Unsurprisingly, the biology behind this means that isometric contractions allow athletes to recruit more muscle during training-like 100 percent of your contractile tissue. As soon as that happens, you are doing isometrics. The moment your muscles are lifting the highest possible load they can handle, they stop moving. In short, this law says the heavier the load gets, the slower we must move. This is due to a physiological law called the 'force-velocity' relationship. Isometrics allow you to utilize heavier loads than conventional resistance training methods. The heavier the loads you can use, safely, the closer you can get to your maximum strength potential. But if you want to get stronger than the next dude in a hurry, you need to use heavy loads. Heavy Isometrics Build Strength Rapidlyįor muscle building, sure, you can get by with time-under-tension techniques using moderate weights. This anoxia, in turn, powerfully stimulates the synthesis of new actin and myosin in the muscle cells, to help them survive. It works because at any angle, isometric exercise increases intramuscular pressure, occluding circulation and resulting in anoxia (oxygen deficiency) inside the muscles. At the top and bottom of the exercise, muscular tension drops almost to zero.Ĭompare this with an isometric curl maximum tension can be held at any angle and you can make it last as long as you want-or as long as you can stand. During a set of curls, the tension in the biceps is constantly going up and down, like a sine wave. But this ideal angle only lasts for a split second. Imagine a barbell curl the hardest (and most productive) point of the barbell curl is when the forearms are at 90 degrees, parallel to the floor. So maybe now you're thinking, 'Hell, I'm a bodybuilder, not a weightlifter or a martial artist. This is why the team at Dragon Door, with my help, invented the Isochain, the first-ever isometric chain-and-bar device with a digital readout display in the handle. The major issue here was that you couldn't see the meter during training, so you needed someone to call out the numbers. This problem was partially solved by the addition of a simple dynamometer to chain-and-bar devices.

Sadly, without knowing how much you're lifting, progressive overload is pretty abstract, and tracking progress is difficult. How much force are you using? If you are pushing a barbell against pins in a rack you might know what's on the bar, but how much force is going into the pins? Nobody knew. The major argument against isometrics has always been the lack of measurement. Then, seemingly overnight, isometrics passed out of training culture.

It seemed like isometrics were going to be the training method of the future.

Full body isometric workout