isometrics exercises

Isometrics Exercises are another fantastic form of bodyweight training which require no special equipment at all. To the layman, the most interesting thing about isometric exercises is that they require no movement at all. When performing a proper isometric contraction, the joint angle or muscle length does not change. However, tremendous force is applied, and the entire muscle can be fatigued within seconds. I've heard it put that with isometrics exercises, the key is to "get to the last rep first". This outlines the real secret of isometric training as well as any that I know off.

The value of isometric exercises has been known for sometime. It has been a part of such disciplines as Yoga and Martial Arts for thousands of years. However, it was never really studied in any serious way until 1920. The results were astonishing, but unexpected. This is what happened.

At the end of World War 1 the medical community had a problem. There were thousands of soldiers around the country who needed to be rehabilitated before they could return to society. However, there just wasn't the medical personal or equipment to give everyone the care they needed all at once. The question that concerned doctors of that time was just how long could a limb remain immobilized before excessive muscle degeneration took hold and the limb could no longer be rehabilitated? This is the question that researchers at Springfield College in Springfield College Massachusetts decided to investigate.

To test how long a limb could remain immobilized before atrophy set it, they decided to use frogs as test subjects. They tethered one leg of each frog to a heavy weight, completely immobilizing it. They left the other leg free to move about. Leaving the frogs in this state for two weeks, what the researchers expected to find was that the immobilized leg would be far weaker than the free leg. From this they might be able to determine how fast an immobilized limb would degrade, and this knowledge could be used with the injured soldiers.

To the researchers astonishment, however, the EXACT OPPOSITE occurred. The tethered, immobilized leg had gotten demonstrably larger and stronger over the two week time frame. So much so, in fact, that when released, the frogs would actually jump lopsided! Without realizing it, the researchers at Springfield College had stumbled upon one of the key principles of isometrics exercises, namely what is called the "Synapse Effect".

What is the "Synapse Effect?" Essentially, your body is always trying to perform actions in the most efficient fashion possible to conserve energy. If you pick up a glass of water, for example, your body will only use the bare minimum of muscle fibers required to pick up the glass. Likewise when you perform an exercise like a bench press, even using a very heavy weight, there is likely only a fraction of a second at which every muscle fiber is working. The Frogs with the tethered legs, however, were constantly straining to move their immobilized leg. As they were trying to move their legs but couldn't, they were forced to use EVERY MUSCLE FIBER in the attempt. Unlike weight lifting, EVERY MUSCLE FIBER was being used. This is the secret of isometric exercises, and the reason the tethered frogs legs were so much stronger.

Unfortunately, these results were not the ones the researchers were looking for. They didn't feel these results could be applied to the wounded soldiers, so they ignored the findings. They wrote up their results, published them, and moved onto other things. It really is a shame, as the principles of isometrics exercises could really have helped the wounded soldiers that the researchers wanted to help in the first place.

In the intervening war years, isometric exercises grew in popularity amongst the general public, but were not studied seriously by the medical community until 1946. Once again, doctors faced the same problem as their peers did in 1920. Thousands and thousands of injured soldiers needing to be rehabilitated, but nowhere near enough medical equipment or personal to do the job. However, some researchers thought, might they be able to use isometric exercises in this situation to help the soldiers? Drs. E. A. Mueller and Theodore Hettinger of the Max Planck institute decided to find out.

I think it's worth noting the differences in how these men approached this matter. The researchers in 1920 were not looking to discover the value and possible uses of isometric exercises, they just stumbled across it. By 1946, however, there were many examples of circus strongmen and athletes (Maxick and Alexander Zass spring to mind) who claimed that isometrics was the key to superior health. I believe this is why Hettinger and Mueller decided to focus on isometric training. Could these claims be true?

At any rate, here's what they did. 50 otherwise healthy men aged 19 to 55 were selected and, echoing the Springfield Frog Experiment, had one otherwise healthy arm completely immobilized in a plastic cast. The arm was taken out of the cast once a day, in which isometrics exercises were performed for less than a minute. Once completed, the arm was placed back into the cast. This experiment was run for 4 weeks. The result? A dramatic increase in strength of the immobilized arm!

This time, as these were the results the researchers expected, the results were circulated far and wide. The results were confirmed by the medical community as a whole, and not only did they help the wounded soldiers, but other medical patients such as polio victims. The bottom line is this. Isometrics Exercises, by forcing all of the muscle fibers to contract for brief periods, works. If you are looking to try something different to get into shape, you may want to try this method for yourself.