Paused Reps In Your Training
Takeaway Points:
Pauses in reps can be very useful for building muscle mass and practicing strict form, especially when doing higher reps or exercises where you tend to zone out or speed through.
Pauses at the bottom of each rep helps keep you aware of your form as well as letting your muscles re-engage for the second part of the lift. Pauses mid-rep are less effective and can lead to weird patterns in your lifts.
However, pause reps don’t always work for every exercise. Doing a pause rep for something at an extreme range of motion could cause undue stress and cause or complicate injuries. If the pause causes you to have poor form, it should be avoided.
Pause reps can be a great way to add more difficulty to your workouts, but it’s best to assess each lift to see if it will be beneficial.
What are pause reps, and how should they be used in your training?
Pause reps involve the use of stops, or pauses, at some point in the range of motion. There are many ways to pause reps, and every lift is a bit different, but their primary focus is to make reps harder while encouraging good form.
For example, a barbell bench press is an exercise which does NOT have a great range of motion for the chest, compared to a freer movement like a pushup, where the pectoral muscles can travel through a greater range of motion. This is especially a problem if range of motion is further limited using sloppy partial reps.
The simplest and easiest way to counteract this, of course, is simply to ensure that you are using as great of a range of motion as possible, touching the bar all the way down to the chest. This ensures that you’re getting as much out of the exercise as you can, when it comes to building muscle mass (which heavily relies on long ranges of motion).
You can also simply use other methods as well, though these are less specific to building bench press strength (which is, after all, why a lot of people want to bench press in the first place). A dumbbell bench press, for example, isn’t limited by the bar touching the chest, enabling you to get into a deeper range of motion. A cambered bench bar is a specialized bar built with a bit of a U-shape in the middle, enabling you to get a slightly deeper range of motion with each rep on the barbell bench press - less ideal when training for strength, but better for building muscle mass. Then, of course, there’s the noble pushup and dip - exercises which are not as easily scalable as the bench press in terms of adding weight, but which can enable much deeper ranges of motion.
Another solution is simply to add a pause at the bottom of the range of motion - pausing for a second with the bar touching the chest, before initiating the press. This ensures maximum range of motion, and because the muscles will relax very slightly during the pause, will force you to re-initiate tension before starting the press - turning it into a more challenging lift overall.
A massive benefit of the pause is that it also ensures very strict form. When lifting weights for more than a few reps at a time, it becomes easy to lift mindlessly - not focusing too hard on individual reps, and letting form get a bit sloppy. This changes near the end of a challenging set (when everything gets hard and you’re struggling to complete reps), but can get especially sticky in the middle if you’re rushing it and not paying proper attention. Naturally, a pause at the bottom of each rep can serve as a kind of external cue that can help you ensure tightness and crisp reps throughout, while of course adding a bit of extra challenge.
The research generally supports the idea that paused reps are individually more effective at building strength and muscle mass, meaning that this added effort is not disconnected from results. For example, a study on deadlifting found that “bouncing” the weight off the floor at the bottom of each rep, led to inferior strength gains - trainees who trained the lift in this way effectively got used to the benefit of the bouncing effect, and as a result did not develop much strength in the initial phase of the movement.
Such a lifter would have a very hard time getting the first rep off the floor, but could then easily bounce and complete many more reps afterward. One can imagine the same thing happening with the bench press - someone who gets used to bouncing the rep off the chest would then be worse at getting the bar moving, and thus their peak strength would suffer in competition, where it is required to pause at the chest before completing the rep.
Likewise, we can apply similar approaches to any major barbell lift. The pause squat involves pausing at the bottom of each rep. A paused overhead press would simply involve resting the bar at the shoulders between each rep, instead of immediately initiating another rep. A paused barbell row became known as a Pendlay row, because weightlifting coach Glenn Pendlay was so fond of them.
In some cases, the pause effect can also be accomplished via the use of “reverse” reps. If you set spotter arms to be at or just above the position that you would end a bench press, then rest the bar on the spotter arms and perform the rep in reverse by starting with the press and then ending with the lowering phase, you accomplish something very similar to the pause bench.
This has the added benefit that it’s a bit safer (you could pause a rep and then realize you can’t get it back up afterwards in a normal pause bench), and likewise easier to keep strict. The same can be done with a squat, and even to a certain extent a deadlift, overhead press, or barbell row - through the use of boxes, spotter arms, and so on.
The use of reps with artificially shortened or lengthened ranges of motion (board presses, rack pulls, and so on) are a discussion for another time. Suffice to say, that you can use these implements as tools to help enforce pauses and keep reps strict.
Initially, this feels very hard, and is often discouraging. If you’re used to bouncing out five deadlift reps and find that you can only do 2 or 3 with stricter form, you’re more likely to want to go back to bouncing to keep your numbers up. I’ve certainly fallen for this a lot in the past. However, in the long run, this only cheats you - and stricter reps will generally lead to better results even if it feels discouraging in the short term.
This has led to a kind of movement in recent years which is often shortened to the moniker “team full ROM”. Naturally, followers of this style of training recommend the use of full ranges of motion, often with strict pauses where applicable in each rep in order to maintain this strictness. In general, I would say that it’s hard for this philosophy to lead you very wrong. However, I do imagine a few caveats that I would like to discuss.
Mid-Rep Pauses
A related concept is the concept of mid-rep pauses, which involves pausing part of the way through a rep. In the bench, for example, someone might lower the bar to the chest, pause halfway up, and then complete the rep.
I imagine such reps could be useful, but I’ve never found them to be very useful in my own training. Pausing midway through a rep is a lot more challenging - and in ways that I’m not sure will be super helpful. It’s helpful to pause at the bottom of a range of motion in order to ensure a strict rep, for example, but I fear that pausing in the middle of the rep can have the opposite effect.
Pausing midway through a bench does NOT teach a pattern that is useful to a competition bench, and it doesn’t help increase the range of motion. Instead, it simply encourages you to get used to stopping in a very particularly weird and challenging place - and I suspect this could do as much harm as good, as it could ingrain a very weird pattern of movement relative to a standard bench press.
Likewise, midway pauses in squats and deadlifts have never struck me as useful so much as pointlessly challenging, and I’ve never found much use for them in my training. The common argument is that they could help with developing strength in sticking regions - if you tend to fail a bench midway through the rep, for example, then training with a pause in that midpoint would help build strength in that phase of the lift.
This is, I think, based on a misconception about why reps fail. As Greg Nuckols talked about in a recent podcast, you don’t fail at a given point in your range of motion because that’s where you were weakest - you fail because you were weaker at some earlier point in the range of motion. You start slowing down earlier in the range of motion because that was your weakest point, and then you ultimately come to a stop when that slowing down catches up to you. Thus, pausing at your point of failure is likely to miss the mark - and very often, pauses at the bottom of your range of motion will do a lot more for you.
Pauses At Excessive Ranges of Motion
I also fear that pauses can be a problem in certain excessive ranges of motion.
Based on personal experience - I’ve always been able to manage pause bench, pause deadlift, pause overhead press, and pause barbell rows - but I’ve NEVER been able to handle paused squats very effectively.
This is because while a squat requires you to get down to a certain range of motion, many lifters could continue to go much deeper, but doing so would cause buttwink, rounding of the spine, and a compromise of strength. In short, with squats, while it’s still general to go to as full a range of motion as is possible, it’s also possible to go too deep and compromise the quality of your lifts in the process.
When I do pause squats, I tend to sink a little bit into the bottom of the movement, and this means excessive buttwink, rounding of my spine, loss of tension, later back pain, and an all-around bad time. In short, they don’t really do it for me.
What I’ve found is that similar things can sometimes happen in the deadlift as well, depending on your limb ratios - some people have bad ratios for deadlifting, and this results in a situation in which they have to bend over significantly to get to the bar, causing excessive rounding. This can be especially pronounced if using something like a deficit deadlift, where you increase the range of motion by elevating the feet a bit but continuing to lift to the same depth.
In such cases, pauses may not be ideal. I like to use reverse squats as mentioned above, using the spotter arms set at a good height to enable me to get deep while having something to keep me from going TOO deep. Likewise, a box squat, provided that the box is set to an appropriate height and not significantly decreasing range of motion, can be another good tool for accomplishing something similar. I also recommend being sparing with lifts like a deficit deadlift if you don’t have a good physiological setup for it.
Pauses On Accessory Work
Pauses can also be used to great effect on accessory work.
For example, the whole point of certain exercises is to load up an extreme range of motion - RDL’s, good mornings, and chest flyes are all examples of exercises where a heavy load + a high range of motion is exactly the point. Such exercises benefit strongly from a pause at the bottom of the range of motion to keep them strict. Otherwise, they can often get trivially easy if you simply stick to the “easier” range of the motion where you have more mechanical advantage.
A dumbbell chest fly, for example, is hardest at the bottom of the range of motion, where the stretch it applies on the pectorals is the strongest. But it can get incredibly easy at the top of the range of motion, where most of the weight is supported on the bones of the arms, and not directly placing force on the muscles. This can also be avoided by using another variation like the pec deck or the cable fly, both of which enable more consistent loading of the muscles throughout the range of motion. Still, it matters to put pauses in this movement anyway, so that you can keep it strict.
I also find pauses useful in keeping very “cheat-y” exercises strict. A dumbbell bicep curl, a calf raise, or a tricep extension - with all of these, it can be easy to rely too much on momentum and cheating, and a pause in these exercises helps to keep your lifting mindful and strict.
Are Pauses Always Necessary?
You might read all of the above and think, well, Adam, it sounds like you’re telling me that pauses are always a good idea - and to a certain extent, you’re right. They generally are.
At the same time, pauses can be brutally difficult, and certain movements do NOT mix well with pauses. A leg extension, for example, is an exercise in which pausing at the top of the rep would place a massive amount of stress on the knees, and would potentially be capable of exacerbating injury risk.
Likewise, some other movements which rely on momentum or explosivity, like olympic lifts, jumps, kettlebell swings, and so on - would obviously be a very poor match. Messing with the momentum on these lifts would often defeat their purpose.
Thus, while pauses are OFTEN a good idea, they’re not always useful. The main benefits of pauses are that they help keep reps strict and they help maximize range of motion - and if they’re NOT doing that for any reason, it may not be a good idea to use them.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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