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Workout Tempo

Are you ready to go home after 10 minutes at the gym? Or, not making any steady progress? Perhaps your tempo is to blame.

Workout Tempo

The tempo at which you work out is very important. I see a lot of people over do it in the first few minutes of their workout thus rendering the rest of the session pretty useless. Or, people over do it in the first couple of weeks and burn out before any real progress gets made. If anything like this is happening to you, try changing your tempo.

Overall Fitness Tempo

The tempo of your fitness can be broken down into three main types:

1. Long term tempo (gradual results)
2. Individual workout tempo (how much you do per session)
3. Individual exercise tempo (speed of sets and reps)

Every one of those types is very important and can be a big factor into whether your fitness progress takes weeks, months or never.

Long Term Fitness Tempo

As I always say: take your time. Fitness and weight loss should be done with your health in mind. Progress and results that occur over a short period of time are usually short lived and fleeting.

The best way to make sure your long term tempo is on track is to have short, middle and long term goals clearly written down somewhere. Keep them near you so you can often check your progress and your targets.

Individual Workout Tempo

Workouts should be intense. I always stress that. Farting around for two hours on a treadmill or on some weight machines will yield little real progress. However, it is possible to over do it. In fact, I often over do it. Recently at the gym I had to sit down for 10 minutes after doing a 8Â�mile uphill sprint on the hardest setting of the gym’s best exercise bike because I thought I was going to pass out. Intense workouts are good but that was just silly.

So, to get the right tempo at each workout try to:

• Warm up with both light cardio, stretching and sometimes some weights
• Set a definite time (ie one hour)
• Have a definite routine that you work on, add to, etc. each week so you know your capability
• Drink plenty of water
• Breathe properly both during and after sets
• Don’t do too much after a ‘time off’ period

Exercise Tempo

If you are a long time reader of mine then you will know I am all for doing weight repetitions very slowly. If you pump out your weights very quickly it will not have the desired effect and you will probably be working out the wrong muscles. A very general and well tested rule of thumb for lifting weights is:

• Four seconds negative motion, three seconds up.

Likewise, cardio has guages so that you know how to adjust your tempo. For example, if you can talk normally or near normally while running then you know you are going to slow. Always try to increase your workout load as you make progress.

Weight Loss Tempo

Another time that tempo is very important is when on a weight loss exercise program. If you run too fast and are exercising before your first meal you are in danger of burning muscle instead of fat. It is important to know what tempo is best for your type of workout and how to measure it.

Remember, your ideal tempo from last week probably isn’t your ideal tempo this week! Keep progressing!

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