hi. I'm Dr. Eric Cob of ZL Performance, and today we're continuing our isometric series, looking at building either maximum strength or hypertrophy, and the protocols that seem to show up the most in the literature associated with this. Now, if you're new to Z Health, we are a brain-based education company. We specialize in digging through emerging research, finding the nuance and detail that really matters, that you can apply practically today to your own body or to your clients. So, if you are a movement professional, a doctor, a therapist, or a coach, make sure to subscribe and check out our free resources. For the last few weeks, I've been talking about isometrics and some amazingly cool practical tips that are now showing up as we get deeper and deeper into the research literature over the last really 5 years or so. I'm shooting this because we just released the brain-based practitioners unit, our membership guide to isometrics, ideas that you can apply immediately. So, we've already covered some different things about should I do long or short isometrics, yielding versus overcoming.

what if I have some sensory issues. So, if you haven't watched the other videos in this series, go back and check them out. But today, I want to go back to basics. I want to talk about building strength or increasing muscular size, so maximum strength or hypertrophy. I've read, you know, and seen for many, many years, people say, Well, can isometrics actually do hypertrophy? Can they make you stronger? The answer is unequivocally yes. And in many cases, the strength development is actually faster in some ways than dynamic exercise, and hypertrophy can also be very significant. But you have to do the protocols correctly, and they are very different. What I see a lot of times is that people will start doing isometrics as a part of a training program, and they're doing them incorrectly. They actually don't know what they're doing. So, they'll just basically do the same kind of exercise over and over, and haphazard application of science typically leads to haphazard results. So, let's solve that today. Maximum strength development. First thing

I want you to know that if you want to work on building maximum strength, you should be doing your isometrics at long muscle lengths over and over. This has been showing up in different studies, so if you have to guess, go with a long muscle length. This means, though, that you don't have issues that preclude doing this. Go back and watch the information about sensory issues or lack of neural drive or coordination issues. Those may change whether you choose a long or short muscle length, but purely for strength development, think long muscle length. Next, we have to know how hard are we going to contract. What's the intensity? Well, if you're trying to get stronger, guess what? Maximum contraction. You need to be above 90% of what you are capable of doing. So, in general, I'm just asking people to pull as hard as they can while remaining safe. This is one of the big issues: long muscle lengths combined with extremely strong contractions take some time to build up to because the brain may not feel safe.

there. So, this is not something I recommend jumping into immediately. I normally will start meeting my clients who are somewhat deconditioned, or if we're going through a rehab process, we will start at mid-range where they are strongest and over a few weeks progress them to doing 90 plus % contractions in long muscle lengths. So, be careful with your body. Now, the next thing we have to know is if I'm going to contract that hard, how long do I hold it? Well, this is how things work normally. If we're going as hard as we can, we can't do it very long. So, your contraction time needs to be between 3 and 5 seconds. So, you're going to do a 90 plus % contraction for 3 to 5 seconds, and then you're going to stop, and you're going to rest, but only for 5 to 10 seconds. And then you're going to do it again, and you will repeat that until you hit five reps. Then you're going to take a three-minute

break and you're going to do that two to three more times. So again, I said a lot of people apply isometrics. Hazard. They've read somewhere years ago that hey, a 6-sec isometric is all you need to do. Actually, no. And what we're seeing again is if I'm doing five repetitions of 3 seconds, that's 15 seconds per set, and I'm doing three to four of those, so 45 to 60 seconds of near-maximal contraction. Most people, when I first ask them to do that after the second set, they're like, I'm done. I can't go any anymore. So one of the reasons we see people struggling with building maximum strength with isometrics again is that they're just not working their way up into an appropriate protocol because it's difficult. What is cool is that if you look at the research, the amount of strength that people can generate from doing this for usually between 7 to maybe 12 to 16 weeks, training two to three times a week, you will see strength.

improvements that range anywhere from only 5%, which is a very, very minimum, up to 91% over the course of 2 to 3 months or four months. That is staggering. So, this is again a joint-friendly, safe way for people to get a lot stronger very, very quickly without them having to go through a lot of strong learning curve related to different types of lifts. So, I love using isometrics for maximal strength. There's other reasons I might do it as well for specific athletes, but that's the idea there. Now, let's compare that to hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is kind of into fitness, and I want to look better. Can I use isometrics to increase muscular size or change the shape a little bit? Once again, the answer is yes, but a different protocol. Here is the only similarity. The only similarity is going to be that both for maximum strength and hypertrophy, we want to be doing long muscle length in both cases for strength and muscular growth. This seems to work better. The difference is number one in the intensity, so for

maximum strength, we're 90 plus %; for hypertrophy, we want to be around 70 to 75%. Intensity doesn't really matter that much if all I'm trying to do is increase muscular growth. What matters is the time. So, for maximum strength, we were doing 90 plus % for 3 to 5 seconds; for hypertrophy, I'm going to be doing around 70%. So, in my head, I go, Okay, what would be a 10? What would be then a 5? What would be a 7? Right about there, that's my Baseline. If you have cool equipment and you can measure it, that's great, but you can also go on a 1 to 10 scale on your effort level. So, I'm going to hit about a 7 to a 7 and 1/2, but now I'm going to hold it for a long time. The idea for us to create hypertrophy is that we need to be aiming to reach somewhere between 80 and 150 seconds of that amount of tension. However, we get

there what is normally seen in the literature is that a few l Hold isometrics at 70 to 75% is most ideal. So what that would look like would be maybe I say okay I'm going to go for four repetitions of 30 seconds. So I'm working on my right bicep, I'm at a long muscle length, I'm going to contract to a seven to a s and a half, and I set my timer and it's going to count down 30 seconds, and then I'm going to rest. How long do I rest? Not very long. You're going to rest for 10 to 15 seconds, and then you're going to do it again. And what you will find is that by the time you hit typically that second, third, and fourth 30-second period, that muscle is really, really burning. It's really starting to fatigue, and it is that time under tension and that prolonged holding that seems to promote the highest level of hypertrophy. They have compared this where they said all right we're going to

do four sets of 30 seconds. That's 120, and then they do 20 sets of 6 seconds, also 120. And what they found when they compared them is that the longer holds seem to do a better job of increasing hypertrophy. So, in that particular case, the rest periods and everything don't really matter. What we're aiming for is we want to just maximize that time under tension, hopefully hitting that 120 to 150 range. If you're going a little bit harder, maybe down around the 80c range. So, for hypertrophy, we have a very different look, a very different style of isometric, and it is much more challenging in many ways. Going to want to think about, okay, what do I already know from these other videos? Well, from something that's really long hold, I'm probably going to need to use an overcoming isometric because we have typically double the endurance of a yielding isometric. So, in all the videos that we've shot so far, there are little details that you can start to think.

through that will help you really refine your programming for yourself and for your clients because our job begins to save time. The faster people see results, the more inspired they become to continue doing the work that they need to do to be the person that they want to be. All right, so this is one of the reasons we love this stuff. We love the literature, we love the detail because again, my job is to help you coach your clients to be their best as fast as possible. And that's why we have fallen in love over the last 20 years with Neurology. So I hope you find this really interesting and useful. And like I said, um, if you are a professional and you have found this series interesting, make sure to check out not only this channel but our resources on the [Music] web.

Isometrics for Strength or Size (Different Protocols for Different Results!)

Isometrics for Strength or Size (Different Protocols for Different Results!)