Resistance Training Terms

Here is your jargon-busting guide to terms that you might see commonly used when discussing weight training.

Weight - Simply put, the mass (weight) lifted in a particular exercise. Important to know here, that when performing barbell exercises, such as the squat, deadlift, etc, you also include the weight of the bar. So for example, a squat, with two 20KG plates on either side of an Olympic bar, would count as 60KG lifted.

Reps - Short for repetitions, this is the number of times you perform the exercise. If I performed dumbbell curls, for a count of eight up and eight down, that would be eight reps.

Sets - The energy systems we use to lift weights to increase strength and size, run out of gas pretty quickly. So they need to recover. So we break up the total amount of reps we perform into sets. For example, I might be able to curl 10KG dumbbells for three sets of 8, but there is no way I can perform 24 reps in one go. Thus the need for sets, to make sure we can perform enough volume necessary for growth.

Volume - Volume is the total amount of sets, reps, and weight lifted on a particular exercise, or in a given training session. It would be calculated, as follows:

Volume = Weight x Sets x Reps

That is at least the typical definition. However, I would actually redefine volume as follows:

Volume = Weight x Sets x Reps x Time Under Tension (TUT)

Time Under Tension (TUT)

TUT is the amount of time your muscle spends under tension when performing an exercise. TUT became this craze in the bodybuilding community a few years back, and I can’t for the life of me understand why.

Some personal trainers were recommending to their clients that they lift extremely slowly to maximize TUT. The problem with this is that if you maximize TUT, you are going to lose out on the total amount of weight that could be lifted, as well as reps.

So in actuality, you’re back to square one, as if you performed your exercise at a normal tempo. Thus meaning that TUT is not this magical thing in and of itself, but it is one of the other variables as part of total training volume.

My recommendation would typically be that my clients aim for a 1:2 ratio of concentric: eccentric. So on a squat, maybe 3 seconds to go down, 1.5 to come up. This leads us to concentric and eccentric.

Concentric and Eccentric - The concentric portion of the movement is when you contract the target muscle, with the eccentric being where you relax the target muscle. On a bicep curl, the concentric portion would be when your bicep contracts to raise your palm up to your shoulder. The eccentric portion being when your palm lowers back down towards your waist.

With the concentric portion, you want to make an effort to breathe out, whilst on the eccentric breathe in, and actively resist the muscle relaxing, as gravity tries to get in the way. Or rather, you actively resist gravity. This is done by ensuring, as discussed above, that your eccentric takes approximately twice the time as it takes to complete the concentric portion of the movement.

There you have it. Now you understand the basics of our language. You are one of us.