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Why I switched to being an Isometric strength trainer...

Many years ago, maybe 10 or more, I took it upon myself to find the best way to train a client as a PT.

I had many questions which I needed to answer in order to find the best method. Questions like ‘what’s going to get my guys to their goals the fastest’ and ‘how will it grow my business’ and many others.

But, as I came to understand, I hadn’t ever thought of the right questions I needed to ask myself. In fact there is only one question which should be answered…

Is it safe?

This isn’t a quote from The Marathon Man, a classic 70’s film but the only real question that should be asked before all others. A question which had never been part of my fitness education up to this point, never even mentioned in all the books, tests and homework which is needed to gain the badges.

Is it safe?

I very soon became aware that this question had to be the first question answered in any and all exercise selection. As I continued to train people one to one in a commercial setting I started to see that no one was considering this. Something I now feel is malpractice on the part of any personal trainer if this isn’t starting point of a session plan.

I watched countless PT’s getting clients deadlifting, performing incline dumbbell presses, kettlebell cleans, med ball Russian twists and 100’s of other exercise that they insisted needed to be performed and many done ‘explosively’ in order to activate the elusive fast twitch muscle fibres.

Needless to say this isn’t the case, recruitment and the resulting inroading of the fast twitch fibres comes from the fatiguing of the muscle or muscles being used in a movement before the body is forced to switch to these fast twitch fibres. It has nothing to do with speed of movement. But it has everything to do with time under tension.

So, what is the safest way to exercise? I’m sure we all except that we run the risk of injury during activity right? from 5-a-side football to scrabbling up a rock face, it all comes with a degree of risk and its our chose to participate. But exercise is different.

With the very high levels of intensity (coming during muscle contraction and extension) which happens during exercise the degree of injury increases as we find ourselves under tremendous loads relative to our bodyweight. These are what we call shearing forces especially when we are adding any rotation to the movement, as apposed to impact forces which we tend to receive from sports activity. This is just a general rule of thumb depending on the activity.

Creating safety during exercise is all about controlling variables. The more we can control and even eliminate the safer the practice will be. So, what are the variables we will encounter?

There are 100’s just in the gym environment alone. From the random guy walking through the area you are training to the weights left on the floor after someone has used them. When you think of the nature of chaos and all the different people and bits of equipment and machinery in a gym is it even posable to control your training environment? The answer to that was a firm no. So there and then I decided that I had to make my own environment, my own studio to practice and teach.

Next I had to look at the exercises themselves. What really needed to be trained? Thinking about the exercise session in terms of plains of movement and kinetic chains instead of standard exercises like deadlift, squat, bench press etc. This made me see that there isn’t any exercises that had to be performed, you just need to activate and fatigue the plains of movement. You don’t need to deadlift to train the posterior chain you can do it in many different ways which are far safer. It just needs a little imagination.

Then we have to consider how you safely progress a client as they start to get stronger. The long established way is to add more weight, incress the rep and set count and/or perform more training sessions in a week. All of which incress a clients exposer to injury, a lot of which would come from over use injury’s. This is where to magic of Isometrics come in. This method of strength training holds infant progression, in overcoming isometrics anyway. The object you are creating contraction against is by its very definition immovable, you will never beat it. So as you get stronger and stronger it matters not to the object.

If we can reduce the volume of training that a client is performing without compromising the level of intensity and ensure the right about of rest is taken between sessions (frequency) We can further reduce the exposure to injury. One set to fail in each plain of motion allows us to perform 10 to 12 exercise to maximum intensity in roughly 20 minutes. The perfect amount of exercise, and this is repeated every 3, 4 or 5 days depending of the clients sleeping habits and other variables in lifestyle.

All in all this training method of Isometric, one set per movement plain or body part, performed for 20 minutes twice a week is very different from the standard PT session you encounter.

It is a far superior way to perform your strength training. The science says so.

Get in touch if you are interested in learning the skill of exercise

mbptstudio@gmail.com