Stimulate your muscles to grow with isometric holding!

Isometric posture is the most painful training method, but we will teach it to you! This is so that you can stimulate the growth of your hamstrings, glutes, biceps and other muscles!

Isometric posture for better results

The isometric hold is simply a pause. It can be long or short and works great for increasing the intensity of a given set.

Let's look at a pause in a shortened muscle position (contraction). We'll hold the weight for a set amount of time, and do this for exercises that have an increasing resistance curve. I usually recommend holding for 1-3 seconds in each repetition.

This is how it works for exercises like shoulder shrugs, biceps raises while lying on the bench, pec-decks, standing pull-ups, overhead kicks, standing and lying trips... you know where I'm going with this. These are exercises where as the range of motion increases, so does the resistance and the muscles are exercised in a shortened position.

The isometric hold also exists in the stretched position of the muscle, and you could practice it in the bottom of a single-arm squat, leg press, for example... Those reps also increase strength production and muscle growth.

Didn't you say to increase the training stimulus by holding in a shortened muscle position? What am I supposed to train then?

You can use either method depending on what exercise you are currently doing and your training goals.

A person with weak biceps should probably use more frequent training frequency and lots of exercises where the biceps are trained in a shortened position and with an isometric hold. This is great for improving the neuromuscular connection between the brain and the muscle being exercised.

After weeks or months of such training, the contractions will be of better quality and it will be possible to add exercises where the biceps are exercised in a stretched position, such as one-arm lifts on a positively inclined bench or biceps lifts with your back to the pulley.

In such exercises, it's good to add isometric holds at different trigger points. This will again increase the growth potential of the biceps workout.

Another example would be someone who has been doing leg press for months with an emphasis on glutes and adds a pause at the bottom of the exercise (isometric hold in the stretched muscle position). This execution will lead to greater force production and increase the stimulus of the workout without increasing the number of sets or reps. A very useful tool.

I like to use both types of isometric holds with my glutes. You do the glute bridge and at the end of the set, you hold the weights for 15 seconds in the top position of the exercise (in the shortened glute position). Then, without a break, you move on to the single-arm squat, which you begin by holding in the bottom position (in the stretched glute position) for 15 seconds, then you practice your reps.

If you practice this correctly, your glutes will be completely destroyed in one round of these two exercises. So what? Have you been using this method for a while now? Is it giving you results? We believe YES! And you, who are reading about this method for the first time... Get to the gym and experience pain you've never experienced before!

Source: www.t-nation.com - Tip: The Most Painful Pause (1. Dustin J. Oranchuk, (2018), Isometric training and long-term adaptations: Effects of muscle length, intensity, and intention: A systematic review, doi.org/10.1111/sms.13375)
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Translated by Jaromír Uhlíř