 Today, we're going to talk about tempo squats. So this is a variation popularized by a man named Joel Jamison from 8weeksout.com. He wrote a book called Ultimate MMA Conditioning where he outlines many different conditioning methods and how they're impacting the different energy systems of the body. One of his aerobic methods is tempo squats. Basically it looks like this. You're moving really, really slowly on the way down and on the way up and you don't stop ever. You just keep going. So seems simple, seems kind of boring when you watch it, but when you do it, even after you do one round, you're like, this is easy. And then by round three, you're crushed. So if you have this continuous movement, right, you don't clear out these byproducts quite as well, and that fatigue just accumulates so bad. I remember seeing my good friend Cody Benz doing 185 on his back squat, tempo squats. And I think he threw up afterwards, so don't be a hero when you try tempo squats. They're good too. You can hold a kettlebell really low. I've gotten a pretty good forearm soreness from doing that. You can hold it like a goblet squat if you are ridiculous and you have amazing upper back endurance. Barbell work works or barbell movements work really well because the weight sits on the most of your body, right? And so the big parts of your body can support it instead of relying on your arms to do this. So why would I do tempo squats? I mentioned it's an aerobic method. You can read Joel's book if you want to go into the nitty gritty, but what I like about it is it teaches the aerobic system to work as hard as it possibly can. So I keep this fatigue building and I can't get...so there's two types of muscles. Let's do this. This is one of the things that he outlines in the book, right? So two types of muscles, fast twitch and slow twitch. Slow twitch muscles are fast, slow twitch muscles are still pretty fast, but not quite as fast as the fast ones. And the big other thing is the fast twitch muscles get bigger and stronger. So they're fast, they're bigger, they're stronger. The slow twitch muscles might not be as big, might not be as fast, but they are very fatigue resistant. They don't get tired quite as easily. So if you're doing a sporting event, like let's say MMA, and I might write a book about it, right, the type one, the slow twitch fibers, they fight off that fatigue. And when you're in the middle of a fight, you cannot gas out because there's no coming back from that, right? You'll never feel quite as good. You'll never be quite as fast. You'll never punch or hit quite as hard. So I take tempo squats and I teach these slow twitch muscles how to keep going. And I focus on fatiguing those. Most of the fatigue, I would say that you're feeling is coming from fast twitch muscle fibers here because those are going to give out quicker than all the other ones. But you need to keep going and you need to keep the load light enough so that you can continue to move and not have to pause and clear out some of that noxious feeling that you have. You have to continue to move so that you load the slow twitch muscle fibers so that you continue to deprive them of oxygen, force them to keep going, and give them some mechanical stress that says, all right, we should even make these muscles bigger. And so if I have bigger slow twitch muscles, I have bigger muscles that don't get tired. And training in general does that. I don't know if tempo squats really do this for slow twitch muscle hypertrophy. Maybe they just increase the oxidative capacities, the fatigue resistance of the fast twitch muscles. Maybe there's some sort of combination. But this is a great method for generally working on your aerobic endurance work capacity.