Q: Hey Mike, Im on your 6 week chest routine MWF to get out of my 135 pound benchpress plateau. Im half way through week 2 now, at 100 pounds. Last week i had no trouble, but this week only adding the 10 pounds ive noticed ive had to push a little bit harder, and actually would get a little bit of a burn the next day. Im worried that if im getting a burn on week 2 already then i might not be able to lift the higher weights in week 4+ (I bring the weight down and push up very slowly to get a burn)

A: Oops, I should've mentioned this more explicitly... When on strength-building programs such as that one, you should lift EXPLOSIVELY and bring the weight down relatively fast (though still under control). So by trying to get the burn and doing it slowly, you're going against the program. Change your lifting to make the concentric phase (pushing the weight up) as explosive as possible and the eccentric (lowering it down) fast while still under control!

Strength-training and power-training are all about explosiveness, not about the burn. That's the reason why you don't go to failure almost at all while strength-training -- if you're at or neat failure, you have no explosiveness left in you (as you yourself are experiencing now!)

I would go even as far as saying that you should NEVER lift slowly, no matter if you're bodybuilding, strength-training or anything else. The concentric phase (the lift phase) should always be done fast, powerfully, while under control. It should not last more than a second for most reps/exercises with the only exceptions being struggling on the last 1-2 reps when lifting to failure. Do not intentionally make the lifting phase slow, it's completely counter-productive. There's a limited body of evidence that slow eccentric phase (when you lower the weight) may have some benefit for hypertrophy (muscle growth), but even there the data is very mixed. It certainly won't make a dramatic difference. I prefer to save my energy for squeezing out higher weights or more reps rather than for super-slow eccentric. Use 1 second or less to lift and 1-2 seconds to lower. And do it even faster when training for strength!