Your workouts are nothing without time under tension. Within the basic form, it’s the duration of time during a repetition that you are stressing with the weight. I’m sorry, not?Tutankhamun the Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty…
TIME UNDER TENSION.
The most commonly known time of tension may be the concentric movement phase, which is the part that many people associate with weight lifting. The ‘up’ movement on the squat, the ‘press’ movement on the bench press, the ‘curl’ movement in a bicep curl. People focus so hard on this phase they forget all about the other half from the lift, the eccentric movement, that is referred to as the return phase. Letting the bar down towards your chest on the bench press could be just as essential as pressing them back of the chest.
The the easy way execute lifts with a decent level of time under tension is simply to pay attention to the movement of your muscles, not only the movement from the bar or weights. A lot of times people will worry about doing what you can to maneuver the bar, and this causes them to recruit other muscles, taking stress off of the muscle they’re planning to work. If you are conducting a bicep curl and rather than concentrating on moving the dumbbell, you concentrate on actually contracting your bicep and using the muscle to move the load, it can help you against recruiting other muscles that may help you ‘cheat’ the rep.
A fantastic way to think of time under tension is with a 1:2 concentric:eccentric movement. For example, if pressing the bar from your chest during a rep of the bench press takes 1 second, bringing the bar down again for your chest must take 2 seconds. This can create a totally new degree of force on your muscles because they lengthen, drawing more blood in to your muscles, permitting more muscle growth.
Give it a go the next time you work out, and find out how sore you are the following day!
I promise it will be worth it!