game, even if that means sacrificing a little bit of speed. I find that this is more effective both in my own training and in the training of my clients, since those movements are especially at risk for cheating.

In general, the opposite - moving purposefully slower than needed to maintain form and range of motion - doesn’t seem to provide any meaningful benefit, and probably should be avoided.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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