Isometric Super-Power, the Top 10 Reasons to Use the IsoMax in your Strength Training
by Paul Wade
Do you remember strength?
Real strength—not the drug bloated here-today-gone-tomorrow gym posing bullshit you see on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok and so forth. I mean pure, ferocious, animal power—power possessed by guys who looked lithe, or even small; not the gigantic, bovine, steroid-built heart attacks-waiting-to-happen that pass for modern "strongmen".
I’m talking about the kind of strength that can shatter handcuffs, punch through walls, and bend steel—the kind of wiry, seemingly superhuman feats that the old-time martial artists and strongmen used to demonstrate, back in the early 20th century, before everything in training tuned to creamed crap.
Why the hell should you? Glad you asked, beautiful. Here are my top ten reasons why isometrics is essential for anyone who wants to become the strongest version of themselves.
1. Incredible strength—at insane speed
This has to be number one.
Decades of scientific research have established that isometric training increases absolute strength faster than any other resistance training method known to man. (If you disagree, you don’t know what absolute strength is.)
I could explain it all in scientific terms like the
force-velocity curve, or the
all-or-none law, but in reality it’s simpler than that. Strength is
muscle contraction. The harder you can contract your muscles in training, the stronger you will get. The heavier the loads your muscles have to work against, the harder they contract. With isometrics, you can use heavier loads than conventional training—because you can hold more than you can lift. (
Duh.) Heavier loads equal more contraction and therefore produce more strength.
The old-timers were forced to guess their isometric strength. With an
IsoMax, you can measure your progress with digital accuracy, and progress from session-to-session.
2. Amplified total body power
The difference between "good" and "great" strength is coordination. It’s the key to all athleticism. All the muscles of the body must learn to work in harmony, to produce a crescendo of power which no individual muscle group could hope to approximate.
With regular gym work, you can easily isolate different muscles, or muscle groups. In fact, the new equipment practically encourages—some would say, demands—this isolation approach.
Isometrics is the diametric opposite. The loads are so high—maximal—that every single isometric exercise becomes a total-body exercise. Look at Bruce Lee performing isometric biceps curls, and you’ll see his pectorals and deltoids splintering with the effort—his spinal muscles, abs, lats, forearms, and even legs and feet are all contracting maximally.
Isometrics not only forces you to learn to use your muscles in a coordinated fashion, it also means you are training everything every single rep. No wonder strength gains are so crazy fast.
3. Accelerated strength learning curve
You may have heard the saying; strength is a skill. More accurately—strength is a series of skills. Mastery of these skills can ramp up an individual’s strength to epic levels in a highly compressed timeframe.
What are these skills? There are about ten of them. They include; the capacity to generate high levels of tension; the ability to "breathe behind the shield"; bracing of the abs and glutes; etc., etc.
Chain isometrics are as old as the hills. Proto-IsoMaxes were available in the Golden Era—but lacking the crucial measurement component. Bodybuilder and martial artist Hugo Labra pulls.
Some athletes spend a fortune on seminars and workshops by high-level coaches in an attempt to acquire these special skills. But—because of the increased load and the need to maintain a static position during isometric training—isometrics is essentially a black belt level masterclass in developing the entire spectrum of strength skills. You are literally forced to absorb these skills and improve on them—it’s entirely automatic. You don’t have a choice.
4. Demigod recovery power
This is a less-sexy, but mucho-powerful reason to exploit isos.
It’s been known since the dawn of time that you recover faster from isometrics than any other form of resistance training. This is because muscle damage primarily occurs when you stretch under load—a negative movement. Isometrics contain no negative movements. They also cause less cellular waste and junk than moving exercise, due to a physiological principle called the Fenn effect. As a result, you don’t feel sore, or beat-up after isos. You feel energized. You recover much faster.
How fast? Once you are conditioned to the drills—lightning fast. The original German scientists who studied isometrics recommended maximum intensity training sessions for every muscle—not twice per week, not three times per week, but every single day. Some athletes even perform isometrics multiple times daily.
5. Bulletproof joints + heal old injuries
Conventional training with heavy, external weights, strengthens you with one hand, but it beats the crap outta you with the other. The joints are ground zero. The fundamental reason weight-training screws with your joints is internal abrasion. This has been proven many times. As the joint repeatedly moves up and down under pressure, tissues, cartilage and even bones grind together. It’s unavoidable; internal abrasion is the product of tension multiplied by movement.
Isometric training is static. The tension is there—this is what builds the strength—but the movement is not. As a result, internal abrasion drops to near zero levels. Not only that, but isometrics has been proven to actually heal old joint injuries, while having a powerful analgesic effect on joint pain.
After a few months of
IsoMax drills, many of our beat-up lifters have found they are even able to return to brutally heavy weight-training—something they thought would not be possible. We are hearing stories every day about how the IsoMax is
curing chronic pain. Isometrics is like super-steroids for your joints.
6. Develop the REAL "strength muscles"
Superficial muscles—like big pecs and biceps—are great for "show", but for "go" you really need the deeper, foundational system of stabilizer tissues which lie beneath the outer "bodybuilder" muscles. Whenever you meet or hear about relatively small men who can perform seemingly superhuman feats of strength, it’s generally because they have trained these "strength muscles"—and typically, with isometrics.
Which muscles? I’m talking about the transversus of the waist (which stops us getting a hernia), the internal "armor" tissues which criss-cross the trunk and hips, the rotator cuffs (which protect the shoulders), the palmar muscles of the hands, the plantars of the feet, and so on.
Isometric training uniquely develops these crucial tissues, due to a combination of load and the need to maintain static integrity. If you could ask the old-time strongmen and traditional martial artists how they built freaky strength with small frames, their answer would be—isometrics.
7. Exploit autogenic inhibition
Working with external weights is ultimately limiting—your contraction potential is limited by the weight. If it’s too light, you don’t get optimal stimulation; if it’s too heavy, you can’t lift it, or risk injury in doing so. You are basically a slave to the weight; and trust me, it doesn’t care much about you.
Isometric contractions are not governed by the physical properties of an external weight, but a phenomenon known as autogenic inhibition. This basically means that your brain and nervous system automatically calculate and establish an exact maximum limit to how hard you can voluntarily contract your muscles. This means that you can work out harder than you can with weights, but with far, far less risk of injury. A perfect world.
It also means that an isometric device—like an IsoMax—is scalable to every human being on the planet; from the elderly and atrophied, to the world’s strongest human beings.
8. Assassinate weak points!
Any engineer will tell you that a system is only as strong as its weakest link. This is true for the human system as well. It’s also true for individual lifts—it doesn’t matter if you can lock out with 500lbs on the deadlift, if you can’t get 250lbs past the sticking point at the upper shins, it ain’t going up.
So…why not just work on the sticking point? Isometrics acts as an advanced training technique which allows lifters to train just a single aspect of a range-of-motion—on any lift—with laser-like focus and maximal load. In mere weeks it obliterates weak points that might take years to beat with conventional methods.
This is one reasons elite powerlifters traditionally love isometrics. Wanna get super strong? Listen to them.
9. Military grade training efficiency
Unlike conventional training, there are no low-intensity or "wasted" portions of your training drills. The Soviet sports researcher Yuri Verkhoshansky—arguably the greatest strength scientist in history—summed it up like this:
The (isometric) training is very productive, if the time expended is considered. Each 6-second isometric contraction is equivalent in its effect to many dynamic contractions (of the ballistic type) in which maximal force lasts no more than 0.1 second. From a practical standpoint this means that 10 minutes of isometric tension in specially selected exercises can replace a fatiguing hour of training with weights.
This is incredibly useful if you have to limited time to train due to other sports, martial arts, etc. Maximum strength does not require hours in the gym, if you understand the science and practice of progressive isometrics. If you own an IsoMax—which can be used in a square-foot space at home, in a hotel, or even by the side of the road—then there is no goddam reason you can’t optimize your strength-athleticism in record time.
10. Zen-type mental power and muscle control
I’ve heard it said that true strength is in the mind. I think this is true. The mind controls and generates our strength. So what if you have the body to lift a thousand pounds—if the mind is too weak (or afraid, or lazy), then you will never approach that potential.
Isometrics builds enormous mental strength from day one. Why? Because you have to generate all the forces yourself—through a combination of willpower and muscle-control. With isometrics, there is no external criteria for your muscles to meet. You’re the one who determines how many motor units you recruit, not the equipment. It’s all you, baby.
Isometrics literally reconfigures your brain over time. It gradually lowers levels of cortical inhibition—the blocks your nervous system puts on your muscular strength. Isometrics wears down those blocks and allows you access to ALL your strength…and in case you don’t know, even a small, slim human being with full access to their true strength is a very, very frightening animal.
Want to get scary strength? Make the best conditioning choice of your life and get yourself an IsoMax. Check out the unsolicited reviews, here—you won’t regret it.
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