"While both athletes could produce the same amount of maximal force in the bench press, Ben could absorb more force eccentrically at a higher velocity. ...Ben was able to load up his muscles with more energy to use concentrically, enabling him to accelerate the bar faster than Tommy did, producing more power." Cal Dietz, "Triphasic Training"
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....I'm not a fan of tempo. Actually, I'm not a fan of the consensus on tempo and how it is used.
There is a large body of coaches who believe you have to have a tempo on everything in order for a program to be legitimate and I just don't buy it.
For those of you who may not be aware, the tempo prescription of four numbers each represent the muscle action in an exercise. Eccentric motion, time spent in the stretched phase, concentric motion, and the time spent in the contracted phase.
The muscle at each of these moments exhibit specific actions and qualities. A good coach knows what is going on during each phase, the best parameters to use to evoke the change desired, and how the body recovers from each action given a program context. Yet, when you prescribe them all the time, just for the sake of filling in 4 little numbers on a program, I believe you lose control of your program.
As far as I know, the idea of tempo was introduced to the mainstream through Charles Poliquin (who I know, so know that these words are not of a keyboard warrior hiding behind his screen). As my memory serves me, his thought process was that he simply wanted a way to normalize the time under tension his athletes were exposed to during exercises. If he wrote dumbbell curls for 3 athletes, one might do a set of 10 in 12 seconds, one in 16 seconds, and another in 30. Without standardizing the time under tension there was no way to account for the results at the end of the program. So in that light, tempo is brilliant. Time under tension is absolutely a variable that elicits a specific effect which should be accounted for.
Yet today I see that being more of an afterthought of coaches writing tempo rather than being the reason, and almost EVERYTHING has an eccentric tempo of 3 or more. If you think that is negligible, try lowering your deadlifts at that tempo from now on.
Now take the epiphany Cal Dietz had in his book. He had 2 athletes, both throwers, and both could bench 405 max. Yet one threw further. Why? Because one lowered the bar, stopped it, and then reversed it at a greater speed than the other. Read the book if you want to dive further into the physics of what is going on between the two benches (its a great book by the way), however you should be able to conclude just in your head that it would be easier to stop a car coasting towards you at 2mph than one rolling at 15mph. Its the same car, but the reversal strength needed to stop the faster one is much greater.
So what happens when you prescribe a controlled eccentric tempo to everything?
Ok, this is all conjecture from here on out, I'll be straight up with you. Yet recall that conjecture is where all science begins, so there is my rebuttal.
I benched with a slow and controlled eccentric for powerlifting for years. I got decent and could bench 415, which was way more than a lot of the guys I competed against in highland games where there is a lot of throwing. I never trained my muscles to absorb all of that descending weight at a fast speed and therefore could not exhibit explosiveness in my throws despite my heavy bench.
The same goes for almost ALL of my lifts. I always lowered slow and controlled.
Now at this point in my life I am trying to develop explosive qualities and am having to start at the kiddie shallow part of the pool. The weight I used today on my front squats (125#s bar weight with ~80lbs band tension) is far less than what is typically used in a traditional Westside speed day where bar weight usually represents around 50% of your 1RM. I went up in weight as much as I could and still feel fast on both the eccentric and concentric portions. More importantly, I wanted to be fast in the reversal.
The small weight used would deter many from continuing to travel down this road as it is very mentally hard, but I will push forward with it in hopes of developing that fast reversal speed quality, allowing me to better train for power.
So there we are. Think about why you use what you use in your programs. If you're using a parameter that was introduced by a coach, ask what their original intent of that parameter was. Does it fit with what you are training for?
The information game in this industry is like the telephone game we played in school. Don't always trust that information will retain its integrity by the time it reaches your ears.
