This may be a late post, but I'm reading this and I have to point out:
Lifting with 100% intensity on every rep is going to kill your CNS. Think about it, 25 maximal reps (not including warm ups! some ppl ramp up the weight with all that intensity too) and then maybe another 50 maximal reps for the rest of your workout. And some people train 3x a week!
This is wrong, and I am not advocating psyching up for all sets and reps, the point is the intent of maximal bar speed. Lifting with a premium on SPEED of the rep, not grinding out rep after rep, is alot more cns friendly and will give more carryover to athletic performance than lifting a heavy weight slowly, the time under tension alone will be much greater for the latter, causing much more fatigue and cns drain. Explosive lifting is used by many as a recovery method, and it works very well in that way, in fact, a good way to deload from a heavy, low rep, maximal strength block is to perform an explosvie strength block and let the cns recover.
The body will also obviously not be able to maintain max speed or intensity on every rep regardless of intent, so the mere fact that you say "50 maximal reps" sounds like something out of a Schroeder article, makes that impossible, and is bullshit also. The body is very good at allowing what it can and cant handle, TRYING to move the weight as explosively as possible, will keep the rep speed higher, but it will obviously not be MAXIMAL later on in the workout.
Last, there is really no need to go any further into this, but many olympic lifters lift VERY CLOSE TO MAXIMAL, if not maximal, weights several days per week, in multiple sessions per day, at maximum speed, regardless of load. They do very well with it. The time under tension on a slow, heavy, lift, is going to cause more overall fatigue and systemic breakdown than accelerating a weight through its entire range of motion, END OF STORY.
BUTTTTTTTT what people don't realize is that the body is highly adaptable. It's not just your muscles that will be able to adapt and recover faster from workouts and be able to put out more force when fatigued than before. It's also the nervous system that will slowly adapt to this new stimulus as well. So make the most of your workouts people. It's literally like fast fowarding through a huge macrocycle in your training because you'll learn to recover faster while making better gains.
Wish I knew this before. Smolov jr taught me a lot.
Thats the goal of ATHLETIC training, to not only stimulate the musculature, but become more powerful and explosive as a whole, a highly trained and hard to fatigue cns. Football, basketball, track, etc., all require extremely intense burst of speed and power, over and over and over again, throughout game after game, and practice after practice. This is a quality that can be improved, and one of the best ways to do so is the intent to move loads as quickly and powerfully as possible.
All that being said, there are times that tempo and slowing down a lift may be of benefit, BUT THIS IS GOING TO BE MORE DRAINING ON THE BODY, AND REQUIRE A LONGER RECOVERY PERIOD, than lifting explosively.
