Tempo squats and RFD

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hi,

Would you recommend 3-0-3 Tempo Squats for an athlete competing in any of the power sports (any team sports, racket sports,…)?
Bompa (or Zatsiorsky) and many others have stated that to improve your Rate of Force Development, you should always train with an intent to go as fast as possible on the concentric portion of the lift. This doesn’t mean that you should train only with weights around 50% of your 1RM to develop RFD, you can go as light or heavy as you like actually, as long as your “intent” is to be as fast as possible on the ascent.

What are your thoughts on this regarding the Tempo Squat? Would you say that Tempo Squats is simply not meant for athletes in these sports, even for a Strength mesocycle in the off-season, and therefore after their LP they should just implement 2ct Squats and Pin Squats in their programming?
Or are Tempo Squats just fine even if there is a 3sec count on the ascent?

Thanks for your answer!

Nathan

2

This is an interesting and complex topic.

There’s quite a bit of specificity at play when it comes to strength adaptation (see here), and so you could certainly make an argument against them from that perspective (particularly the concentric). However, we should also consider that our programming doesn’t involve exclusively tempo movements (as you’ll see in our program, these sorts of things only comprise a fraction of overall training volume for a particular lift, and are only used during a specific portion of a program). Additionally, there are potentially unique benefits of these movements from a technique development and tendon perspective that can be useful. With that said, if I were programming for an explosive/power athlete who had excellent technique and no tendon issues (either current tendinopathy or history of recurrent tendinopathy), I think a program that excluded concentric-tempo’d movements would be reasonable.

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