Nov. 24, 2025
Does Rep Speed Really Build Muscle? Exercise Tempo, Strength Pyramid Level 6 - 23
In this episode of Driven For Health, Coach Brian Parana closes out the Strength Pyramid series with Level 6: exercise tempo.
Coach Brian explains what tempo actually means, including how fast you lift, how controlled you lower the weight, and why many lifters overthink slow reps before they understand the bigger strength training principles.
This episode breaks down slow eccentrics, time under tension, rep speed, force, controlled lifting, bar speed, muscle growth, strength training, and why normal controlled reps usually beat super slow training for most men.
Coach Brian also recaps the full Strength Pyramid: adherence, volume, intensity, frequency, progression, exercise selection, rest periods, and tempo. The main takeaway is that tempo matters, but it should not distract men from the bigger pieces that actually drive strength and muscle growth.
This is a strong episode for men over 40 who want to build muscle, get stronger, train smarter, avoid wasted effort in the gym, and understand how to lift with better control.
In this final installment of the Strength Pyramid series, Coach Brian breaks down the truth about tempo and rep speed. Most men spend years overthinking how fast to lift while ignoring the principles that actually drive muscle and strength.
In this episode, you will learn why tempo is the least important layer, how to use it correctly, and how to avoid the common mistakes that slow down progress.
What You Will Learn in This Episode
- Why tempo often gets more attention than it deserves
- How to control the eccentric without sacrificing strength
- The real relationship between load, speed, and muscle growth
- Why “time under tension” is misunderstood
- How impulse, force, and intent determine your training results
- When tempo actually matters and when it does not
- A simple, effective way to approach rep speed for long-term strength
- The biggest tempo mistakes men make in the gym
You will hear a full recap of the entire Strength Pyramid, what tempo really does in the gym, and the straightforward approach that helps you train with more confidence and better results.
If you want simple easy to follow tips to implement into your every day life then check out my 30 Tips in 30 Days series, a free email plan that gives you one simple, actionable tip every day to help you improve your nutrition, fitness, and overall lifestyle.
You’ll learn how to eat smarter, move better, and build small daily routines that actually last.
Just clear steps you can put to work right away.
Join for free at go.brianparana.com/30days
and start building a healthier, more confident version of yourself today.
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Zach's Favorite Workout!
Full Body
100 mountain climbers each leg
90 squats
80 pushups
70 situps
60 walking lunges each leg
50 dips
40 leg lifts
30 side to side squat jumps over a line
20 burpees
10 pikes
(Perform each exercise until that number of reps is complete)
Use it at your next workout!
Let me know how it goes
Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?
Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.
Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:
To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com
Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.
- You have heard every rule about slow eentrics, that low ring down, perfect rep timing. None of it matters until you understand the real driver muscle growth. Today I break that down so you can stop wasting time, effort, energy on these just the truth on exercise. It's driven for health time. We are closing out the strength pyramid today.
- This is the sixth and final installment. If you have been following along in this series, you now have the full blueprint for how muscle and strength training really works. Not the influencer things as we just mentioned, the actual true principles, sciencebacked information, studies that show how to move the bar and move your body forward and building strength.
- This last layer is the least important. That's why it's at the top of the pyramid. Yet, it causes the most confusion for lifters, whether they're novous, even advanced lifters. It's tempo. How fast you lift, how controlled you lower, and all those small details many men fixate on at the gym before they understand the basics is what we want to get away from.
- Today, we clear all that up. We want you to stop wasting time on things that don't actually help you grow and start focusing on what will. Now, before we get started, just want to throw this out. If you're unclear on where to start or what habits you should be paying attention to or what should I be eating, I have a 30 tips in 30 days email series that I'd love to have you on.
- It's super simple, easy, actionable tips that are designed for busy guys with busy lives, with careers, families, and all that. You literally read the email and think, "Wow, I can do this today." Take action on it. That's what matters regardless. The information is everywhere. The implementation is the hard thing. Nutrition, fitness, overall healthy lifestyle.
- You'll learn how to eat smarter, move better, build small daily routines that actually last. Just clear steps that can put you to work in the right direction, the right way, straight away. Join for free at go.brianprana.com/30 days. That's 30 days. I'll send this into the show notes for you as well. It's for you to start building a healthier, happier, more confident version of yourself today.
- Now, let's get into it and recap the foundation. Want to make sure all of this lands, all this makes sense, and we wrap up in the right way. Here's a quick recap of the entire strength pyramid. The priority is the bottom up adherence. If you cannot stick to the plan, nothing else matters.
- Consistency beats perfect programming every day of the week. That alone will put you ahead of most most gym dowers ever. Volume, intensity, frequency. These big three, Biff, VI, if total volume drives growth. As long as you can recover, you can't bury yourself with tons of volume. [snorts] Intensity has to match the goal.
- If you're a novice, you can't go super intense. If you're an advanced lifter, you can go way more intense in time, duration, and load. in heavier loads build strength, right? Lifting heavier, you'll get stronger. Frequency helps you organize the work so your body can handle the training and your schedule can handle everything else.
- The third one, which was episode 17, was adherence. 18 was volume, intensity, frequency. Number 19 was progression. Your training needs to move forward over time. Not over every single workout, not every single week necessary, but over the arc of your training or your periodization cycle.
- We have stronger movements, more reps, more sets, better performance. Progression is really going to thread the needle here and make sure that you move forward. Then we have episode 20. Yep. was exercise selection. And in that one, specificity matters. Not in a way that locks you into just doing one movement, but you need compound lifts, smart accessory work threaded in there.
- You need variation, and you want to learn lifts well enough that your skill isn't the thing that's holding you back. Your technique isn't the thing that's holding you back. And episode 22, rest periods. This is where a lot of people cut the corners. Too little rest actually kills your performance in the gym and potentially increases your recovery.
- You end up doing less total volume, less weight, less reps. If you don't allow proper rest, you say save time in the gym workout, but you might be walking away without the gains with a Z gains that you would have had if you would have taken an extra 10 minutes and just rested a little bit more.
- That brings us to today. Tempo. Tempo is the speed of your reps. Up, down, back up. It's simple. But people turned this into a complicated mess. Tempo has gotten a lot of attention because of the ideas of time under tension. T U T is usually it's abbreviated. This theory shows and says that if you slow down the rep, you get more growth. It sounds good.
- And we need to break this down a little bit and separate the truth from where things get a little confused. And yes, if you do eccentric range of accentuated movements, you will get sore. You're stretching the muscle out, and that can help with muscle growth, but it may or may not be the divisive action that you need.
- For strength, tempo is pretty straightforward. Heavy loads move slowly. There's no trick. The the load actually dictates the speed. If you watch a heavy squat or a deadlift, the bar speed is really slow because it's close to the limit. And that's completely normal and reasonable. That's how strength works. You still control the lowering phase, but the load determines the speed on the way up.
- It's just what it is. Where tempo gets confusing with hypertrophy muscle building. On the muscle building side, most ideas come around slow eccentrics come from lab studies where people can overload the lowering phase of the motion by using machines that allow heavier weights on the way down. Here's the problem.
- It doesn't really match real gym training because you cannot safely use a heavier load than you can lift concentrically. Think of a bicep curl at the bottom. Your arms are straight. You're curling up. That's the concentric. That's the squeezing of the muscle. And the eccentric is the lowering and you're resisting.
- Now, you can do say cheater reps where you use your hips and you swing the bar up to get to the top and slowly lower down. That could work. But say for example a bench press, you slowly lower down and you get stuck because you can't get the bar back up. You might need a spotter. That is one way to be able to afford that. But here's the study is where there's that complication of what's done in a lab verse done in a real gym.
- You cannot lower more than you can lift on a barbell bench press on a squat, right? Go really slow down. I guess you could just slowly lower down and set the bar down and then either have people help support it, lift you back up or you put the bar down on safety rack and take some weight off and then lift it back up. The lab study doesn't directly apply to gym settings.
- Another common idea is that slowing the eentric down creates more time under tension, but that ignores the magnitude of the tension created. The amount of force matters more than dragging the rep out. And if you can say on that lowering of the bicep curl, if you can keep the tension really high, then that could that's going to may matter a lot more than how long it takes to lower.
- Think of it as, okay, I have uh 25 lbs on each side of the easy curl bar. I curl it up and I slowly lower down. I'm resisting gravity. Whereas if I took an empty bar and I had my friend pull down and I bite on that eccentric lowering phase, that's where the force is going to magnify. You're going to get a lot more out of that type of time under tension than if you just fought gravity.
- That's the magnitude of tension and why force matters. Walking has plenty of time under tension, but it doesn't grow your quads. Sprinting creates huge force and production to accelerate your body in a short window of time and that stimulates growth. Doing hill repeats. Sprinting on a bike is going to grow your quads and your calves more than just riding for 50 miles.
- But if you're going up, I've had some pretty intense bike workouts where we've done hill repeats and holy lord, you work hard. You're up out of saddle, just pushing and pulling on the bike. Oh, I loved it. It was so much fun. Going downhill though, I was always a little more reserved.
- Some guys would bomb down these hills with turning corners and stuff. I could not muster the fearlessness that they had to do that. I was always afraid of the death wobbles. If you've ridden a bike at a fast speed, say 40 plus mile an hour, you know what those are. the w the wheel starts to wobble no matter how tight or hard you're holding it.
- Not something I want to experience going downhill and with potential curve or the roadway not being great. All right, back to the lifting. So, time matters. Force matters more than the time under tension. They create what is called an impulse. force multiplied by time. That's the real driver. Studies show that lifts with heavier loads move with normal controlled speeds and they create more impulse and better growth than lighter loads done slowly.
- Another study looked at slowing down the eentric to 4 seconds. Well, what happened in the study? people lifted less weight and did less total work. The volume piece, guys, that's where it goes back to the slow lowering made them tired before they even pushed the bar back up, which created less load, less volume, less stimulus.
- Super slow training has also been tested many times and nearly every time normal control tempo beats it for both strength and size. There used to be a gym and remember it was super slow zone I believe it was called and you'd go in and you wouldn't sweat. You just had to send time under tension and then you left but it was 15 minutes and it didn't stick around long.
- What do you and should you actually do then? Let's keep this simple. For real world recommendations, you should do these practical guidelines. Control these eccentric, of course. Don't let gravity just drop the weight down. Stay in control. Slowly lower. Say curl up one or two count and maybe two to three count on the way down. Perfectly great tempo.
- That's great for hypertrophy. Drive the concentric with intention. Really squeeze and push hard. on as far as the concentric of bench pressing is the pushing up. Concentric of pulling is the pulling the weight toward you. We want that to be really strong, not throwing the weight, but really focus on attention, force with good form.
- Don't slow down the rep unnecessarily. Don't drag it out an extra three seconds in a sense. it again the total volume of work done lessens because you get fatigue rather than strength. Use natural controlled rhythm. Most strong lifters land right around 1 to 3 seconds concentric and then also similar on the eentric.
- A really natural rep range is doing count doing one to two count on the eent the concentric excuse me and then two to three on the eccentric. Sometime there's a pause at the top and at the bottom for one count as well. And when you see tempo right now it'll say something like four one two one. That would mean four counts lowering, one count pause, two counts up ex the for bench press, and then one count at the top.
- That would be the tempo. And usually it's done in four [snorts] digits if you're having a very specific exercise routine created for you. For pretty much anyone listening to this podcast, we're not that into the weeds. This is not say bodybuilder.com. This is I need to figure out how to maintain my healthy lifestyle, a fit healthy body for my day-to-day work responsibilities, job responsibilities so I can thrive in everyday life.
- That's what this whole thing is about. As we close out, hopefully this is a really good peak to the top of it. We're closing out the strength pyramid. All six layers give you everything you need to start building muscle strength the right way. Built on principles that actually work for busy guys who want results they can keep.
- If you missed the earlier episodes, go back and listen to them. Adherence is on episode 17 and it goes to 18, 19, 20, and 22 are the episodes and this being 23. Moving into our fast five. I love this portion. Just fun, light, related to the topic at hand usually, but quick and easy questions that I get asked all the time and help clear it up for you guys.
- Question number one, what is the biggest mistake most men make with tempo in the gym? we talked about. They're slowing down the reps so much, they're actually losing productivity and strength and power output and total volume in the workouts as we just talked about it. You get tired and it ultimately steals away the amount of load, the volume, the force that you can create.
- And number two, what tempo do you use in your own training right now? Well, for me, I'm usually doing a natural controlled pace. I'm not throwing the weights up and I'm not just letting them fall down. 2 seconds up, 2 seconds down. Something like that. One, two, and then slowly lowering. One, two. Controlled. I like that 8 to 12 rep range.
- Occasionally, I'll do 15 if I feel like I can with the weight just to get a couple extra reps. I might even do 16 or I might do 11 or 12 or 13 just depending on the actual weight and the set just to get a lot in there. Number three, what is one tempo myth you want men to stop believing? The idea that the slow eccentrics are automatically going to build more muscle.
- As we talked about it, it just isn't true. Question four. What lift does tempo matter most for in your experience? Most men temper tempo matters most for movements where form breaks down easy. Row curls lateral raises. Right? If you throw your arms out straight to the side and lateral, that's a hard movement. That's really long levers and it's not a strong muscle.
- It's easy to just let the weights fall and then you're really throwing the weights up but not getting 50% of the effort and results from it. Question number five, what is your favorite strength workout to run when life gets busy? For me, the basic one is going to be push-up sit-up squats. 20 minute time frame.
- I'm doing 10 reps each. So, 10 push-ups, 10 squats, 10 sit-ups on repeat for 20 minutes. That's going to give me a slam dunk workout. I'd tell you to do it, too. Uh, speaking of a fun workout, wanted to read a testimony from Zach. You may have remember him from episode 10. And he had stepped out of his workout routine before he joined the call to rise 100 day fat loss challenge.
- And soon as we got in there, he stepped into it and stepped up. This is what he said. Before joining the call to rise, I wanted to get stronger, but my days were slammed with work, kids, travel. I kept missing workouts cuz nothing fit my schedule. Coach Ryan built a plan that worked around my life and still pushed me.
- Didn't matter if I was on Long Island or in New York City or in Vegas traveling for work, I was able to keep up. pace. The workout that really changed everything for me was the 19080. It was a simple sequence that hit every muscle group, burned lots of calories, and forced me to push myself. It carried over into the rest of my day.
- I love do it in the morning, especially on days I traveled, because I knew if I got that done, I could do anything else in the day. And that's where it showed up in my energy, confidence, and those other areas of life. I started getting stronger, dropped fat. He actually dropped 30 some pounds from 225 to 28 to 197.
- And he feels in control. Again, if you're a busy man who wants real strength and structure, the call to rise is one to join. The final layer of the strength pyramid is done. Wrapping this up. If you made it through the full series, I congratulate you. Please email me, message, comment on the post. I do see them all the time.
- And let me know where I can help you more. I'm always looking for more ideas or help people in their exercise routines and give them more specific answers for that. So, please engage. Temple has its place, but is not the driver of your results. Adherence is. got to show up and do the work in the first place.
- Controlling the lowering, pushing the concentric with force, effort, energy, and intent. You keep your eyes on the bigger principles that change your body. That's how you build real strength over time that changes your body physically and emotionally. Well, thank you for listening. I appreciate you being here, putting in the work, and our next episode is going to be talking about some really good ultimate guide to burning fat.
- Some really key tips. We'll get back to fat burning and nutrition and putting it together. Looking forward to
