NEW Isometric Research Explained & Q&A w/ James de Lacey (SSOF Ep 205)

James de Lacey0:00

For example, a mini course that just goes into eccentric training, going into the adaptations of eccentric training and the practical aspect of how to program it and what you're trying to get out of it and things like that. Could do one on isometrics, can do one on mini things in there. Cluster sets is another really good one. Could even just be one on programming, a mini one just on programming generally. I think these will be helpful and they'll be fun to make and I think they'll be valuable for any of you guys.

Just let me know if that's something that would be interesting. Other than that, make sure you leave a review on this podcast. Five stars, of course. You guys don't understand how much it helps. If you just go to Spotify and click review or Apple Podcast or whatever you listen to this, click review. Boom. That would be awesome.

Other than that, check out what else is in the description. If there's anything else in the comments. And if you have any questions, throw them in the chat. I might cover some conditioning stuff because I've been posting a lot of conditioning stuff recently. If you go on YouTube, YouTube has been popping off recently on some conditioning stuff. So check those out as well because yeah, those are really good.

I was just on, if you saw if you follow me on Instagram as well, I was just on Uber's podcast in person that just got released talking about conditioning. Dr. Mike T. Nelson for those of you who follow him and he's been on this podcast a couple of times. I was just on his podcast. I think that should come out this coming week or the following week talking conditioning. So there's some stuff going around, but let's just go straight into this isometrics. It's been a few minutes.

So there's a couple of new papers. Dustin Oranchuk involved in both of them. If you haven't listened to Dustin on the podcast, you should because he's one of the leading researchers in isometric training. Himself and Danny Lum, in the past couple of months they released two papers.

One of them is comparing a full body eccentric quasi isometric training program for 6 weeks versus a dynamic resistance training program. If you're not familiar I will go through eccentric quasi isometrics. It's probably one of my favorite you could say intensity techniques, even though it wouldn't be considered a traditional intensity technique like a drop set or lengthened partials and stuff, but it's a way to intensify your training without having to have the training age and all that kind of stuff to do 110% one rep squats and bench and stuff like that.

And then the other paper is comparing the effects of pushing and holding isometric training on strength and muscular tenderness adaptations. So both of these are intervention studies which is quite cool. So you kind of see before and after. Now before I go into both of these, it's kind of a big limitation with these and that is essentially untrained participants in both studies which, when you're recruiting for studies it's kind of it becomes difficult to get really well trained people and stuff like that.

So I understand they're going for the untrained. So I will mention that it's a limitation as I go through these, into what and into things that maybe could be more helpful for guys like yourself who are more well trained. But there is stuff we can take out of this which is quite interesting in the application of isometrics for essentially your combat sport strength training.

So I'm going to start, well let's start with pushing versus holding because I think that's where a lot of people are using isometrics the most in this instance. And I'll go into the eccentric quasi isometric stuff, but essentially what they did is they were looking at pushing against an immovable object. So that would be your overcoming isometrics and then holding a joint angle against an external load and that would be your yielding or holding isometrics.

And essentially they just wanted to cover those two, the two main isometric exercises and they looked at the strength and morphological adaptations between the two and they equated the volume as well. So they took 10 subjects and these were non-resistance trained adults, so bear that in mind. And they completed essentially a within subject design. So one leg was used for pushing and one leg was used for holding. So same subject, each leg was kind of put into the different intervention groups.

That is 6 weeks on the isokinetic dynamometer which is essentially a very fancy leg extension leg curl machine because you can dial in isokinetic. Essentially you can have constant speed of the, what would you call it, the crank, the arm, whatever that goes against your leg, whatever you want to call it. So when you're doing a leg extension, you're not going against say a weight stack. You're going against an immovable resistance and the speed moves with you. So you're always maximally pushing against it, but it's moving at a certain speed. In this instance, obviously, it's isometrically held. So it's in place.

There's an 80° knee angle, which is if you think you're 90° angle sitting there, just not much further extended than that. And they did 20 second holds at 70% of their pre-test maximum voluntary isometric contraction. So essentially they did max pushes against this thing and then they're doing it at 70% for the actual intervention, four to six reps per session.

And then they looked at pre and post assessments, things like knee extensor, eccentric concentric and isometric knee extensor torque. So torque, just rotational force, and just to make it really easy to understand we can just say force or strength. And then they looked at morphological change as well. So we're looking at things like quad size, fascicle length, pennation angle, things I've talked about a lot in the podcast before when we talk about speed adaptations, and then tendon thickness. So just your questions there.

So what they found was that both groups in this instance after 6 weeks they had similar improvements in isometric concentric and eccentric peak torque. No significant difference between essentially the different conditions on each leg, although there was a trend for the pushing isometric leg to have greater eccentric torque gain.

Same thing when we talk about the morphological adaptations. No significant difference between the ones that we mentioned earlier, but holding did lead to significantly greater total quad hypertrophy and moderately greater rectus femoris size. So we can take from this that potentially your holding isometrics may be better for I guess size gains, just taken from that face value. Pushing isometrics may be better for strength neural gains.

And if you actually look at the data, you kind of see this trend playing out across all of those variables where the holding isometrics tended or I should say trended to have slightly better gains in things like muscle fascicle length, pennation angle, reduction in pennation angle, tendon thickness, size, these kind of things.

Whereas the pushing trended to have better, I guess, neural adaptations in terms of strength. So it kind of, I would say, supports how we typically use isometrics in training. Definitely supports how I typically use isometrics in training. And you've seen probably some of my isometric videos and things I put out around long duration isometrics.

We talked at length with Bill Smart, who is the sport scientist at City Kickboxing for a lot of the New Zealand UFC guys and how he uses isometrics as well in those distances for speed, I guess, for muscle adaptations, for speed.

Now, when we talk about speed adaptations, it's not just moving fast, if that makes sense. That is obviously important doing, quote unquote, fast training. But if we're trying to target the adaptations we need for speed, there are different tools we can use and different training modalities we can use in order to elicit those adaptations.

And the adaptations for speed, you have neural adaptations. So obviously the pushing is going to help things like rate of force development, rate of power development. And then you go even deeper. You got rate coding or firing frequency, how quickly you can send signals to the muscle. Muscle motor unit recruitment. Can you recruit high threshold motor units and muscle fibers relatively quickly and efficiently?

Then you go down to the morphological side or structural side where you're looking at things like there was in the study longer muscle fascicles equals faster contractile velocity. More types of muscle fibers is faster. Reduction in penation angle, again closer to the line of pull within that muscle. So you're going to contract faster. And these are things that you can develop through various types of training. And it seems like the holding isometrics are going to give you a lot of that structural side or morphological side. Pushing is going to get you more of that neural side.

So in practice, how I typically like to use these. The holding I use often within different athletes and I like to hold the long muscle lengths and I usually go two roads. One is more of a duration volume style approach. One is more of an intensity based approach and we know there's an inverse relationship between intensity and volume.

So theoretically, if I can potentially speed—in this one, this was trend, this was only, what was it, 20 second holds, four to six to 20 second holds, so it's not a lot. So if you're doing more of a duration volume style holding isometric, like if you're holding a split squat, you could do a long duration, 60 to 90 second holding that tension, making sure you're not just sitting there trying to actively scissor your feet back together. Will create that tension. You could hold that for that 60 to 90 second block. Maybe do one or two sets.

Same thing. Another one I like is a Bulgarian split squat. You can do the same thing. Hands elevated deficit push-up is a really nice one as well. So you put your hands on a plate so you get extra range. You get a deep stretch in the shoulders and chest.

A one-arm side bend hang or even just side bending off a 45 degree back extension. These are all different ones you can use to create that really long muscle length with tension and long durations and theoretically you should gain some of these structural adaptations.

So it works really well in, say, an earlier training phase block, depending obviously on your training schedule and year and all that kind of stuff. Then in, if you don't want to—well, not say if you don't want to—then if you are, say, progressing or you're doing other things, you can use load instead of the duration and volume.

So instead of holding a split squat for 60 to 90 seconds, I like to load a heavy [expletive] barbell. You hold them between your legs, use straps, and you're holding for, say, 20 to 30 seconds. So now you're increasing the intensity in a load. You're loading the [expletive] out of that position with these long muscle lengths. But you're just doing shorter durations. And I've worked up to about 80 kilos in those split squat positions. One of my jiu-jitsu guys has been doing with 100. It's a pretty cool little variation. And one of my favorite loaded isometric variations.

So those are just holding ones. You do a load, shorter time, no load, longer time. Relatively simple. Then you got the pushing ones. A couple—one of my favorites is a lateral push against a rack or wall because you get a little less lateral movement. So just like you would do a skater jump, you're just putting your shoulder against a rack or a wall and you're just pushing hard against it as hard as possible. 6 to 10 seconds, usually around six to eight. And I'll usually complex that with some kind of ballistic movement.

The goal is to push it hard as fast as possible. I think that's the main intent you want to get out of these. Sometimes you can think, oh, six to eight second push, I'll gradually work my way so the last couple of seconds are maximal. The goal is to try and essentially hit peak force as quickly as possible.

And we know through our bike sprint data that when we hit peak power, that's when the muscle starts to desaturate oxygen quickly. So it's an efficiency thing. Andrew Asha has some preliminary data that's hopefully coming out around isometrics and oxygen desaturation. So essentially rate of force development becomes important from an efficiency standpoint alongside your reactive strength standpoint, your ability to produce force quickly, move quickly.

It also ties back to this idea of impulse momentum. We have short periods of time to generate force. We can generate more force. Then we increase the velocity of the movement, blah blah blah. Bench against pins is a good upper body one. You can do the same thing.

The other one is a rotation with the bar against the rack. I've shown some videos of that. It's a funky one that I got from Bill Smart. You can hold it for long durations, but because it's obviously you're pushing against it, you got to kind of, you can either do it submax or max. I typically haven't done this as a max, as you do it as a long hold because you're in a really—your hips are facing one way and your shoulders are facing the other way which makes it a really nice rotation.

So that would be like the holding versus pushing in this instance and how you can apply it to your own training, where you fit it in your training day. The pushing stuff you typically do near the beginning will be your main strength, power base work. The holding stuff, honestly, you can pretty much do anywhere. Typically I like to do, if I'm doing a heavy loaded hold, it's near the end of the session. If I'm doing long duration hold, it's either at the beginning or the end.

And it actually makes a pretty good warm up too if you're doing long duration holds. A long duration split squat initially is a nice warm up, especially for your knees and stuff for getting to a session. So you kind of got options to play with where those go.

So which kind of brings me to the second paper. It's comparing six weeks of full body eccentric quasi isometric and dynamic resistance training on muscular size, physical performance and serum hormones in untrained men. Again, untrained population. Now if you're not familiar with an eccentric quasi isometric, it's basically holding an isometric. So it's a holding isometric. You're holding it until failure.

So if you are doing a chin-up, you say you're holding a 90 degree elbow angle. You're just holding that position and resisting on the way down as you fail, trying not to fail. So it's not lowering yourself slowly. That would not be an isometric. It's trying to hold that position and you have no choice because you're failing. That would be an isometric.

I love the—I program these all the time with various athletes. I think it's one of the more potent and applicable training modalities that you can use, especially as a fighter. Mainly because of the morphological adaptations and you can make mad strength gains if you load this stuff heavy.

So what they did, let me just come down to the paper here. So they wanted to essentially answer the question of what are the chronic effects of eccentric quasi training because most of the research has kind of been acute or I should say at the time versus long-term.

So again, 30 participants and they were put into three groups. A control group, a dynamic training group and then an eccentric quasi isometric group. So they really made drastic, I should say drastic, extreme programs to really try and show the difference because the eccentric quasi isometric group did all their exercises as eccentric quasi isometrics versus a dynamic group who just perform normal movement.

So if I come to the actual program, did a pre and post test and they looked at things like one rep max on the leg extension, the bicep curl, muscular endurance to 60% one to failure, countermovement jump using hand on the wall then jumping and chalk on the wall, that kind of stuff just to measure performance and then they looked at muscle size through thigh cross-sectional area, upper arm circumference and then looked at things like testosterone, cortisol, growth hormone, etc.

Resistance training program just to give you an idea. It was basically every day was three days a week and every day was the same layout. So it's upper body horizontal push, lower body movement. So it was either leg press, leg extension or leg curl for upper body bench press, incline bench press or dumbbell bench press.

And then it was an upper body pull, so like pull downs and rows. Then it was a shoulder movement. So it was either military press or dumbbell like side or front raises. And then it was an arm isolation, triceps or biceps. So that was every day was basically that structure and the dynamic resistance training program just kind of varied sets, reps, and load.

So things like three sets of 12 with 60 to 65% 1 RM or three sets of 10 at 70, 75. It kind of progressed through. The isometric group did the exact same exercises but they performed every exercise as an EQI. EQI is short form for isometric so I don't have to keep saying it.

So for example, week one, day one was three sets of 60 to 90 second holds at 60 to 65% one rep. So again, holding that position and essentially letting themselves fail at those loads. By the end of the program they're looking at shorter eccentric or EQIs at 15 to 30 seconds at 80 to 85% 1 RM.

So relatively heavy to hold in those positions. So, bench press essentially like holding at like a 30 degree elbow angle until failure or until they finish those sets. Leg press, same thing. Lat pull downs, all of it. Bicep curls, triceps, all are done in this kind of EQI fashion.

If we go further down to the results, so the results were pretty well similar. So we basically saw improvements in all measures for dynamic and EQIs with very small to moderate differences between the two for certain measures but nonsignificant.

So they also state that EQI tended to result in a small to moderately greater beneficial change in upper body strength and endurance, growth hormone. Whereas muscle size, lower body strength, endurance, jump power and cortisol improved by a small to moderately greater magnitude with dynamic training.

So essentially, while there was no statistically significant difference for any of these, at least in this cohort, potentially a trend for EQIs to give you a little more strength and size whereas the dynamic may be more for strength and endurance, well even size as well in the lower body, jump power and things.

Now again, not statistically significant in this cohort. Now, I will say these are untrained individuals. So, you give them anything, they're probably all going to adapt relatively similarly, which makes it really hard to differentiate the protocols. Because as long as you're giving them something that is stressful enough, they will adapt.

I will say that I, at least theoretically, in my opinion, EQIs will be a more stressful and intense stimulus for most better trained athletes and fighters. And that's simply because you're creating an eccentric overload. Now I don't know if in this paper, because they don't state, they just say that the contraction time during the eccentric quasi isometric was 60 to 90 seconds at 60, 65% 1 RM.

So in the methodology it is the target contraction durations refer to the total duration of each individual repetition for every exercise and to achieve the targets the researcher increased the external load when participants exceeded the prescribed contraction time and decreased. Yeah. So it was basically to failure.

But the issue is, again, being untrained. When you have those adaptations in place and you're able to load it heavy, I theoretically still think you can gain, you can use this as an eccentric overload strategy. Whereas in this instance it's hard for an untrained person to overload an eccentric phase and because you can use it as an eccentric overload strategy you should potentially gain greater morphological adaptations like the holding isometrics in the previous study where you're able to see increases, muscle fasciculation, all that kind of stuff.

The other thing as well, on top of it, if you're doing, say, eccentric quasi isometric chin-ups, it's one of my favorite variations. So, typically I'll do say three sets of five to six weighted chin-ups and then you finish with one set of EQI isometric.

And what you'll find is you have to load that pretty heavy. Say you do three sets of five with a 20 kilo plate to really fail in say 20 to 30 seconds, you're going to need to load at least double that in my experience.

You're pretty strong in those positions. So it means the load you're getting on there is pretty big like 40, 50, 60 kgs when you were doing say 20 kgs for your five to six reps. Now you can think of like the strength carryover or something like that too. How strong your arms and lats become from trying to hold that load and resist failure.

My other favorite one is the snatch deadlift variation. Especially where you stand on deficit. You load it relatively heavy and you hold the hang position until failure.

Like if you're a wrestler, or you have a more wrestling style game as a grappler or even MMA, if you're holding like 120 plus kilos in those positions till failure, you know, you're going to have a stupid strong back and legs.

It's going to be very hard for your opponent to, obviously if you have the skill, very hard for your opponent to kind of deal with you. So you can kind of see where it's not just using say eccentric overload for kind of morphological gains for speed, like you can see where the strength comes in behind this too in terms of that development.

So that's those two papers, two new papers in kind of the isometric world that are quite interesting. I hope they do some follow-ups in more well-trained individuals to see kind of what comes out the other end because I think that would still be quite interesting to see as well.

I'm going to get to some questions I had that came through Instagram and if you have any, throw them in the chat, too. I screenshotted these. So, there's a couple in here. One of them is, is a push press a good lift for boxers.

Now, I was actually just about to make a short video or a short reel today about the push press being my number one upper body lift. And it's not technically an upper body lift. It's more of a full body lift, but it is my number one, my number, like we'll call it the cis, just for ease of use.

My number one upper body lift for pretty much any contact collision athlete. I pretty much program it in almost every single program. For boxers specifically though, you may not use the barbell variation depending on your shoulders. With rounded shoulders and stuff, it can be hard to get a barbell overhead.

So in this instance, you would use dumbbells or kettle bells. I prefer dumbbells over that. Or you can even use like a landmine castle push press. But regardless, your goal is to get your legs involved. As Jimmy Radcliffe has said in the past with Olympic lifts, from toes to fingertips.

Push press is kind of one of those variations that let you do that. And you can do it with like two dumbbells, one dumbbell. Both of those work really well. And it's just this ability to be able to transfer force from the ground from your feet through to your hands.

And yeah, it's one I use all the damn time. In terms of like how you program it, there's multiple ways. Okay, if you're going after volume for whatever reason, waves work phenomenal with push presses. So I think like five, 543, 543, there'll be six sets.

You do a set of five, add a little bit of weight. Set of four, add a little bit of weight. Set of three, take some weight off, but it still should be slightly heavier than your first set of five. And then work your way up again.

Then you can do the following week 432s and then 32 ones. Those waves are very nice for push press specifically. Don't know why. It just works really well. Works well for some more compound lifts too, those waves. So you can give that a go.

For more intensity based obviously you can just do like your three threes, three doubles. You can use some cluster set variations or cluster set waves. I will say cluster sets, yeah, they still work well there. It's just sometimes because it's such an exerting lift, it can be quite hard to recover between those short periods.

Complexes are another one of my favorite. Push press plus jerk. It's one of my favorite overhead complexes. You're essentially doing like, you're still getting the speed of the dip. So, if you listen to the podcast with Kristoff Kip, and the similarities between the dip in the push press and jerk and vertical jump,

You're getting both of those. You got the push press, you're getting more upper body strength, and then you got the jerk, which is speed under the bar. So, you have this really nice kind of dichotomy there when you're doing push presses plus jerks.

So, that's one of my favorites. Those would be my two big ones. Most importantly when you're doing the push press is you need to dip straight down. So one of the worst cues people give for squats and push presses, to sit back.

I don't know why people still talk that kind of [expletive]. Never sit back. You never sit back like you're sitting on the toilet or a chair in a squat or a push press. If you sit back in a push press, you will never push press any weight.

You need to think there's a rope on your tail, attached to your tailbone down to the floor and someone's pulling that rope straight down. That's how you have to move. And in order to do that, you have to create space with your knees.

So, if you don't create space or tension with your knees kind of coming out, tracking your middle toes, you don't have that tension on the dip and you don't stay centered in your feet. You kind of push your knees forward and you kind of get into this funky position that the weight can shift in your feet and you don't have the tension under the bar to essentially propel it off your shoulders with your legs.

I've done, I think I've done a push press breakdown. Maybe I'll do another one. It's a little more clear on the channel because yeah, it's one of the best lifts for sure.

One from Articulate BJJ at Jared Dell in New Zealand. Pick one: unbreakable cardio or inhumane explosiveness. If we're talking like fight, for the ability to win a fight, it would have to be unbreakable cardio. For maybe earning potential in human explosiveness because then you could be in something like the NFL.

Last question for Instagram. What do you think of energy systems conditioning plans that use AI like Games Lab? I had to look this up. I've never heard of this, but I didn't give much information. Examples. Here we go.

Athletic data conditioning. Okay. So, all I've done is benchmarked your times coaches. Okay. So, essentially they just created normative data it seems and then compares you against this normative data and then done some ratio stuff and then they just give you a plan based on where that weakness is seen.

Now, this for just the average person, fine, whatever you want to do. If you want to do something like that. Hang on. There's more examples. But you cannot use AI alone to understand the limitation of an athlete. And if anyone's watched my conditioning videos recently, I actually broke down a ton of data on my YouTube channel from various athletes, including myself, and you can see the stark differences in baseline testing and how that prescription changes.

But to do that, you have to dive deep into that data and break it down. Versus just taking a number because two athletes could reach the same time or same level on a test but have two different physiological profiles to get there which means there's two different prescriptions.

It's the same thing with maximum aerobic speed test which is a great way just to be able to get a general idea to individualize a program, but your physiology is going to be different even if you have a similar maximum aerobic speed score to someone else.

It's kind of how the anorobic speed reserve came around but that still doesn't tell you the physiological response or the profile of an athlete or yourself to prescribe conditioning. So if you want to get really granular, no, it won't. AI training things like that won't do anything. If you're just looking for something to follow that will give you something a little more structure, yeah, you'll probably make gains doing it.

Doing anything is better than doing nothing. I think the issue is people will take, yeah well they do a lot of low intensity volume and this and that and it helps them. It's like yeah okay, you went from doing none of it to doing some of it. That's great. But what is the thing that's going to continually help you improve? Because at some point you need something to attack whatever is limiting you and that might not be the thing.

I had a question in the chat here. My muscle burns later in rounds. My hands drop. What can I do? Far too general for me to answer but generally you need to box or whatever your sport is. You need to do it more often if you can.

It's honestly it's just time doing the sport. One, two, if you have done the sport a long time, say you were a professional, this was happening a lot, then your conditioning is probably just [expletive] and you probably need to improve the ability of your upper body to be able to handle the demands, which typically is going to be sprinting in this instance.

And I mean on a bike like airbikes that's going to get more upper body involvement and it's going to develop the condition annotations we want to be able to essentially help with that problem. So that's a very general answer to that general question but it's going to, time in sport is the main one. You can't underestimate the importance and the development that happens when you're doing the sport day after day after day.

Now is that all you can do, you just do that and do nothing else? No, because at some point you need the kind of physiological underpinnings to support that. Now, of course, there are freak athletes that have gotten away with it and still get away with it, but that's different.

You guys listening to this probably aren't freaks. Which means that there are other things that you need to do. And even the freaks still need some stuff to go underneath, just they're just so good at the sport that it often doesn't matter.

Yeah. And I've had a couple, a lot of other questions around more so kind of just, I think people are confused about this idea of sprint intervals and what they really are and where it fits in the conditioning because people think it's just that's just sprint intervals.

It's not just sprint intervals. It's taking something and complementing what is happening within the other training to develop or continually develop in the time we have the underpinning physiology we need to meet the demands. And if you're only training the sport once or twice a week, well, you're probably not that competitive. One and two then you probably need to do potentially some other intensity based training whether it's longer intervals and different repeats versus just sprints because you're not getting that from the technical training.

And I don't care if it's, if someone needs low intensity work or more longer repeats or sprints. All I care is about here's their data. This is their training schedule. This is how much time they have to train. This is the limitation. Okay, this is what we're going to do to attack it. That's literally it.

It's not a we have to do aerobic based work and aerobic work and then do anorobic. It's [expletive]. It doesn't make any sense physiologically and it does not help the athlete address what they need. And you can do as much low intensity work as you want. At some point in your intensity and what you're trying to drive adaptation wise from the low intensity work probably isn't giving what you want.

The episode I just did with Dr. Mike Ty Nelson on his podcast, it should be out soon. I talk a lot about that too, so that'll be interesting for you guys too. I'll send it out on the email list if you're on there.

But other than that, I think that's everything I had to cover. Hopefully you enjoyed the isometrics. Couple of quick questions and next week we should hopefully have a guest. Hopefully I can get Cal back on and Tim Swords and we'll have a couple of banger episodes. So, I'll catch you guys in those.