Check it oot.
The slow training guy, the mind-muscle connection & smash burgers.
Issue nine. First, the vote.
Last issue I asked whether you wanted instructional exercise videos. Sixteen of you said yes please and four of you said no thanks. So they're happening, but not quite yet. To be perfectly honest, I want to do them properly, but they're on the list.
Audio Issue
Me reading this one out loud. At a perfectly normal speed, before anyone says anything.
The Question
This one didn't come from a client. It came from a guy at the beach, who walked up to me and said it.
“You're the slow training guy?”
It wasn't really a question. He follows me on Instagram, and saw me working out. Apparently that's becoming my reputation now. He's not the only one, either. A client of mine once mumbled under her breath, passive-aggressively, “You look like you train in slow motion.” No doubt because I'm constantly telling her to slow down and focus during difficult exercises, when she'd much rather do the opposite.
I gave a wee laugh, because I don't see myself that way at all. If I had to guess, I take about four seconds on the way down and two on the way up. That's not slow. When I first arrived in Spain, I saw slow.
Back then there seemed to be a “slow movement” developing in training, with a single rep lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute. I'd already made my peace with Spanish time. A two-hour lunch, dinner at ten, fine. But a minute for one rep was taking the piss. Unsurprisingly, the trend didn't stand the test of time. And yet one guy I watched doing it was jacked. For some reason he's stayed in my mind ever since.
I sit somewhere between him and the ego lifters. Watch a few sets in any gym and you'll see who I mean. Curls heaved up with the whole body. Squats that bounce off the bottom and fly back up before the legs have had a chance to do anything. Rep, rep, rep, done, phone.
Slowing down forces you to face up to your ego and lift within your limits. If your form is awful, it's probably because the weight is too heavy. Speed hides a lot of that. The faster you go, the more momentum does the job your muscles are meant to be doing, and the more you can get away with. Slow it down and there's nowhere to hide.
Ego wants you to look impressive. The funny thing is, the people that matter most aren't impressed by how much you lift unless you lift it well.
We all have an ego, me included. A client's kid just asked me how many pull-ups I can do. “Fifty-five,” I said. “Just kidding. Around ten.” Both were lies. I've no idea how many I can do in a row, because I haven't done a max set in a long time. I used to chase numbers, but these days they're not what makes me train harder. So I asked him how many he could do. Seven. Brilliant, I thought. He's in the top 1%. For whatever reason, I'd wanted to seem more impressive than I am. Even to a kid. What a role model, eh.
So if slowing down means less weight and less to brag about, why bother? That's the next chapter.
01
The mind-muscle connection. Be here.
Tighten up
If you've trained with me, you'll know the cues. Tighten up. Focus. Slow it down. Three of your best. Be here.
They come out when I see an arm or a leg start wandering out of position. Different words, same message every time. Stop going through the motions and be in this rep, not the next one.
I used to train a lovely guy who could talk for Scotland. He was on the leg extension, blethering away on autopilot, and looked like he could have sat there all day. So before the next set, I politely told him to shut up and focus on every rep. He didn't get anywhere near as many reps as the set before. Focus makes it harder.
It's why I have a rule. Don't talk to me during sets. I'm happy to chat when you're resting, but when you're working, you're working.
Almost every client I've asked to slow down says something along the lines of, “Uff, that was so much harder. I've been doing it wrong the entire time.” You haven't. It isn't only about speed. Going slowly lets you connect with the movement, and that's what gives you better form.
Is slower better?
You'll hear the phrase time under tension, the idea that the longer a muscle works in a set, the more it grows. It sounds right, and I've been telling myself it for donkeys. The research, annoyingly, is less convinced.
A 2015 review pooled eight studies and found muscle growth was about the same whether a rep took half a second or eight seconds. Go very slow, past about ten seconds a rep, and results looked worse, not better, although very few studies have tested reps that slow. As for the jacked guy from my early days in Spain, I've no idea how he got that way. I'm just not taking a minute a rep to find out.
Mine land somewhere around six seconds, comfortably in the middle. The clock isn't the magic. What you do with the time is.
Where your head comes in
What slowing down gives you is time to feel the muscle doing the work. That's the mind-muscle connection. Arnold, my absolute idol, has a name for it: “meathead mindfulness.”
The science backs him up. In 2018, researchers took 30 untrained young men and put them through the same routine, three times a week for eight weeks. One difference. Half were told to focus on squeezing the muscle. The other half were told to focus on getting the weight up. The squeezers' biceps grew 12.4%, against 6.9% for the other group. Nearly double, just from where they put their attention. It works best with a weight you can control. Go too heavy and your body stops listening and does whatever it can to complete the rep.
Goals matter
This isn't for everyone, all of the time. If the goal is to lift as much as possible on the day, it's a different game. Watch the weightlifters at the Olympics. Nobody snatches a bar overhead slowly. Every lift is as fast and explosive as they can make it, because the goal is the heaviest weight, once.
It's the same reason my approach changes with the person. If I'm training an athlete, or someone who wants to keep their speed, we keep the eccentric (the lowering) slow and the concentric (the lifting) medium to fast. For everyone else, I'd rather you slow down and feel it.
Lean into it
Slow reps feel harder because they are harder, and harder is where you feel the muscle. In my experience there are two ways to handle a set that's getting tough. You can rush through it to get it over with, or you can lean into the discomfort and stay with every rep. It's obvious which one gets better results.
I get so much joy when clients start to slow things down and lift with intent and focus.
It's also kept me in one piece. In 25 years of lifting, I've stayed largely free of major injuries, and I'm convinced controlled reps with a weight I can handle are a big part of why.
As I get older, the numbers might go down. How I move and how well I know my own body are the two things I'd like to keep improving forever, and they only improve with practice. I don't train harder than most, but I do it consistently.
Sources: Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger, 2015 · Schoenfeld et al., 2018
02
Coach's Pick: smash burgers
After a whole issue telling you to slow down, here's the one thing I want done fast and hard. Smash burgers.
People have been telling me about them for ages, and I was sceptical. A burger's a burger. Then I made them for Tati and me over the weekend, and it was the best burger of both our lives. Fucking spectacular.
How I made them
I bought beef mince with 15% fat and rolled it into balls of 225g each. Massive, I know. Salt and pepper, a tiny splash of olive oil in my cast iron pan, then in went each ball, smashed flat. Three minutes a side and they came out perfect. Cheddar on top, a seeded bun with a light spread of pesto, diced tomatoes and pickles.
I didn't follow a recipe. I'm a magician.
Balanced, obviously
Even here, I tried to balance the meal, because that's how I always cook. We were going to get brioche buns, but brioche is made with butter, and the supermarket ones can carry around three times the fat of a plain bun, gram for gram. So we went with a seeded bun and added cheese instead. It tasted like butter anyway. I still can't believe how good it was. Even with a massive burger, I want to feel good afterwards. If I eat too much, I feel it, and I'm at an age where overindulging just isn't worth feeling rough for.
The aftermath
Tati needed a two-hour nap straight after. Two days later she said she was still fuelled by it. Three days later she told me she just feels better. Her bones, her muscles, her blood. Bless her. She reckons we should have one once a month. This is a woman who was about 99% vegetarian when I met her. Now she eats steak and her fridge is rammed with protein. My work here is done.
Next time, smaller? No chance. We're going big every time. Built properly, a burger is a brilliant meal, and nobody should feel bad about having one. I've been saying it since Issue 07.
One more thing. If you'd like the full picture of how I train myself and my clients, from the first check-in to the last rep, it's on the blog now: How I train myself and my clients. Make every rep count. →
Chau for now.
Martin · Barcelona