"Hey Matt, you’re looking great these days!"

"You’re really filling out your shirt. Whatever you’ve been doing, keep at it!"

"Whatever you’ve been up to in your training, you look bigger than ever!"

Comments like these used to catch me a bit off guard. As a perpetually slender, ectomorphic individual, I’m not used to getting comments on my muscles.

However, over the years, it has become much more commonplace. You could even say I’ve started to get used to it, as it happens whenever I get more serious about isometric bodybuilding.

Building muscle is one of the most notable benefits of isometric training, yet it’s also what many find hard to accept about the discipline. People understand that isometrics is incredibly valuable as a joint-saving way to quickly develop powerful functional strength. But, there’s less faith in isometric training for packing on muscle.

It’s a shame because if there’s anything isometrics can help you achieve, it’s hypertrophy. I would even say you’re leaving gains on the table if you do not include isometric training in your muscle-building plan. To understand the huge advantages of isometric bodybuilding, we must first reassess the basic process of stimulating muscle growth.

Fundamentally, you stimulate hypertrophy by challenging your muscular work capacity. When you contract a muscle, you create a given level of tension in the muscle. The more time you hold that tension, the more you use up your muscular work capacity.

Holding more tension uses your work capacity at a faster rate. Meanwhile, holding less tension means using your work capacity slower. This is why you’ll reach the limit of your work capacity faster if you’re generating more muscle tension and slower if you’re lifting a lighter load.

Any training method that requires a fair degree of muscle tension can challenge your muscular work capacity and stimulate hypertrophy. However, isometrics offers a unique advantage.

Dynamic training always requires a trade-off between time and tension. If you want to generate a lot of tension, you can’t hold that tension for much time. Lifting for a long period of time is great, but you can’t do it with much muscle tension. You have to make the trade-off between strength and endurance.
 

 

Isometric training doesn’t require such a trade-off. You can generate a very high level of tension and hold that tension for a long period.

 

 

Furthermore, dynamic training requires more than just muscular work capacity to perform most exercises. You also need coordination, mobility, stability, and a degree of proficiency to perform an exercise safely.

The more an exercise challenges these skillful traits, the more likely those qualities will limit your ability to continue performing the exercise. These limitations make it much more difficult to regularly challenge the work capacity of the muscle you’re attempting to grow.

 

 

Isometric training also requires those traits but to a much lesser degree. These unique advantages make it much easier to challenge your muscular work capacity and stimulus for hypertrophy.

Pushing your muscular work capacity is relatively simple; you place a lot of tension in a muscle and challenge yourself for how long you can hold the tension. In practical terms, this means lifting fairly close to failure.

One of the biggest advantages of training IsoMax is the ability to measure time and tension and bring the concept of failure to isometric training. Theoretically, you can hold an isometric exercise indefinitely. You just end up applying less force to the handle as you gradually fatigue.

The IsoMax measures your force output which is closely related to muscular tension. When you’re no longer applying enough force, in a load of time mode, that stops the mechanism from beeping. This is fundamentally the same as no longer creating enough tension to continue lifting a weight.

But remember, you can reach "failure" in a dynamic lift through the limitations of other functional variables like stability and control. So, using a device like an IsoMax gives you a more direct measurement of time, tension, and total work capacity by reaching the true limitations of your muscular work capacity.

It’s not just the creation of the stimulus for hypertrophy that gives isometrics an advantage; it’s also the other half of the process through recovery.

One of the biggest advantages of isometric training is that it doesn’t produce as much residual stress and fatigue as dynamic training. It used to be believed that such stress was the main driver for stimulating hypertrophy, but experts have become more critical of this idea in recent years.

Many athletes produce very high levels of neuromuscular stress and even damage without building muscle. Endurance athletes, like distance runners, are one such example.

Stress and fatigue probably play a role in building muscle, but it’s not as prominent as once thought. That’s one of many reasons I talk about creating a stimulus for hypertrophy by challenging your work capacity. It correlates more directly with muscle growth than just exhausting yourself with punishing training sessions. The side benefit is that it also helps you recover a lot faster.

The less you need to recover, the better. No one ever builds muscle through recovery; you build muscle through adaptation.

Like muscular stress, there are many examples of people who recover very well without any net gain in muscle mass. Plus, everyone always recovers from the stress of training. It’s not like recovery is ever in doubt, yet hypertrophy certainly eludes many hard-working athletes.

Recovery is all about repairing and bringing yourself back up to speed. Adaptation is about building yourself up to be better than before. The more time and physical resources you need to recover, the less you have available to build yourself up.

Isometric training doesn’t involve nearly as much stress, so it doesn’t require nearly as much recovery. With much less time and resources spent on recovery, you have more available to build yourself up.

Adding it all up, isometric training can help you more directly produce a high degree of tension for a long time, making it easier to challenge your muscular work capacity consistently. Add that to the fact that you need less recovery time, can adapt faster to the training, and have the ultimate one-two punch for building muscle.

There are always variables outside your control regarding your potential to build muscle. Some examples are age, training experience, exercise proficiency, and good old-fashioned genetics.

The more control you have over your training, the less you leave your potential to chance. Isometrics is a valuable tool that helps you achieve control and empowers you to achieve the desired results.