Excerpted from The Ultimate Isometrics Manual by Paul Wade

An appreciation of its value and breadth of application should restore isometrics to a place of importance in all training programs.
-Verkhoshansky, Supertraining

In modern fitness and conditioning culture, great strength is indelibly associated with motion. Training drills—where you hoist up bars, dumbbells or machine levers—are inevitably called movements. Bodybuilding and weight-training are even grouped under the honorific title of lifting.

To become bigger or stronger, you must move. The idea that you can become hugely bigger and stronger without moving is clearly absurd. It’s obvious—movement and strength are practically synonymous.

...Or are they?

In fact, the science says otherwise. Most athletes and coaches (even some sports scientists!) don’t realize it, but science has understood for almost a century that movement is not required to build superior strength and muscle—and it’s all thanks to machine guns and frogs.

Amphibians, warfare and bodybuilding

The early twentieth century saw the most devastating conflict in all of human history—the First World War. From 1914 to 1918 industrial technology collided with outdated Napoleonic tactics and the results were terrifying, and felt on a global scale: by the time the dust had settled, seventeen million people had been killed, and over twenty million wounded.

The nature of the new weaponry (machine guns, mortars, poison gas) meant that there were more injured soldiers than any time in history—and many of these injuries were severe, requiring many months of convalescence.

While politicians and generals wrung their hands over what had gone so badly wrong, the medical world was posed with a different problem—how best to deal with the wounded. There was a tactical element to this, of course; the longer injured soldiers remained in bed—often immobilized partly or entirely due to injury—the more they began to atrophy: waste away.

Due to the nature of their injuries, many servicemen required long stints of bedrest to heal. However, over this extended period, their conditioning vanished, muscles shrank, strength diminished and even their bone density began to significantly decrease, to levels normally expected in little old ladies. In short, they became useless as soldiers.

Not good.

Particularly "not good" if the fragile web of armistices following the Great War were to collapse—as many imagined it would—and the Allied Powers required as many able-bodied men as possible to rush to the front to defend freedom and civilization.

In an attempt to solve this problem of atrophy, many medical institutions received government funding. One of these institutions was the Springfield College in Massachusetts. To analyze rates of atrophy in immobilized soldiers, they embarked upon a study using an amphibious population: not scuba divers, but frogs. It was an experiment which turned out to be hugely fascinating—for all the wrong reasons.

In the trial, the researchers took a number of frogs and securely bound just one of each of their legs to a small strut—effectively making a sturdy splint, preventing the frogs from even slightly moving the bound leg. They then popped the frogs back in their tank, allowing them to limp around as normally as possible.

Two weeks later, the researchers returned to their amphibious population, pencils at the ready, eager to chart just how much their immobilized legs had wasted away.

As expected, the free, unbound limb appeared perfectly normal, having been used by the frogs for daily movement. However, when the researchers removed the splints, they found something completely bizarre and counter-intuitive—the bound legs of the frogs hadn’t withered away, or atrophied at all. In fact, the very opposite had occurred—the bound limb had become far larger than the free limb, almost to the point of appearing muscle-bound. Seeing this, the scientists were forced to look at each other and scratch their heads. Why?

 

 

Not only were the bound legs larger, they were also vastly stronger than they had been. When the frogs were set down, they were immediately able to jump long distances, but in a diagonal fashion. The bound leg was so much more powerful than the free leg, that the amphibians had to relearn how to jump in a straight line.

 

Before too long, the developers of the experiment realized what had actually occurred. For two entire weeks, the frogs had been pushing their bound legs against the splints, in a vain attempt to move them. They hadn’t—the splints remained—but as a result, the immobile leg had gained a remarkable amount of
strength and muscle.

Realizing the error they had made in using an animal population, the Springfield boffins chalked the experiment up to experience and moved on to other methods. Ironically, they automatically assumed that the trial had been a failure, when in fact they had stumbled upon an essential truth of exercise science. They had,
unwittingly, discovered the enormous power of isometric exercise.

 

 

 

Isometric exercise has been valued for its benefits since prehistory. Martial artists and strongmen have utilized techniques involving static holds—either of postures, or objects—for thousands of years. But the true potential of isometrics is only recently becoming understood. Fortunately, since the 1920s, the effects of isometric strength training have been studied (and repeatedly confirmed) by hundreds of controlled scientific trials.

 

Isometric simply means "same length" and refers to conditions of muscle contraction where the body remains static and unmoving, as contrasted with isotonic, or dynamic, exercise, where the body or limbs move. There are many related terms in modern isometrics—isokinetics, isotonic-isometrics, overcoming isometrics, yielding isometrics, etc.—but to keep things simple at this point, we’ll just use the term isometric, and define that as muscle contractions where the body or its limbs do not move, or move minimally.

 

The more recent studies have clearly demonstrated five inherent advantages unique to isometric exercise: and if you are an athlete—or just interested in becoming stronger or bigger—these are benefits you need to know:

1. Isometric exercises stimulate strength better than dynamic (moving) exercises.

They make you stronger, quicker than other methods.

2. Isometric exercise is at least as effective as dynamic exercise for muscle growth.

You can get bigger using isometrics.

3. Isometric exercise is more efficient than dynamic exercise.

 

Training sessions take less time.

4. Isometric exercise is less likely to incur injury, either chronic or acute, than dynamic exercise.

 

Isometrics is safer, protects your joints and saves your body from wear and tear.

5. Isometric exercise can be performed more frequently than dynamic exercise.

You can train in isometrics more often, and make more rapid progress.

This list applies to all isometrics: but if you are able to use an IsoMax, there is an added sixth important benefit:

6. Isometric training on an IsoMax,  allows athletes to perform heavy, progressive resistance training without the need for a fully-equipped gym.

Isometrics using an IsoMax, is more convenient than traditional methods.

 

IsoMaxs are highly durable, take up very little space, and can accurately measure training loads of many hundreds of pounds. To be able to use such loads without an IsoMax would require hundreds of dollars in weight plates, or access to a conventional gymnasium.

But with the IsoMax, serious training—strength work or bodybuilding—can be performed at home (or anywhere) at any time.

Any athlete or coach would have to agree—that’s an incredible rollcall of benefits. Granted—nobody would expect anyone unfamiliar with the science to accept the first five benefits at face value, so we’ll carefully examine each of these principles in turn shortly. But before we go further you might be asking—if isometrics are this great, why isn’t everyone using them?

Measurement: the deal-breaker

The answer is that despite the proven efficiency of isometrics in scientific trials, there have been some major practical and methodological problems with applying isometrics in the real world. The main problem is lack of measurement.

In most of the traditional methods of isometrics—bodyweight holds, pressing static objects (like walls or doorways) or pulling on ropes and chains—there is no possible way of measuring what you are doing; how much force you are exerting.
 

It's isometric, and it works--but how do you measure it?

 

Strength training and bodybuilding are, from a functional point of view, the pursuit of increasing levels of force output. Being able to measure that force output is essential for various reasons. The most basic of these is simple motivation; if an athlete is working hard to do something, he or she wants to know what they are doing, or rather, how well.

Programming is another issue; many strength training programs are built around different levels of intensity—differing levels of workload. But this is impossible to do if we don’t know how hard we are actually working.

Perhaps the biggest issue with a lack of measurement in isometrics relates to evaluating progress as time passes. Progressive strength training—slowly adding more and more load over time—is the Holy Grail of modern strength sports and bodybuilding. But with a chain or rope (or spring, or elastic band, or whatever) if you can’t accurately measure your force output, you can’t train progressively.

If you can’t measure progress, how do you even know if your training is working, or whether to adjust it? There are other, minor issues, but this is the real reason isometrics has fallen out of favor in the modern era: lack of measurement. It’s fatal.

Historical forms of isometrics: questions and problems

It is possible to perform measurable isometrics—some of these methods were utilized in the scientific studies we’ll discuss later. But there are typically practical problems involved with these methods.
 
For example, one common method allows athletes to use heavy weights or, more typically, resistance machines of the kind found in most gymnasiums. Because all humans can hold (isometrically) more weight than they can lift (dynamically) this means that in order to perform isometrics, the trainee requires one or two willing partners to lift the weight into position to begin each hold. This allows you to measure the weight (e.g., number of plates in a stack) being held static by the athlete.

Unfortunately, finding assistants willing to do the actual lifting poses a problem. In addition, isometrics makes athletes so powerful so rapidly, that conventional machines often just don’t have enough weight resistance to be viable long-term.

Another method is to use super-heavy weights in a special rack—if you have ever seen "power racks" in a gymnasium, this was why they were originally invented. Today they are mostly used as simple safety devices during squatting or bench pressing, but few gym-goers realize that they were originally designed to allow athletes to perform heavy isometric holds without the need for training partners.

The man who popularized these racks was Bob Hoffman (1898-1985). Hoffman, an athlete and record-breaking weightlifter with more than six hundred trophies and awards to his credit, was—after Joe Weider—the most prominent advocate of weight-training and bodybuilding of the twentieth century. As well as being the US Olympic weightlifting coach, Hoffman was also an avid exercise ideologist who published the infamous periodicals Strength and Health and Muscular Development.

After decades of international-level competition and coaching, Hoffman concluded that isometric training was the greatest and most productive strength training method in existence. He literally wrote the book on isometric training.

 

 

To say that Hoffman’s method of using an isometric rack to help athletes hold super-heavy barbells worked, would be something of an understatement. His star pupil and guinea pig, Bill March, gained so much power using Hoffman’s isometric training that he was able to win podium positions at the World Championships and summer Olympics. A record holder in the press, he was so far ahead of his contemporaries that—as a middle-heavy—he could outlift heavyweights on the international scene. Interestingly, his isometric training amplified his physique to the point where he placed second in the IWF Mr Universe competition, despite never performing any conventional "bodybuilding" exercises.

Sadly, Bill March’s accomplishments are too often overlooked today, because he was one (among many) of the first generation of steroid users in strength sports. However, it should be remembered that, at the time, these compounds were new, and entirely legal.

Hoffman’s power rack method works; and the force output—the weight on the bar being held—is at least partially measurable (you can measure the weight on the bar, but not the extra force being pushed into the power rack pins).

The major drawbacks are the availability of these units, as well as their expense, and the need for lots (and lots) of barbell plates. In addition, few trainees have access to an Olympic-level coach versed in isometrics, as March did.

 

 

 

 

Hoffman based his drills around classical weightlifting. The twelve fundamental drills comprised three presses, three pulls, three squats, a calf raise, a shrug, and a hanging abdominal exercise (Hoffman recommended hanging work as both a warm-up and a cool-down):

1. Overhead press: top
2. Overhead press: midpoint
3. Overhead press: bottom
4. High pull
5. Middle pull
6. Low pull
7. Back squat: top
8. Back squat: midpoint
9 Back squat: bottom
10. Calf raise
11. Shrug

 

There are of course isometric tools like the old-fashioned Bullworker—essentially a spring-loaded two-part telescopic pipe with a force meter on the side, which slides up accordingly as the pipe is squeezed. Nobody would deny that Bullworkers really work—they do—but unfortunately, they don’t genuinely measure progress.

In theory you can measure the isometric hold of a Bullworker squeeze by seeing how far the cylinder compresses via the meter on the side, but because the resistance is generated by a spring, Hooke’s law (and therefore the principle of diminishing returns) applies. This means that, beyond a certain point, the pipe is almost impossible to compress, and huge force is required to move the meter even slightly.

This means that (beyond the beginner stage) progressive measurement is realistically impossible. Another problem is that Bullworkers severely limit the amount of serious exercises you can perform. Heavy leg and back work—the key to advanced total-body strength—is impossible on a Bullworker.
 

 

Of course, there are even older methods than the Bullworker. Old-time strongmen like Alexander "the Amazing Samson" Zass used to utilize a chain for isometrics; looping one end around a foot, he would pull on the other end. (Zass was so powerful, he sometimes broke the chain he was using. But then, this was a man strong enough to pick up his horse, and take it for a walk.)

 

 

Half a century later, Bruce Lee—who used isometrics religiously—had one of his students, George Lee (unrelated) build him a superior, adjustable version of the chain device with a bar-handle and a baseplate to stand on. Virtually every serious Olympic weight-lifting gym through the 1960s and 70’s had similar custom-made chain devices.

 

 

Comparable isometric chain tools were available commercially. They never truly took off during the bodybuilding and home-fitness explosion the way that weights and other gadgets did, however, because of the familiar old demon of measurability.

How can you tell how hard you are pulling/pushing against a chain? You can’t. And if you don’t know your force output, you are just spitting in the wind when it comes to your training.

Next-gen isometrics: technology solves the problem

The answer to this problem of measurability—simplified—is to add a force gauge to the chain. This has been attempted before—it was happening as early as the sixties—however, the older gauges were mechanical.

This meant that the athlete needed somebody else to look at the gauge during training, to tell them how they were doing—there was no easy feedback mechanism. Training was stilted, and training alone virtually impossible because the athlete couldn’t see the gauge.

 

The IsoMax makes serious isometrics viable as an elite training method.
 

Fortunately, there is now an ultimate solution to the problem of measurability: we make the force gauge digital. This is where the IsoMax is revolutionary. It not only allows you to perform all the major standing techniques of bodybuilding and strength training; it not only measures how much you are "lifting"; but it also allows you to instantaneously and directly see that metric—in pounds or kilograms—on the LED electronic display on the handle.

In addition, the unit has an audible feedback system: an alert sound tells you when you have hit a target weight, or held that weight for the desired time.

 

The take-home message here is—yes, there have been problems with isometrics in the past, but technology now allows us to eliminate those problems, and unleash the power of isometrics training in a way which was impossible previously.