Tempo simply means your rep speed, or the speed at which you do a lift. It is a variable we could manipulate to obtain desired training adaptations.

You might have seen the tempo stated as a code – 4020 or 3230.

Let’s break this down step by step and understand what this means.

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Let’s take an example of a bench press and let’s take the tempo 4020.

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“4” refers to the eccentric portion of our lift, so in our bench press, this would mean we take 4 seconds to lower the weight.

The “0” following the “4” is the number of seconds we hold the bar at the end of our eccentric portion, so in this case it’s “0” which means we don’t pause at the bottom of the movement, we transition without a pause to the concentric portion of our lift.

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Alright 2 digits down 2 more to go!

Now we are at “2”, this “2” means the number of seconds we take to lift the weight back up, so it’s basically our concentric portion of the lift.

The final “0” is the pause at the top of the movement, so as we push the weight up above our chest, we don’t pause at the top of the movement.

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So that’s basically the meaning behind tempo and an example of a 4020 bench press!

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Remember we can manipulate this any way we want, and it’s directly related to a concept called “Time Under Tension”, which is the time which a muscle is held under tension during a particular set in an exercise. Our 4020

means we roughly take 6 seconds to finish a rep and therefore a set of 8 repetitions would take 48 seconds!

 

Honestly, I rarely used this concept, but it’s good to know the bodybuilding terms which are used within our iron brethren.