• Time Under Tension

  Sep 23, 2025

  I recently learnt about the concept of Time Under Tension. When working out, how long you draw out the movements matters. The longer you draw them out, the better the muscle activation and hence the muscle growth. It had never occurred to me before. I used to think that if I’m lifting the weights, that’s all that matters. If someone is doing it slowly, I thought it’s just because that’s the safer way.

  I see a parallel to learning here. For many non-fiction books, people argue that you can read a short synopsis and you get the message. But they are missing something important. They get the idea, but it doesn’t take root unless you read the whole book. When you read the book, you go through the journey and understand the nuances. The long time spent reading helps in gaining a deeper understanding, and increases the likelihood of getting value out of it.

  Perhaps the same applies to our LLM usage. If we use LLMs to answer all our questions, are we taking a shortcut and not giving ourselves a chance for deeper understanding and growth? Prior to LLMs, whenever we did a web search, we would read through multiple pages and piece together a fuller picture. This journey gave us more insight than what we were looking for. One trick could be to include in our LLM prompt an instruction that it should include more related information than what we asked for. It might not lead to as much serendipity and exploration as before, but could just be enough or close to being enough.

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