Slowly But Surely Lifting in Slo-Mo is Safe — and Hard

By Elizabeth Jardina, Staff Writer, Inside Bay Area

The sounds coming from Gary Lindahl's physical therapy office might make you worry about what exactly is going on in there.

Guttural grunts. Pleading whimpers. Wordless wails of great effort.

"The worst is sitting in the waiting room," says client Sheri Benjamin. "It sounds like 'Dante's Inferno' in there."

It's not quite medieval, though. Lindahl's clients are strength-training — with the intensity turned all the way up and the slow-mo button pushed.

While exercise experts agree that almost any kind of strength training is good for people in all stages of life, those who advocate super-slow lifting have almost a missionary zeal. They decry ordinary lifting — with its reliance on momentum — as inefficient. Standard strength-training usually involves doing 12 to 15 repetitions of each exercise two or three times. Slow strength-training calls for one set of slower reps. Advocates say that lifting heavy weights slowly for only an hour a week can constitute your entire physical-fitness regimen.

Lindahl, who practiced traditional physical therapy at his Fremont office for 35 years beforeturning to the trademarked SuperSlow strength-training protocol in 1999, makes no bones about the fact that this kind of training is hard.

"This is not fun at all," he says. "This is hard work."

Slow down, you move too fast

Here's how it goes: You have two 30-minute sessions a week. One-on-one with a trainer, you lift for about two minutes each on six or seven machines. It costs $49 per session.

Doesn't sound too bad, right? Except that you're lifting very heavy weights — 80 to 90 percent of the most you can lift for one repetition. And you're doing it slowly. Very slowly. Ten seconds up, 10 seconds down.

To illustrate how slow this is, do it right now. Bring your arm up in a bicep curl. Count 10 seconds up as you lift, then 10 seconds down. It's absurdly, surprisingly slow.

By going very slowly, you eliminate momentum, and therefore keep the muscle engaged the whole time.

Combine heavy weights and slow lifting, and you've got a recipe for complete muscle fatigue — which is the goal.

"The reward is in the failure of the muscle," Lindahl says.

His patients tire their muscles so completely that sometimes their hands are too shaky to drive home, he says. They have to sit in the parking lot for a few minutes before their fine motor skills return.

Low injury rates

Don't confuse muscle fatigue or muscle failure with muscle injury. The former is good; the latter is very bad. But injury virtually never happens in a supervised SuperSlow session.

Lindahl has clients as old as 84 who are successfully gaining muscle, and he stresses that you're never too old to start.

Lindahl's goal with SuperSlow was to help people with injuries get stronger safely.

Current patient Ron Goodman of Fremont had back surgery in March for spinal stenosis, in which the bones of the spine tighten on the spinal cord and put pressure on the nerves.

"Walking was extremely painful," says Goodman, 58. "I wanted to be able to stand without agony."

He is now fit, healthy and able to leg press more than 470 pounds.

Another one of Lindahl's patients was Menlo Park resident Taru Fisher, whose rheumatoid arthritis kept her from walking more than a block at a time.

Fisher's health improved when she started slowly lifting weights, which led her husband, James Bell, to become a certified SuperSlow trainer.

"My wife had miraculous results," says Bell, 54. "Now, she can easily walk three miles up steep hills. It completely changed her life. She was ready to say, 'I don't want to live any more.'"

Bell, too, had health issues. A career as a woodworker — lifting 700- and 800-pound wood beams — and rock-climbing as a young man left him with seven degenerative disks in his back.

He's had similar results from SuperSlow.

The downs and ups

Remember how Lindahl said that SuperSlow is hard work?

He wasn't kidding.

Researchers at the Quincy, Mass., YMCA did a pair of studies in 1993 and 1999 that compared the strength gains of adults who lifted weights at a normal speed (two seconds up, four seconds down) and slowly (10 seconds up, four seconds down). Even though they were lifting for the same total length of time, the slow lifters showed a 50 percent increase in strength gains over those who lifted quickly.

But here's the rub: "Of 147 subjects, only two were willing to continue training in the slow method after the 10-week study was completed because they just felt it was too tedious and too intensive and too tough to do," says study author Wayne Westcott.

Another potential problem with slow lifting is that people tend to hold their breath. That's not usually a critical problem, but for those with hypertension, slow lifting without proper breathing can raise blood pressure to dangerous levels. SuperSlow trainers monitor breathing and teach clients to breathe in and out deliberately, almost like Lamaze breathing.

Is SuperSlow for you? Some people are motivated enough to work their muscles to total fatigue at a gym on their own — especially after having a session or two (or four) with a personal trainer who can help explain proper form and breathing.

Others need that one-on-one contact to make sure they lift until the muscle is totally toast — not just a little bit burning.

Lindahl says that he has trained pairs of people who can act as each other's gym buddy, ensuring that they lift correctly and continue through the hardest part at the end of each exercise.

But SuperSlow lifting does have one significant benefit: You only have to do it twice a week for 30 minutes. Then you're done.

"High-intensity exercise is the form of exercise that produces muscle mass the fastest," Lindahl says. "After 30 minutes, (my patients) are goners. They don't ask for 10 minutes more."

- The official SuperSlow Web site is http://www.superslow.com.

- Contact Gary Lindahl's Fremont office at (510) 793-2480. Contact James Bell's Menlo Park studio at (650) 799-7891.

Elizabeth Jardina is a Bay Area Living staff writer. E-mail her at ejardina@sanmateocountytimes.com or call (650) 348-4327.