012 How to build muscle with isometric training

Welcome back everyone to another episode. Thank you all for joining us. Chris, how are you today? I'm doing very well. Thanks, Tick. Tickio, good to hear. So we have a, I guess you could say this might be our first episode where where it's sort of like an audience suggested topic. So a lot of you guys have asked about this particular topic and that is why we are covering it today. I'm not going to give away what it is, but it's probably going to become quite obvious when I talk about the silver euro workout plan in a moment, but I do want to say thank you guys for your suggestions. I've had a few people give me suggestions over the last week and we do appreciate it. We, of course, appreciate you guys sharing and commenting and doing all the good stuff subscribing. So please continue to do all of that stuff. So today I'm going to introduce us to a, not a full workout, but just a bit of, it's sort of like a specialization, I suppose. And last week we did talk about a specialization phase. And this is, I suppose, another form of a specialization phase. And this is actually coming from John Grimick. Now, I think I would have mentioned John Grimick in the past on other episodes, but I don't think we've talked about one of his plans yet. And we will, at some point going to plans in more detail. This is just a specialization part. But Grimick was very, very important when we look at this silver euro. So he was the first Missy Universe back in 1948. And in fact, there's several very interesting things about John Grimick. So first Missy Universe, he won multiple Missy Americas. He competed in the American Olympic weightlifting team in 1936. And this story of how he did that is very interesting. I actually find this, you know, people look at bodybuilding today. And there seems to be this kind of dichotomy where like, well, you know, bodybuilders aren't that strong. And if you look at the silver euro guys, they were the strongest guys in the planet. And you know, the story of Grimick competing in the Olympics, like he wasn't even preparing for that. He was doing his bodybuilding weightlifting stuff, just being a strength athlete. And then essentially in the lead up to the Olympics gets contacted by Hoffman being like, hey, basically we need you to join our team. And he was strong enough just in his normal day to day training that he was able to step into that role. You know, we see people obviously like we've talked about George Park in a past, you know, second person to bench 500 pounds. And you know, obviously a bodybuilder by trade. So the silver euro guys were incredibly strong, you know, the idea that strength and muscle were separate, like that just didn't compute. Anyway, I'm going off an attention. So 1936 Olympic competitor and the other interesting thing with Grimick. So he was part of the York club. So we've talked about Hoffman quite a bit so far. So he was one of Hoffman's guys. And he was potentially one of the first, at least based on the documentation we have, one of the first American bodybuilders to actually experiment with steroids. Now this was documented in 1954 as part of a group of lifters at York, York Barbell. And it's worth noting because people might be like, well, why are we talking about Grimick then? But Grimick was 44. I think he would have been 44 there about when he experimented with steroids with York. So he'd given up competing half a decade earlier. All of his competitions that he'd won were done well and truly before he experimented with steroids. And by all accounts, in fact, the first experiments actually didn't even work. And they got a stack of side effects and no benefit. And apparently boarded the experimentation. And then a year or two later, that's where Debo hit the market. And that was obviously more successful. But nonetheless, John Grimick does come up quite a lot if we look at the history of the silver era. Now this plan or this specialization phase I'm talking about, I will admit that this was published host steroids. But as I've said, Grimick had finished competing well and truly by that point. And he talks about this as a method that he used to build his arms. And he does say that when he was writing this, he says that people now are talking about high volumes and they're talking about doing thousands of curls. And that's what he's talking against. He says, no, no, that's not how he did it. It was stuff that got you strong. And he talks about using this at the end of a workout. So as you know, I sort of discuss last week with specialization phases, often they would take out say the exercises for that particular muscle from a normal full body workout and then add this either the start or the end or sometimes even on separate days. So that's what Grimick was suggesting with this for specializing in arms. And what he suggested doing was getting a barbell and setting up a power rack and setting up the barbell in the power rack. So it's up against pins. So it's removable. And in at a 30 degree of elbow flexion, 90 degree and 150 degrees doing a max effort, five second isometric in each position. Just a single five second isometric. And they're and resting between each set. So he'd give max effort to each set. And then he suggests doing the same thing for an overhead press and setting it up at eye level at hairline level six inches above the head and then two inches before lockout. And once again doing five second max effort isometric as high as you can resting between each set and doing the other positions. So that's the first we've talked about isometrics at least on this podcast and any of these plans. Chris, what do you have to say about those? Well, I think it's absolutely fascinating. We've got some really, really good stuff here. You know, I think it's very close to a perfect example of an isometric training program five virtually. And I think there's there's a couple of things I want to kind of draw out here. At least three if not four. So first things first is using a maximum effort contractions. I think that's important to reiterate and not using sub Maxwell one. So I'm making sure we get a very high level of motino crewman there. Secondly, he's not overdoing the duration of the contractions. We've got five second contractions. Really, really interesting because actually that is the standard duration for a maximal isometric contraction in research studies. So that goes to show just how nailed down that is as a as a practice. And also we've got these different joint angles. So we're getting different regions of the muscles or different muscles within a group being stimulated. And then finally, the volume is actually quite low. So I don't know you've already made that point, but you know, I think it deserves to be reiterated that they're not talking about doing a ton of, you know, kind of low quality contractions here. This is designed to be high quality work that is increasing recruitment, increasing, you know, kind of the hypertrophy in very specific areas of the muscle. I think it's a really, really good example of just how dialled in those guys were. Yeah. And we're going to talk more about ways that one can implement some of these things and obviously this is an example of that. And we'll talk about how we've done that in our own programming a little bit later on. But to begin with, let's unpack what exactly is happening? Like, why would someone do isometric like this? Why would someone you've mentioned five seconds? Why? Why five seconds? Like, let's actually unpack this topic. Well, let me, let me start by answering a, because obviously as you said at the beginning of this podcast, we're doing this topic because people have asked us to. And in doing so, in asking us to cover this topic, they have actually sent us a whole list of specific questions relating to all of these issues. And I've just kind of got an order that I think works to run through these. So let me just insert one topic before I answer that question, which is can isometrics actually cause hypertrophy? And if so, how are they doing that? Because that's like the preamble. That's like the background to all of this stuff that we're going to be covering. So the stimulating reps model is not about numbers of repetitions as I've said before. It's about physiological reality. How is muscle growth being stimulated? And the stimulating reps model tells us that we stimulate muscle growth on a whole muscle level by point A, or starting at the beginning, achieving a high level of muscle fiber activation, by which I mean a lot of muscle fibers are activated. Now we do that by recruiting a high level of motion. It's a lot to motion. It's and that allows us to activate a lot of muscle fibers. So step one, step two is then we have to apply a high level of mechanical tension to each of those muscle fibers. Even today, I'm seeing people saying things like, oh, well, you know, if I devote to a high level of effort to this contraction, I'm going to feel a really high level of tension in the muscle. And that's telling me that I'm experiencing hypertrophy. That's just not how hypertrophy works. hypertrophy is a muscle fiber phenomenon. You're not being able to feel what's happening at all. What's actually important is that each individual fiber experience is a high level of tension. How does it do that? It needs to be moving slowly. Well, in a slow concentric, obviously we're moving slowly, but some people look at an isometric and go, well, we're not moving. So I'm not moving slowly. So I'm not getting this. Yes, you are. So the static state, the zero velocity is basically just as good if not slightly better than a very slow movement velocity. So the actimals and cross bridges are creating a high level of single fiber tension at zero velocity in the same way that they do at a very slow concentric velocity. So essentially, the isometric is giving you automatically that very slow shortening velocity and that then paired with a high level of effort, which is why I mentioned Grimx, you know, kind of focus on maximal efforts being important. That is going critical for the other side of the equation. So basically, in a maximal effort isometric, we are essentially getting the same thing as we would get in the last a couple of repetitions of a heavy or any strength training set really, but you know, it's focused on heavy load because that's what we talk about. You know, you get heavy load or a moderately heavy load. You're basically getting the same kind of experience from your isometric as you are from those last stimulate terms of a set, if your efforts are maximal. So essentially, that's how isometric is hypertrophy in exactly the same way as a heavy That's a really interesting and important point where you've talked about because people will look at this and be like, well, you know, if based on force velocity, if there's no movement, then that's not doing what it needs to do. And as you've just said there, know what we're talking about is the the cross bridging between the actor and my son and you saying that even at that point of no actual movement, there's maximum cross bridging that's occurring. So that that is a misconception. I see a lot online with people thinking, well, if there's no velocity at all and nothing's moving, then there's no tension. No, no, no, that's not how that works. Exactly. And ultimately what's important is to start with the physiological reality and then interpret that from an understanding of how physiology works. I think what happens is people come at this space from different, you know, trajectories, different directions, different backgrounds, and they don't understand, you know, what act in the miles and doing and they just hear force velocity and they just interpret it in a way that isn't actually correct. If we start from physiological reality, we can see that an isometric contraction is doing exactly the same thing as a slow concentric so you could literally just treat them from a physiological point of view the same. Now, we'll get into some differences in the minute because that was your question, but ultimately starting point is that yes, isometrics will cause hypertrophy and they'll do it in exactly the same way as a dynamic set done relatively close to failure. So the question you had for me was essentially, you know, what's, I think it was what's different. Was that correct? Was it a slightly different direction that you were taking it up right? Yeah, I was just one of the parameters, you know, you've talked about five seconds and max efforts of what's actually and you've explained a little bit what's happening. We're still getting this cross-rigging, but there's more to it as well. There is, there is. So ultimately putting this in context, we can say that if the isometric is behaving much like a dynamic, then ultimately you can start with what we know about, which is obviously heavy strength training or moderately heavy strength training done to failure. If a moderately heavy strength training set done to failure or a heavy strength training set better still at five repetitions, if a five repetition maximum takes about sort of 12 to 15 seconds to be a completed, I'm just thinking about the concentric phases because the eccentric is aren't really doing very much. But if you just time the concentric phases of a five rep max, you're all around about get to somewhere between 12 to 15 seconds. So you could say, well, okay, the whole of that set is stimulating hypertrophy. It's an entirely separate conversation about whether every single rep is equally stimulating or whether we can even judge to stimulus based on the time or anything like that. But let's assume we can for this conversation, then you're probably going to find that approximately 10 to 15 seconds worth of isometric contractions get you to about one sets worth of hypertrophy stimulus, more or less. You could argue that the isometric will be slightly better if it's done with the way that Grimmick might be slightly worse if you do it in a way that's not quite so good. I'll get on to that in a moment. So ultimately, we're talking about back to Grimmick 10 to 15 seconds worth of high levels of mechanical tension is what we're looking for there. Exactly. Now if we translate that back to Grimmick and so low K, so he's doing these, I think it's three separate contractions at three different joint angles for the biceps it was and I think for the overhead press it was four. So essentially, he's getting about somewhere between a set and maybe a set and a half depending on how you slice it. So it's definitely a full set, at least a full set and maybe a little bit more depending on, you know, as I say, how you judge it, but definitively it's clearly a good set there. So he's getting one set and a bit from each of those efforts that you're doing, which is, which is really solid kind of addition to something that, you know, because you said you're doing this in addition to what you're already doing, you're only adding one extra set really. It's just a very judiciously segmented cell was training different parts of the muscle. Now, the important thing about the five seconds is that if you look at the way that fatigue mechanisms build during isometric contractions compared to diamond contractions, a dynamics, you get these little reset points between repetitions. Now, an isometric, you don't necessarily get that unless you do what Grimmick has done, which is put them in. So by putting these five second contractions in and saying, well, I'm not going to go along with them five seconds, you're creating the equivalent of a essentially final rep of a set somewhere between three and a half and five seconds long. Now, if you don't do that, if you just go, I'm just going to do 10, 15 second contraction, what you're going to find is that the spinal central nervous system fatigue starts to build quite rapidly and starts to chew away your ability to create recruitment at the muscular level. Even though you're experiencing a high level of effort at the end of the set, you're not pushing as hard as I possibly can, the recruitment levels have actually dropped quite a lot. And ultimately, that is then disadvantageous. You're starting to pull away from what you were hoping to get and you're not going to get the same stimulating effect. So that's why these five second contractions are just so much more valuable than allowing, you know, kind of 10, 15, 20 second contractions to come into play. I'm sure you're going to tell us about what it is fatigue-wise that's causing that bit. Just from a practical standpoint, I don't know if people listening to this have been given isometrics ago, but if you haven't, you know, go into a gym, set up a bind in a movable position, do a curl against it, and you'll find that four, five, seven, maybe eight seconds. Like you can feel that you are actually really, and I don't mean max effort, but you're able to really, like you can, you can feel how much force you can create doing that. And then you keep going, do 10 seconds, do 15 seconds, and you feel like you're doing max effort, but you can intuitively tell this is knowing there's much force that you're able to reduce at that point. Yeah, proprioceptively, you can tell that the external impact of your effort is no longer what it was, you know, and I think that's a really important point. I mean, is I think it takes a little bit of, you know, thinking about to get to that level of perception, but it's definitely happening. So ultimately, the fascinating thing about spinal central nervous system fatigue is that it's been one of the most well, and I say well researched in a qualitative sense, not a quantitative sense. You're not going to find 100 studies on spinal sinus teeth, but you are going to find probably 10, absolutely brilliant ones. And the sad thing is that the way that research works is that you are trying to falsify hypotheses. And unfortunately, these guys have done such an amazing job that they've falsified every single hypothesis that they've tested. And so they've done some absolutely remarkable work in a objective sense in the sense that they've quality of their work is just unbelievable. When I read the papers, I'm like, these guys absolutely know what they do. And yet, they've falsified every hypothesis that we've had so far in this area. So at the moment, all we really know about this process is that the longer the activation of the motor neurons, or the recruitment of the motor neurons goes on for, the more the motor neurons start to resist the transition of the electrical signal to the muscular level. So essentially, it's like you start sending electricity down the spinal cord motor neurons to the muscle to recruit the motor units and actuate the muscle fibers. And little by little, as time goes on and you're still doing that, the ability of the motor neurons to transmit that information starts to get throttled, and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, and you get a smaller output for the input that you're putting in. Why is that happening? Is an absolute mystery, but as I say, not for one to try. There's been some really great work done on this. It's just unfortunate that it hasn't gone through. And interesting, actually, from just a philosophical point of view, you might take a step back and go, you know, maybe that would happen more in other areas. If the research is actually as good, you know, maybe we'd find more negative results if people are putting the same amount of dedication and care into that. And a care, I think, is the right word here, because you can kind of see that every step of the way as they're going through their papers, as they're documenting what they've done, and they're explaining to you how they've done this experiment. You can see that they've actually put a lot of thought and care into each step of the process. So many research papers you look at, and you can just think that people have just thrown something into a, you know, kind of a rough shape and gone, "Oh, that'll be good enough, let's run with it." Whereas these guys, the quality of their work is extraordinary. And yet, they've not managed to find a result that is helping us expand our understanding. Well, you could argue that they found some things that are not true, and you could say that's helping us expand. But it's not helping me build a model, because it doesn't give me anything positive to work with. Yeah, that's really interesting. Hey, like, even just, as you said philosophically, gives a different spin to what we see when we look at your research papers, doesn't it? And I know from, like, from my perspective, there's a lot of papers I look at, and I'm like, "Why are you doing it like that?" Just the method that you've chosen fundamentally means the outcome doesn't really matter, because it's not even assessing what this issue is you're seeking to assess. So to see people, as you said, they're taking care and actually constructing out of these goals, that's really encouraging, isn't it? It's tremendous, but a lot of the stuff that's pure physiology does tend to attract that type of approach. The further away you get from pure physiology, and the closer you get into things like, you know, hypertrophy research, the worse things tend to get. You know, I think there's, there's like pockets of quality here and there, but hypertrophy research is not renowned for those pockets of quality. So what do we know about the fatigue mechanisms then? So what we know is that the spinal sense fatigue is going to be more rapid if you allow your isometric contraction to go on for longer. And that's, that's the important thing. So what we can do is we can split up the isometric exactly the same way the grimac has done, and go, we're just going to do five second contractions. We're not going to try and get our entire stimulating rep, you know, dosage and then go. We're not going to do a ten, fifteen second contraction. We're going to do two or three, you know, sort of five second contractions, or however you want to do it. and that's going to be the best way of doing it. So in practice, actually, very simple solution to avoid any problem. We don't need to worry too much about that. Just remember, you don't really want to be doing 10, 15, 20 second contractions in a nice metric state because by the time you get to the end of that, the recruitment levels at the muscular level have dropped quite a long way. And that's before we even talk about what's happening at the supospinal level where you might be starting to do motivation or getting, you know, a negative sensation. Do we know how long one needs to wait for that to dissipate? So this is a really interesting question because the dissipation of CNS fatigue is quite controversial for a number of reasons. And it's also plagued by a little bit of methodological difficulty. Now, in recent years, that's been unpicked to a certain extent. So what we've got now is an understanding that there is a very quick recovery of a large chunk of both spinal and supospinal CNS fatigue as soon as you finish the contraction. But it then goes nonlinear and you get this kind of long tail happening. So unfortunately, once you've done something that is a maximal effort, you know, for a few seconds, you probably are going to see a chunk of both supospinal and spinal CNS fatigue lasting for, you know, probably a couple of minutes. But as I mentioned a moment to go, big chunk of that does pretty much go within the first kind of minute or so. Now, I've just been looking at this a little bit more recently. I've been trying to pull together some studies that I've not spent so much time looking at and trying to gather a picture. And I think really, you know, dandered rest periods are pretty good at getting rid of most of this problem. I think three to five minutes is pretty much, you know, a good rule of thumb for these kind of things. I've just sort of studied what showed that there was still some CNS fatigue even after three minutes. But I think most of it is recovering at that point and it is mostly gone. With five seconds, I think we're really minimizing that. I mean, most of these studies that measure supospinal and spinal CNS teaks tend to use much longer duration contractions, even, you know, like a minute, long or something like that. So I think realistically with five second contractions, we can probably take a minute and be absolutely fine. I don't see there being a problem after about a minute for those kind of situations. And to be honest, if you're setting this up, like Grimic is describing and you're setting up different height situations, you're probably going to need, you know, good 30, 45 seconds anyway exactly reset yourself. Yeah, that's what I, when I do use these methods in my own training, that's what I do is I don't often, if I was doing just dynamic sets, I would be waiting longer. I would wait that sort of three or four minutes, whereas here, I'll set up a new position that'll usually take me probably 45, 60 seconds. And often, like if you're setting up positions, you have to unload and then load the bend. So it is a little bit time consuming. And then I would go again. So that's probably going to be, you know, maybe 60, 75 seconds give a take. And because it's generally speaking, there's not going to be much cardiovascular demand of these types of sets or you know, isometric sets anyway. Maybe if you're doing a squat, perhaps, but generally if we're doing overhead tracing, bicycle stuff like that, it's not going to be overly demanding, is it? No, I think it really is going to be mostly spinal CNS T and as I say, that really does come zooming back down after the end of the set or the end of the repetition of a contraction. And you're just kind of dealing with a long tail after that. And I think a minute probably is a good compromise. Nobody wants to be, you know, waiting three to five minutes between a five-second isometric contraction. You know, I think one minute is definitely the right ball part there. I wouldn't go less than that. You know, I'm kind of stuck in an environment at the moment where I'm playing around with isometrics because I don't have access to a very good gym. And I'm finding that the minute really does make a difference. If I do an isometric, and I like to just have a walk around and get my head straight again before I do another one, I think it does help. But you know, obviously that's practical and more anecdotal approach rather than the physiological one. So what else do we need to be aware of fatigue-wise, anything else? So the other thing to be aware of is that, and actually I didn't mention this when I was looking at the routine, and it's just occurred to me to go back and check what order he did his contractions in. So I'm assuming that 30 degrees is a contract to position and that 150 degrees is the extended elbow position. I'm not sure that I haven't seen any photos, so I'm not sure the other way around. Yeah. But actually not that stretched, he's starting at shoulder, which is, I mean, I guess that is quite stretched, to be honest, if he's. Yeah, fairly. So the important thing is that when we look at different joint angles, we are going to experience fatigue mechanisms that are specific to muscle length. Now, the more contract to position you go, the more. I'm a tablet like she's going to get, and they are totally innocuous really. The more stretched you go, the more calcium ion fatigue you're going to get, and that is problematic. So realistically, I would always start at the contract to position and work my way down to the stretched position in that order, because you're going to have a conflict between your stretched position and your contract, but you're not going to have a contract to position impact on your stretched. Now, let me just jump in and predict a point of contention that we might see in the fitness industry as a result of me saying this. Yes, you can find studies showing that contract to position isometric scores more absolute fatigue than stretched position isometric. You can find those studies they do exist. That's not what I'm talking about. The magnitude of the fatigue is totally and utterly irrelevant. It's the fatigue mechanism that matters because metabolite relativity doesn't reduce mechanical tension anywhere near as much as calcium amelite fatigue, and it doesn't last very long. So if you've got metabolite relativity there, you will dissipate it within a few minutes, and you can get on with whatever else you want to do, and there's no problem with that. I'll see how I'm able to fatigue once you create it, you'll start with it until the following day or the day after or whatever. It just doesn't go away. So we'd always want to do the isometrics and the order of contract are down to stretched, and then of course bear in mind if you're combining this into a workout with other things, just bear in mind that you're isometric stretched position contraction might then cause you issues for something that you want to do afterwards. If it's a dynamic, if you're doing isometrics first. Just thinking that you're making us talk about doing this at the end of a workout as an addition. When I program isometrics in athletic contexts, if you're using a relatively contract to position or even a midrange contraction, you can throw them in warm-ups. They're really cool to throw in warm-ups because they really don't create very much fatigue at all if you do them in this way that we're talking about here. So obviously if you weren't doing any other exercises for that muscle wouldn't particularly matter if you were doing this. No, not at all. No, if you're doing this as a replacement then it doesn't matter, but you just do them in the order of contract are down to stretched and that's absolutely fine. Now with five second contractions and leaving a minute or so between contractions, not only doing a handful of them, I don't think it's important to worry about the stretched position causing all to calcium on it because it's not. I'm just pointing out that optimizing the workout in, you know, for the best possible result, we would always do them in that way. How stretched must that position be to exponentially increase the calcium on fatigue mechanism? So I think really contracted down to midrange. So the top half is probably okay. Anything in that bottom half is probably where you're going to have to start thinking about it. So I would just look at your joint anger range of motion and go top half. I'm kind of free range, do what you like. Bottom half you're going to have to start just being aware that there might be an issue. And again, this comes back to if people want to volumize a little bit, then volumize with the top half of the range of motion. I'm sure we're going to get into this at some point, but I just want to put it out there in case it's not some of you're planning on covering. So obviously we've dispelled the myth around the velocity. The next biggest objection I see to isometrics is once someone understands that, they say, well, hang on, no, no, you need to work through the entire range of motion. You need to provide tension or stimulus or I don't know what they would argue throughout that entire range. Obviously, we've just seen with a clinic that he did do these different positions. I don't know that's something you're going to cover with another point, but I just wanted to put that out there. Yeah. So basically, isometrics are going to follow the principle of near mechanical matching in the same way that dynamics do. So when you look at, when we analyze a dynamic strength training exercise, the way we approach looking at it is we go, what's the most difficult part of the movement? Where do I experience peak effort? Another way of the talking about is to say that where is the sticking point? But basically wherever you feel the peak effort point in the range of motion, that's the point when you know, motina equipment is going to be highest and that's going to correspond then to you're going to look at that point to the range of motion and go, which muscles or muscle regions are doing all of the work at that particular point? Now, the isometric is doing the same thing, but you're freezing the joint angle and you're saying, I'm only going to work at that joint angle. So if you've got a dynamic movement with a very clear point in the range of motion, which has peak effort and you've got an isometric with peak effort at the same point, you're going to see a very similar pattern of hypertrophy. Now, the dynamic will be a little bit messier, it'll be spread a little bit more kind of around the edges across other areas that are related as you approach and leave that point in the joint angle range of motion. But the isometric won't, it will be much more kind of literally whatever fibers have have best leverage at that exact point, I'm going to be the ones get the most similar. So the isometric is kind of really fine-tuning and isolating a much much smaller region of muscle area than the dynamics are doing because they're kind of muddying the water a little bit. If you muddy the water even more where you get a very very flat resistance profile you can basically just spread the stimulus across a bunch of different places. So ultimately you know the magnitude of the hypertrus is probably going to be quite similar although differences depending on I mean one thought I often how as well if you have a like a pure isokinetic then you're going to spread the hypertrus across all the possible areas that you could because you're using max efforts and everywhere is going to get in the cool kind of stimulus. In that scenario if you've got an even distribution of moti units a different threshold across the whole muscle group then what you should see is that you actually get slightly better hypertrus now this has never been seen in research some little bit kind of twitching about this but you should actually see a little bit more hypertrus across the in terms of total muscle tissue because you're targeting all of your highest threshold moti unit muscle fibres all of the faster if you just hit one little area there's quite a decent probability that a bunch of those muscle fibres that you're training there are actually capped out they plateaued so even though potentially you could get the same hypertrus if you were a beginner you would but if you're an advanced then your hypertrus capacity here is here but you've got that same chunk across the entire muscle if you do a accommodating resistance very isokinetic style contraction is this making sense? Yeah let's work through the overhead presses and example here on the heat you perform because I think that will maybe illustrate this a little bit more clearly to people so throughout that like let's say someone is doing that dynamically and they're not doing any isometrics and you've mentioned this litmus test of where is this ticking point so let's say someone's doing an overhead press and they have a sticking point in that more bottom position so for them they're going to be getting more middle dealt stimulus exactly they would be say anterior delta triceps yeah and so one would potentially make the argument of what I hear online is well no we need full ROM for the this maximum hypertrophy stimulus but in fact let's say you were using this exercise and you were wanting some anterior adult development then arguably doing the isometric in that singular position where the anterior adult has better leverage closer to that top position that's actually going to be better for hypertrophy for that part of the muscle than doing this dynamic repetition now you've been given an example of a flat resistance profile where there's no sticking point we're basically the entire repetition ends up being a sticking point and you're saying that if one were able to do that then what then each wherever we see this transition to another muscle or region having better leverage well each of those regions are going to get this maximum stimulus yeah but it's obviously in a dynamic contraction you pass through that point rather to the quickly so you're getting this tiny stimulus applied to a very large range of different areas of muscle and contrast to the isometric which is giving you more depth rather than width now the point I'm making is that if you're a beginner then it's not going to matter because you've got capacity to grow everything and you're just going to get you know depth and width doesn't really matter you get the same kind of stimulus across usable stimulus across everything that you're doing but if you're an advanced lifter and you've only got a tiny bit of a capacity to grow then what you're going to see potentially is that the isochonetic might give you a little bit of stimulus across everything whereas the isometric the dynamic with a stick with a very strong sticking point might literally just be giving you this tiny little bit of capacity to grow because everything below that is just not really capable of growing the other side of this issue you know giving aside the fact that we don't generally have access to accommodate resistance of that nature the isometric is really still very interesting for the advanced person because you can literally target things that you may not have been targeting before now the example you gave up as he is the you know the overhead press if you've got this typically the sticking point below the horizontal you're going to find that you always just train in the middle of that with that exercise you might find that doing some isometrics above the horizontal produces some really interesting results you know in terms of anterior adult development which you maybe not able to you know or maybe you don't have the equipment to be able to do otherwise so it's a very interesting method that one could think about for some of these exercises where there are different muscle regions that actually contribute differently at a different point in that repetition yeah absolutely I mean I think the isometrics is a really really cool way of doing things that you might not otherwise be able to do so I've got to remember we're always comparing stuff to our standard strength training exercises because that's what 99% people are doing you know 99% people are going to go to the gym and they're going to use whatever resistance profiles are available to them yes there are like a tiny number of people who have access to isocinetics and they do play around with those things and they you know kind of are able to do that but most people aren't so got a situation where we're talking to group people who are using standard strength training equipment they aren't going to be able to have that perfect resistance profile so isometrics are really interesting for them because they can look at their existing resistance profile and they can go okay so my sticking point is down here if I do some isometrics up here then I'm going to be targeting stuff I'm just not targeting with this dynamic exercise so you've got your overhead press whatever and you notice that it's really difficult to the bottom great keep doing that and we'll put some isometrics in that are higher up and that then kind of gives us some growth we're not getting elsewhere and I think that's the I mean in one respect you could say well is the grimic approach overkill in the sense that you know he's kind of scattering across the whole muscle what he could do is look at what he's already going to dynamics and go well I'm kind of already covering those parts the range of motion with my sticking points in these dynamics I could just do my somatrix in parts the range of motion that I'm not already covering so you could take a step further and try and maybe do a little bit more in the areas that you're not covering I look at less in the areas that you're already covering it's the same thought pattern one would use if they were to look at a partial movements if you were to look at a full full ROM again using the overhead press of an example and like you said okay maybe your sticking points in the lower part of that movement and then you decide I'm going to use a partial movement as well and just do the top half like it's it's the same thought to lead you there I'm laughing I'm laughing because last time I think we did the podcast I talked about everything in exercise science as a spectrum so you kind of have super stable exercises at one end and you've got like really unstable stuff in the other end and everything else is in the middle if you look at contractions you can go from full range of motion at one end of the spectrum to isometrics of the other and your partials can get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until it becomes less metric is a really really cool illustration of exactly the same point you know yeah dynamics and partials is the same thing our dynamics to isometrics is just that you've squeezed the duration or the amplitude of your repetition down to zero yeah it's very very pinpointed like you said now people who are aware of isometrics will know that there's different definitions or different types of isometrics and one might use and most commonly the two that are discussed most would be overcoming and yielding isometrics and there's a lot of confusion I see from people who are aware of isometrics as to which one would you use which one's best for hypertrophy so let's talk about what are those what's overcoming and yielding and is there a difference from a hypertrophy perspective yeah so essentially an overcoming isometric is one that you're trying to turn into a concentric essentially so a yielding isometric is one that you're going to end up turning into an eccentric if you're not careful so that mean that's basically the difference so you can kind of imagine it if you've got a smith machine set up and it's locked in place and you can't move the bar and you're set up and you just push on it that's an overcoming by definition because if you take your hands off the bar it doesn't move so you know a yielding would imply that it's trying to squash you as you're in the process of you know holding it in place whereas the overcoming is that you're actually trying to move it away from you and it's not got any chance of you know kind of squashing you because it is actually fixed so the overcoming is going to have a very slight element of concentric to it and which actually isn't that different from isometric so it kind of is a fairly neutral isometric the yielding is going to have a little bit of an element of eccentric about it and that's where things get a little bit interesting because you're going to get a little bit of passive tension you're going to if the if it turns into a true yielding process where you're actually then turning it into a nice any eccentric contraction you're going to get a lot more of that as the contraction progresses so essentially you're getting like a tiny little flavor of the concentric and the eccentric in your isometrics as you're doing them in practice I'm not a fan of yielding isometrics especially when they turn into genuine eccentric because I think you are because what tends to happen is that you accumulate some fatigue and you turn your eccentric sorry you turn your isometric into an eccentric so imagine you're just holding a weight and as you get to the point where you can't anymore the weight starts to move towards you and then finishes a certain point that is a kind of a quasi isometric or sort of yielding isometric into an eccentric and the problem with that is that a lot of the good stuff that we get from eccentric contractions with maximal efforts comes from an absence of fatigue and a lot of the problems that we get in post workout fatigue situations when we're doing eccentric contractions comes from allowing fatigue to develop in those eccentric contractions so That's a hugely summarized view of the physiology, but broadly speaking, what that means is that you're not getting a lot of good stuff from allowing isometric to turn into exendricks and you're not getting a lot of, and you are getting a lot more advanced stuff from allowing that to happen in terms of post-work happening. So honestly, if you're thinking about doing either of these two and you've got the choice, I would always go for an overcoming isometric or, you know, that sort of side of the equation, I don't see an enormous amount of value in the yielding side of things unless you really, really know what you're doing and you've got a bit specific sporting situation that you're trying to mimic, I really don't, I wouldn't want to go there. If I was, and even then I would be asking myself the question, would it not be better just to do a maximum effort each entry can be done with it? Is that not going to get me the same place? Now a tiny number of places that might not be true, but I think most of the time it would be true. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? If you look at, for me when I look at yielding isometrics, I'm like, what are you, what are you doing? You're kind of doing an isometric into an eccentric, like you said, and if you want to do that, why would you not do both? Why would you not do an overcoming isometric and then do an eccentric? Like, I don't really understand the idea of blurring the two together. And like you said, you're kind of losing out and really you kind of lose out of both in a sense when you combine them. Yeah, I mean, it's a similar situation, it's like a lukewarm, you know, kind of it's neither hot nor cold, it doesn't really do anything well. And I levied the same criticism against upper lower splits, a while back, and I said upper lower done with two of each type of workout, so four workouts per week, is not solving any problems. It doesn't solve a problem that we have in any other training program, and it, so it's lukewarm, it doesn't really do anything well. And as a result, people started running around the internet saying Chris says that upper lower, you know, four times a week has in two of each type of workout, is the worst possible thing you can do. And I was like, no, I didn't say that, I just said it's not a, it's not a program that solves any particular problems, I actually think it's better than Bruce play, but that's not the point. And the same thing happens here, it's like, so oh yeah, and then Chris says that, you know, yielding isometrics are useless and you shouldn't, and no, I didn't say that. It doesn't do anything well, clearly will produce a whole bunch of adaptions and, you know, it'll work. It's just not doing an eccentric contraction well. And as a result, I think it's not giving you anything extra that an overcoming isometric can't give you in the context of what we're trying to do, you know, I would always pick maximal affidicentrics instead of overcoming isometrics, sorry, I would always pick super maximal isentrics over yielding isometric if I was trying to get eccentric related adaptions, and I'd always pick an overcoming isometric over yielding isometric, I was trying to get hypertrophy or, you know, sort of joint angle specific strain things. So I don't see, and hopefully that helps clarify what I'm doing here. I'm trying to point out that if you've got a toolbox of specific tools for specific purposes, I don't see where yielding isometrics fit. Yep. They don't do anything well. As I say, there might be the one percent of a one percent scenario in a sporting situation where you can say, oh, actually I do this and that works great, but I don't think that applies for most people most of the time. Yep. Now, just to make this incredible clear for people, why are we saying that a yielding isometric is likely going to lead to less hypertrophy, better fit than an overcoming. So you've mentioned overcoming, you're trying to push it, you're trying to lift, not push, you're trying to lift that load, yeah, and yielding you're trying to resist that load. So what is changing from trying to resist the load and then potentially turning that into an eccentric as opposed to trying to lift that load that's making it less suitable for hypertrophy? Sure. So essentially, as soon as you start stretching an activated muscle fiber, you start getting calcium imulated fatigue and it's really pronounced. So that's, I mean, that's then inhibits your ability to produce mechanical tension on a single fiber level. One of the most informative, if you like, illustrations of this point is that if you look at the dose response of hypertrophy to training volume in normal strength training situations, there's a non-linear dose response, but it does show increasing amounts of growth with increasing volumes. If you look at eccentric, it pretty much kind of caps out after three sets. You kind of go one to three and then it's a flat line. And that's really, really useful because what that's telling you is that the physiological understanding that we have is correct, which is that as soon as you start accumulating a ton of calcium imulated fatigue, mechanical tension starts dropping and you start to find that you can't stimulate the hypertrophy that you're trying to see. So if you're doing multiple of these yielding isometrics and they are actually turning into a bit of any eccentric, you are going to start stacking calcium imulated fatigue in the same way that you would do is if you're doing a lot of stretch position, in fact, more so than if you're doing a ton of stretch position isometrics. So ultimately, again, if you want to volumeize this stuff, you wouldn't touch yielding isometrics. You would be absolutely on the overcoming side because you want overcoming and contract position and then you're going to be able to volumeize as much as you like within reason. Whereas yielding or a stretch position, you're going to have those calcium imulated fatigue problem. And if someone's listening to this thinking, well, hang on, why don't I just do say I'm doing 15 seconds worth of overcoming? So I do my three mini sets, I do my 15 seconds worth of overcoming isometrics. Why can I not finish with a yielding, a single yielding isometrics and get a stack of this passive tension, is that not a viable way of doing it? So with the durations that we're talking about, it is. If you start going to longer durations, it ceases to become quite so interesting. So if you're doing five seconds and you're getting a yielding point at the end of that five seconds, then yeah, absolutely that will work and you'll get some decent passive tension at the high threshold motunit and high under the high threshold motunit pool. If you start disregarding the suggestions I've made and start trying to do 15, 20, 30 second isometrics and you're getting yielding at the end of that 20, 30 seconds, no, it's not going to work. It will, but it just won't work very well. Because what's going to happen is you're going to get a lot of spinal sinus fatigue, it's going to reduce the access to high threshold motunit that you're trying to train and you're going to find that you don't get that same top end stimulus of the muscle fibers and the top corresponding to the high threshold motunits. Obviously, then also you've got that very large durational contraction into the yielding, you're going to find that you're getting, you've already got calcium ionicumillation when you hit that point, you're then doing an eccentric in a calcium ionicumillated state, which is really silly. Pre-fatiguing going into an eccentric is just not clever because ultimately you're already going into a scenario where you're about to experience calcium ionitivity and you're going in there carrying bags full of calcium ions with you. I mean, that is just asking for a post-workout fatigue problem, really. So, again, that scenario, you're getting the worst of both possible situations because you're diminishing your stimulus dramatically with the spinal sinus fatigue and simultaneously you're racking up a ton of post-workout fatigue with your calcium ionicumillation. So your recruitment is significantly lower in an eccentric than it is in a concentric. Now how much does that sinus fatigue the one would accrue in say a five-second more contracted position isometric? How much is that going to have an effect on recruitment if that then turned into a yielding or an eccentric? So, yeah, exactly. I mean, this is the kind of thing that we don't have very good data on. So you know, you could argue that maybe you know, obviously you're getting to a point where you're very fatigued and you can't hold the isometric anymore. You're definitively in the territory where you're going to be, you know, maximally resisting that eccentric. How much of that maximum resistance is going to be, you know, doable with a lower level of recruitment, really depends on what the ratio is of the muscle fiber force in eccentric to your isometrics. Now, yeah, you're going to lose a little bit of recruitment off the top end anyway. So arguably, it's even worse than I was describing. So you've definitively said that you can't see a utility for a yielding isometric beyond what you could get essentially by splitting up the eccentric and the isometric as an overcoming. I think that's fairly clear there. So then if we're talking about programming overcoming isometrics, is there anything else people need to know about them before they start implementing them? I think that we've kind of captured the important points here, you know, the important points are exactly what we saw with the goomech program, you know, we're talking about a low volume of five second contractions with probably a minute between contractions, ideally done at a number of joint angles. Now, just to be clear, if you want to work in the short muscle length under the spectra and the contract position, you can still change the joint angles a little bit, you just don't have to change them as much, you know, so you can work with joint angles that are too close together and you will get more coverage by doing that. So being a relatively small number of maximal effort, five second contractions with one minute between contractions, we're spreading the map across a bunch of joint angles and I think that's a really, really good recipe. I mean, it never fails to amaze me just how dialed in these guys were, you know, like you threw that together, like in five minutes after I messaged you and say, I'm getting all these questions about isometric contractions, let's do a podcast on isometric contractions and five minutes later you've got hair, got this amazing isometric routine that Grimmate did. And I'm like, that's just ridiculous, you know, though we've got that, you've got that information and it turns out to be literally perfect for the conversation that we're going to have. So, honestly, I think that I've got very, very little if anything to disagree about with that routine. I personally would do less of this stretched under the spectrum, more of the contracted. I would probably even do them at the beginning of the workout rather than the end, but other than that, I've got very little to say that is different, to be honest. I know this, you might not want to get into it, it's a bit of a, not a kind of words, but it's a Jason topic, but for people who did want to use isometric from a strength perspective, is there anything to comment on there? So I often get asked this question in my consulting side of things, and I do like this approach of doing a couple of max effortaceometrics and relatively contracted positions in the warm-ups, or towards the end of a warm-up. I think it works really well for athletes, a number of different areas, and the main reason that I like to do them is to produce an increase in motune recruitment. So imagine you've got like a power lift or another strength athlete, they don't tend to do anything at high velocities. Even when they do what they call speedwork, it's not actually that fast. They're not used to moving quickly. Now, with a speed athlete, or a team sports athlete, I will be saying we're going to try and increase motune recruitment by doing our speedwork, actual speedwork, not what people think of a speedwork, actual speedwork, maximal efforts in unloaded situations. We do those at the end of our warm-ups, because that not only gives us speed related adaptions, it also gives us an increase in motune recruitment that we can then benefit from in our strength related adaptions. So with team sports and other speed athletes, I would always do my speedwork as part of the end of the warm-up, and then segue into strength stuff. With power lift as another strength athletes who are not accustomed to that kind of rapid movement, you don't necessarily want to start throwing speedwork at them. You'd be like, well, less deviceometrics instead, and you get a really nice effect. And the added benefit of isometrics is that you can do them with relatively low amounts of muscle mass, you can do them single joint, you can do them single limb, you can really push the parameters that have the ability to increase motune recruitment as an adaption. Plus, you can get joint angle specific about it, because there's a joint angle specificity effect to these neural adaptions. So you can really kind of start analysing your power lift or go, where am I seeing weakness and sort of difficulty, and you can be like, right, well, let's do some isometrics of the specific muscles in those positions. Now, the difficulty you're going to have in practice is that a lot of those positions will be stretch positions, unless you're working with a geared power lift, in which case it might be different, but generally speaking, with power lifters are not using equipment, you'll find that most of this difficulty is in the stretch positions. So even so, if you're using just a couple of those contractions, you can get some pretty interesting results. So I think that there's some really cool stuff there for power lifters to look at, another strength of these to look at, because the overcoming isometric is so easy to do in a way that doesn't create large amounts of fatigue, such that you can incorporate it relatively early on in the workout before you start getting too tired from everything I should do. Yeah, and you've mentioned doing it early on in the workout, and obviously as you've just said there, part of the benefit of doing it is you're not causing this fatigue that's going to affect your rest of the workout, but if you're using it for the purpose of modding energy recruitment enhancement, then obviously that's going to be more effective in an unvitated state than doing it at the end. The grooming, doing it at the end, really we're looking at this more from a hypertrophy perspective, not that doing it at the start, it's going to be negative hypertrophy, but you're not getting these more strength-specific benefits that you might be getting if you did at the start. I think there's a really good argument to moving it to the beginning. I think on balance, I would always err on the side of putting it in. Yeah, I always program it at the beginning as well. I'm trying to think if there would be, if I could see a benefit to doing it at the end, and I am struggling to see one, and even just for me, almost like a psychological standpoint, I actually like almost using it as a warm-up. There's something doing these max-effort sets, it's a nice way to kind of begin the session. I don't know, it does seem a little bit. I don't even recall even trying at the end of a workout. Perhaps I will try that and see what psychologically even feels like, but it does make sense, certainly, at the start of a workout. You didn't mention this joint-angle specificity, so someone were using the isometrics partly for that purpose of increasing strength in a particular lift. How close to that sticking point, maybe that's a question, how close to that sticking point, or where you're performing the isometric, where is there going to be this overlapping increase in that joint-specific angle? Does that make sense? I'm trying to communicate that. Well, obviously it's best to try and identify the joint-angle as well as you can, because the closer you get to it, the better the effect is going to be. But you do get a spillover effect, at least 10 degrees out of the side, so different studies show slightly different results. But you're going to get a spillover either side of that joint angle. Honestly, I think it's worth putting the time in to try and identify precisely what the joint-angle is that you want to train. Now, sticking point analysis is a science in itself, and people can get really into it, and I think it's worth reading up on the ends and the outs of it. The important thing to remember is that you're not looking for the point in the range of motion where you get stuck, even though it sounds like that's what you're looking for. That's not. You're not looking for the point where you stop. You're looking for the point where you stop, etc. So you've got to go backwards a little bit from the point where you think the sticking point is, because a lot of people will look at a squat and go, "Oh, my sticking point is here," and I'm like, "No, it's not." It's actually like 10 degrees before that, because that's when you start to de-severating. So if a car, if you're driving a car, and you hit mud, and then you start getting bogged in the mud, the point where you stop, that's not going to be the matter. That's not the bit of mud to this, but where you hit the mud in the first place, yeah. So you're looking at the way you start de-severating. So you've got to go backwards from where you thought the problem was, and go and start doing the work there, because that's where the real problem is. But, you know, as I say, the essence of sticking point analysis is complicated. But ultimately, that's the most important thing is to work backwards from where you think it is, and try and identify the joint angle further back when the problem actually started. You mentioned this below effect 10-15 degrees, and partly why I ask that question is, when I program these from a strength perspective, and let's say it's with clients who maybe don't know where this sticking point is, maybe it's a general program template or whatever, what I would do is program those isometrics usually about a quarter of the way up, and then halfway, and then three quarters up. And programming say, you know, in that fully stretched position, only again, this calcium ion issue you talked about, but if you're getting this spill-over effect 10-15 degrees either side, well, you've just lost half of that if you're doing it at the end. And same if you're doing a fully contracted position, you've lost half of that as well. So if I were to program it more generally, I would try to maximize that sort of spill-over effect, as you mentioned. Yeah, I mean, and that's really what Grimmick is doing, you know, I think he's trying to get the coverage across multiple different locations. And not in his case, obviously for my hypertrophy point to view it near mechanical matching, but same thing applies to neural adaptions as well. So practically, someone wants to use some of these, we've given a few points there. You've talked about maybe using the start of the work, it makes a little bit more sense, you've talked about how you can decide where you would perform them in that joint specific or in the particular repetition based on which muscle you want to target or based on strength adaptions or whatever. What else would be helpful for people to know in terms of using these? So if someone, I guess one question there would be, and I'll let you speak to this, because I know we've talked about this for years now, isometrics is something years ago we were talking about like me implementing them in my own programming and you always had one very specific concern or something that a limitation you saw to them. So do you want to tell us about that? Yeah, so basically the problem that everybody is going to run into eventually with isometrics is that you don't know whether you're getting better or not unless you've got some objective way of measuring that. Now, some people do have load cells that they've got access to. I know a bunch of climbers that use load cells to see what their isometric strength are like, you know, if you've got access to that technology, then fantastic, you can now use isometrics to your heart's content and you're always going to know whether you're getting better or not because you can literally read the number off the screen. If you don't have that, you are going to be really struggling to know whether or not your strength is improving or not and therefore whether what you're doing is working. Now, in the context of the athletic situations that I described, I don't actually care that much because I'm not doing it to produce a strength gain in the specific context that I'm doing it in. I'm doing it to trigger an increase in Motu New Acroement. I'm setting the parameters up in a way that I'm confident will generate that output and we just kind of roll with it and hope for the best. In the context where you're using it via hypertrophy, you want to be confident that it is working to produce hypertrophy. Therefore, you want to see some progress overload and you're not going to see that. Now, as you pointed out, we've been back, wasn't forwards on this many, many times trying to find an elegant way of solving the problem. I still don't have one. So maybe you've gone by now, I don't know. But honestly, I've got to the point where I'm like, in the situations where somebody's going to find themselves in, where they have to do isometrics because they've got no other choice. That's going to be such a limited number of situations. I actually find myself in one right now, but only for the next few weeks. But ultimately, again, you come out to that and you understand something else. And then back you're back on the normal strength training program where you can see measure reps changing. So yeah, that's been my biggest problem with using isometrics and hypertrophy context because I like to know whether a program is working. I don't like to be unsure about it. I like to see it happening and isometrics don't let you do that unless you go to a load cell. And so obviously if you were doing like in this example, grammar gave, if you were still doing curls, say on another day or you were doing a set of curls in that workout anyway or whatever, then you can obviously be tracking progressive overload on other exercises for that muscle but you don't know what's causing that adaption. You don't know whether it's not the dynamic training that you're doing anyway. Exactly, exactly. You know, I've thought long and hard about ways to overcome this. You know, one idea I had was selecting a say like a five repetition max as an example, like a five rep max load for a specific. So let's say you were performing the isometric in the mid position of an overhead press and then selecting a load that is a five rep max for that position. I'm not saying you're your five rep max overhead pressing load, but say apart from that position and then essentially doing almost what would be a yielding isometric, we just lift it. The slight is bit like a centimeter up. So you know when you lift it and you know when you're no longer lifting it, right? So it's not technically an overcoming isometric and that you're moving in a movable or you're trying to move in a movable object. But by doing that and then increasing that five rep max load over time or increasing that load over time and then testing it say every few weeks and seeing is is still five rep max load or is it now a six rep max load that would be a way that one could have some assessment at some point in time even if it's every few weeks to see if one word progressing or not. Yeah, absolutely. And I think really that's that's kind of one of the only ways I can see it being feasible to to track progressive loader, progressive overload in that situation. Of course, one of the situations in which people find themselves in where they want to use isometrics is when they don't have access to a gym. So I would say the biggest use case of isometrics is when you're stuck in a hotel or in a you know middle of nowhere and you literally got yourself and a room and you're trying to find things to pull on and push on to create isometric contractions. And that's kind of all you've got. Obviously, you've got no way of doing those gym related testing checks to see where you're at. And I think really that's that's kind of my only problem with them. It's a practical one. But again, given that most people most of the time will only find themselves in those limited scenarios for short periods of time weeks or months, I mean, obviously there are scenarios where you might have to go and work somewhere that has a very limited gym access for a year or two, but less likely, I think, I think it's one of those things where you just say, well, I'm not going to worry about the progressive overload thing. I'm just going to do what I think looks right on paper. And when I get back to the gym wherever I access to recruitment, then I'll see where I'm at. And I think that's probably what the answer is. Yeah, we're not going to go into this in detail, but I do just want to mention again for people who are looking at implementing these. We are talking about max effort isometrics. We are not talking about pauses because I see people use the language of isometrics for pauses a lot. Well, it's the same as people using the language of eccentric contractions for the eccentric phase of a normal string training rep. It's just the fundamental lack of understanding that there is a difference in effort between these two things. And that totally changes the effect of the exercise. Absolutely pauses can be isometric if you have the ability. If you're safe, for example, you're pausing at the end of a chest press and you can push into the machine so that you're actually now doing an overcoming isometric. But that's rare. Most of the time, as you say, we talk about pauses, they're actually sub-maximal situations and they're not going to do anything remotely similar to what we're talking about. But as you say, we'll cover that on another day, so we don't need to dig into too much now. Yeah, exactly. Practically speaking, it's something else you think would be helpful for people to know if they were wanting to implement these. No, I think I've said the same thing about 10 times already. And there's not a it's it's not like you're limited to only doing it for multi-join exercises or for single-join exercises or you know, you don't have to use it, do barbell exercises like what Dremac was doing, you could do it in a machine like there's plenty of ways for one to get creative and implement these on different apparatus with different exercises, different muscles. And arguably, depending on, you know, what your goal is, it maybe makes more sense to get more specific and granular with it rather than using it in a multi-join exercise, it depends on your goal, doesn't it? You know, obviously, there's benefits of doing it in those particular exercises. If we look at isolating a region, which isn't normally getting trained well in that exercise for you, or if it's a goal to increase the strength in that particular lift. So what I guess what I do like about isometrics is the quite a versatile tool. Like in some ways, more versatile than just a dynamic repetition would be on contraction because you can kind of isolate out what you're particularly wanting to work on. So it's just a tool I think to define that. Some of the one thing I was just thinking where you were explaining that, the same rules apply as for dynamics when it comes to things like stability and muscle mass and all of that stuff. So, you know, the same rules. So if we're constructing an isometric exercise that we want to use, we don't want to be massively unstable while we're doing it, you know, you want to be very, very stable. You don't want it to be moving you around. Same thing with muscle mass. You don't really want a ton of muscle mass if you're trying to produce the maximum level of motonic equipment and stimulate the growth. So, you know, that's just like we've talked about that before, but it is to apply the same kind of rules. Yeah, I think you can construct some really interesting possibilities, some are easier than others. Some stuff is just really difficult to make work and other stuff is really easy, but I think they're really good to play around with. Think if people one example of how I'm using them in my own training just to get your creative juices flowing, so I often will have a particular lift that I might be focusing on in a particular phase. And then, so for example, at the moment, I'm doing a lot of behind the neck pressing and then what I will do on either the start of, you just do it at the start of if I'm doing like an AB speed. My AB, I do full body AB, but my ABs look very similar. Like each program looks very similar, there's only a few exercises that differ. So, technically it's an AB, but it's almost like an A1, A2, in a sense. But on one of those, I will normally add in at the start some isometrics, and I will do it for that one third or one quarter position from the top, halfway from the top, and then a third or quarter from the bottom. And I'll do that on that sort of goal or that target lift of that phase for myself. And then I may or may not follow that up with just one set of normal dynamic contractions for that exercise. And then I've got the other day where I'm just doing it as a standard set where I can, you know, I'm seeing or tracking my progressive overload in that. And then each phase of my pick one, I might change it and pick a different exercise to do it with. And I'm tending to use it more on those exercises like the overhead press where I know that there's regional differences in that particular exercise. So for me, whatever muscles not getting trained, well, in that normal set, I can actually isolate out. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, that's very similar to how I would approach it for powerlifting training to be honest. Well, thank you, Chris, for hopefully clearing up what is a topic online, which I think is covered in so much confusion. So hopefully that's demystified or taken away some of the fog and given some people some ideas or some framework or foundation to actually implement it in the own training. And like we've said, you know, it's a very versatile tool where we'd love to hear you guys using this. And we don't think everyone needs to be doing it for every single program. You know, it's not like it's a holy grail of hypertrophy, but it is versatile. And it is something that has benefits and specific utility in whatever, you know, specific cases. So we'd love to hear you guys use it. Thank you, as always, for joining us and we hope you'll join us for another episode.