 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coykey and today we're going to talk about how to be slow. So we spent a few days talking about speed and power work and that stuff I think is highly underrated especially in the general weekend warrior 5x5. I found my program on the internet crew so you should definitely watch those and you should definitely figure out how to be fast. But I want to talk about another point now. If my goal is to get stronger, to, you know, lift more weight, perhaps in the squat bench and deadlift, then I need to be slow. I don't just need to be fast. I need to learn how to be slow because overcoming weight requires that I produce force for longer periods of time. If I go slower, then I have more opportunity to continue to produce that force. Now, if I'm not fit and I can't sustain a contraction for eight whole seconds on a really long rep maximum, then yeah, I'm going to run into some issues, but I would say that you probably need some sort of conditioning block before you're doing your strength block and then you'll actually get some benefit out of it. One of the, you know, I've noticed this a lot training more general population people and fewer athletes, they, once things are heavy, the poop hits the fan, so to speak, and they lose all sense of what this lift is supposed to look like. They totally forget, you know, I'm supposed to push through my heels. I'm supposed to lead with my hips, whatever it may be. And then they just fall back into their, oh crap, I'm going to die compensation patterns. So if I learn how to lift really slowly, not only will my strength be able to increase, but I'll also keep my technique much better. I think that you, you should not necessarily practice going slow, but as you get stronger and stronger and stronger, and as the weight gets heavier and heavier and heavier, there's just no way other, no other way to do it. You have to move it slowly. You have to kind of learn how to grind through some reps. Now not everybody is good at that. Some people have muscles that are good at moving really, really quickly and congratulations because that's probably a little more useful than the slow contractions that my body can do. But in general, as you start to get those that rep maximum higher and higher, you're going to learn how to access some, some slower movements, some, some grind, as we might say. Now the other point of this is if you get overhyped, let me, you know, let me tell you a story. So I used to do powerlifting until I realized it was terrible for my body and I didn't want to keep doing it. And in one of my meats, I nailed my first squat because it was a little light, which is kind of how I like to do it. First rep of the meat, you know, you, you want to nail it. You want to be confident going into your second one. And I was, I was maybe too confident. And so I grabbed my second weight and I just dive bomb down to the bottom and totally lost my balance. Totally missed the rep. It was ridiculous. I wasn't even sure what was going on at that point. But what happened was I went down so slow that there was so much more force for me to combat at the bottom that I had to control that I couldn't control because they didn't have the bar path that I lost the bar path, right? So as I get down there, I have to, I'm like, oh crap, I got to push away from this so that I don't keep going further and further down. At some point you do hit the hole of the squat and you need to come out of it. And when I realized I needed to contract out of that, I contracted a little too hard and a little too fast. And I fell forward onto my toes and then I dumped the bar forward and I missed the lift. It wasn't because I wasn't strong enough to do that weight. I put 10 more pounds on and then I hit my third attempt, right? But what I did was I went slower because Mike Robertson was coaching me at that meet and he said he went too fast, go slower. And he was absolutely right. So as you're getting stronger, you need to learn how to move slower.