A very long plank

A 71-year old woman held a plank for 36 minutes and 58 seconds, if you can believe it.

Exercise helps woman beat world planking record

The best part is this was a demonstration of her fitness after a long period of unfitness. She lost a significant amount of weight and greatly increased her strength and strength-endurance.

Very impressive.

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Isometrics + Explosive Training for Athletes

There is an excellent article over on Elite FTS now that deals with isometric exercises for athletes.


Isometric Training for Athletes

Although the article begins, inexplicably, with a picture of barefoot running, it's not about running at all. Instead, it's about isometric exercises, often combined with explosive exercises.

The idea is pretty simple - you use the isometric exercise to get used to resisting force, and then acting to suddenly tense your muscles against that force to overcome it. Done properly, this totally eliminated the "stretch reflex," where your body stores energy in its elastic tendons briefly before using it to reverse a movement. Think of how you crouch down briefly before you jump, to coil up and store some energy.

The execution is pretty smart - he shows how to load the isometric and then perform unloaded explosive exercises, as well.

Overall, this is a great explanation of an excellent tool in a strength & conditioning coach's toolbox. Worth checking out if you are, or train, an athlete.

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Quick Tip - Teaching abdomninal activation

"Activate your core and keep it tight" is a cue I use whenever I coach any exercises that require a good, stable abdomen and lower back. Not all of my trainees really "get" that cue, though. You'll sometimes hear "tighten up like you're going to take a punch" as well, but that's a fairly violent clue for some people, and it can distract them rather than help them. Besides, my MMA coach says not to tighten up to receive a hit anyway.

I've used planks, Pallof presses, Turkish get-ups, woodchoppers, and other assorted exercises to get people to feel the abdominal activation and learn that it's not just holding your breath but keeping your muscles tighten while you breath. But it can take a while despite this, because most of these exercises have an element that will let you overcome a weak core, usually by powering right through the reps.

One thing I picked up from one of my clients is to use a 1+ second count at the area of maximum contraction with a band or tube-resisted variation of the exercise. You can't help but activate your abs if you are holding a band-resisted Pallof press at maximum extension. I prefer the band because the resistance is actively pulling you out of the position, and its easy enough to recover from if you start to lose it (unlike some weighted exercises - you can't recover from a lost TGU very easily, say).

So try this - add a 1-2 second hold at the maximum extension of a Pallof press and see if that doesn't get you supremely conscious of just what contracted abs feel like. I'm starting to use this cue and this method with all my clients, just to get them used to properly firing their abs.

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Ultimate Exercise part 2

Part II of Bill Starr's discussion of isotonic-isometric exercise is up over at Starting Strength.

I linked to and discussed Part I on this blog here.

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Origins of the Power Rack . . . and Dianabol

Over on Starting Strength, Bill Starr published an article about power racks, functional isometrics, and dianabol. Bill Starr isn't an armchair coach; he's a (former?) competitive lifter, coach, and author of one of the most famous permutations of the 5 x 5 weight training regime.

The Ultimate Strength Exercise - Isotonic-Isometric Contraction by Bill Starr.

I brought this article up to a friend on Saturday when we were talking about anabolic steroids and food (basically, your need for kcals and what kind of food you can get away with eating would change if you were taking steroids). No, I wasn't recommending he use them or advocating their use, far from it. Just mentioning that you need to know all of the contributing factors behind someone's progress before you can reasonably expect to duplicate that progress using the same methods.

This article by Bill Starr was very timely, then. The elevator version of the article, as I understand it, is that power racks, the spike in popularity of isometric exercise, and dianabol have a shared history.

One of the things that I took away from this article is that when someone reports on progress, you have to ask, is that all that was changed? The athletes involved in showing the positive effects of isometric exercise also benefited from taking the then-newly invented anabolic steroid dianabol. It was legal (they didn't become controlled substances until decades after this), but it wasn't held out as one of the reasons for the success of the exercise program.

Dr. Ziegler reported that these guys made spectacular gains using functional isometrics. Now, it may in fact be a very good way to train, but that's not the only factor that influenced their gains. It was also the dianabol that he was parceling out to the athletes. Put aside any prejudices you may have about use or non-use of steroids and consider this - if someone changes two factors in their training, but only reports on one of them, you can't reliably expect to get the same results as them with only that factor.

It's an interesting story as well, and I'm looking forward to reading the follow-up articles about functional isometric exercise. But it's also a cautionary tale to me - the combination of dianabol and isometrics led to the reported gains, resulted in claims of "hoax" when this detail came out. It's also a warning that if some new method or training regime or supplement is "demonstrated" to result in big gains, it's worth asking - is that all that was changed in the lifter's regime?

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Book Review: The 90-Second Fitness Solution

The 90-second Fitness Solution is a book aimed at women interested in fitness. It is written mostly for beginners and women frustrated by a lack of results or other general dissatisfaction with the gym.

The central idea is pretty interesting. Super-slow training - taking tens of seconds for a single rep - for hypertrophy showed promise but ultimately didn't result in bigger muscles. Most women don't want bigger muscles. Isometric exercising strengthens the muscles only in a short range of motion, but lifting fast and hard across a full range of motion takes more technique and exposed you to acute injuries if the weight is lifted incorrectly. So the author decided to use such super-slow techniques in combination with isometrics. The result? A series of isometric holds designed to increase strength, done slowly enough to avoid hypertrophy and make the technique easier to do.

The author gets around the inherent limitation in isometrics (they only strengthen a limited range-of-motion) by a series of paused isometric holds. You'll start with just a pushup top position (a straight-arm plank), but as you go on, you begin lowering yourself 2 inches at a time, holding for 10 seconds, and then another 2, etc. until you reach near-bottom, and then start back up. The goal is 90 seconds per exercise - not 90 seconds total, although the attention-grabbing title implies just that. Each of the exercises is presented in a series of levels, so you know exactly what you have to do for each workout and how to do it.

The book, of course, has a "challenge" in it - the idea that men might think doing 25 pushups is great, but they can't do even one of his. I knocked out a 90-second pushup as described after a pushup/row/lunge circuit recently. It's not hard to do if you're used to long efforts. It's an annoying and typical sales line for fitness books - the brawny bodybuilder gasping in amazement at the sheer strength of someone doing the exercises they proscribe. Sadly, it's true for some people (who are more show than go) but for athletes, it's not much of a challenge.

Within its limitations - this book isn't going to turn you into an athlete - it's got some good stuff. The emphasis on compound exercises, perfect form, and isometric holds to develop postural and supporting muscle endurance is excellent. It's a solid basis for an exercise plan for a woman's home-workout. It certainly seems like it would work - it's hard to say that gaining the ability to do a 90-second straight-arm hang, 90 second wall sit, 90 second semi-isometric pushup and squat, etc. is going to be bad for anyone. It's certainly convinced me to try some of these with more fragile or weak clients who need a basis of static strength before they can move with strength.

But there are limitations - you aren't going to develop a lot of power with a workout like this, which means it's not especially going to help you jump higher, deal with sudden movements (like recovering from a fall), or get you stronger at anything requiring speed. It also emphasizes machine work once you progress to the in-gym phase. It's sad to see someone moving backward from full-body self-supporting exercise to machine-based semi-isometric super-slow lifting.

Perhaps the best section is the diet section. It wholly abandons the food pyramid and goes right to eat real food, and stop worrying about calories. As long as you are eating whole, healthy foods, the authors aren't worried about your diet. They do a good job of showing what you can eat, and providing recipes using their principles.

Rating:
Content: 3 out of 5. It's very thorough in its lifting and eating suggestions, so you really get everything you need. It doesn't miss much of its central topic, but it includes some hyperbolic exaggerations of how well it compares to other ways of exercising. Points off for implying fast lifting is bad.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Well-written, well organized, pitched well to its audience. Physically attractive and the exercise examples are very well explained and pictured.

Overall: If a non-athletic person asked me if this book was a good one to follow and try, I'd be fine with that. The "progress" to the gym workout seems more iffy to me. But the basic workout is an excellent start, and the author certainly does address the concerns of female trainees (don't want to get big) while getting them stronger overall. If that sounds like you, read it. Otherwise, the information isn't really aimed at you.

Training Terminology: Isometric Exercise

Exercises fall into three categories: Isometric, Isotonic, and Isokinetic. Today we'll discuss isometric exercises.

Isometric exercises are done without movement. You place the body into a certain joint angle, either against an immovable object or just body tension, and do not change that angle for the duration of the exercise.


Some examples of isometric exercises are:

- The plank.
- The wall sit.
- The wall push - two hands against the wall, push as if you're going to shove the wall away from you.
- Barbell press against pins - you push a loaded barbell against a pair of pins, ensuring it won't move. The weight of the barbell ensures you must exert a minimum amount of force to keep it in place.

What are the benefits? Isometric exercises have been shown to increase strength and endurance in the muscles utilized. However, and this is their primary weakness, they do not improve strength across a wide range of motion. Your strength increases primarily affect the joint angle you are in, plus approximately 15 degrees in either direction.

It's also hard to load some isometric exercises. You can weight a plank with a vest, but you can't find a wall that's harder to push away for a wall push.

Book Review: Max Contraction Training

Max Contraction Training : The Scientifically Proven Program for Building Muscle Mass in Minimum Time

By John Little
224 pages, published 2004

I almost didn't review this book. But I decided that maybe you'll see it, or borrow it from the library (like I did), or otherwise come across the concepts in it and want to know more. Hopefully, you'll move from it to something else...

To understand Max Contraction Training (always capitalized, and emblazoned on almost every t-shirt in every picture in the book), you need to understand HIT, or High Intensity Training. High Intensity Training is a minimal volume program conceived of, or at least popularized by, bodybuilder Mike Mentzer and Nautilus inventor Arthur Jones. The idea is that if you do one set of an exercise hard enough, using a weight that causes you to fail on the last rep, you don't need to do additional sets. This should, the idea goes, be sufficient exercise and probably superior exercise to the normal 3-5 sets recommended for weight training. It's the opposite approach of high-volume techniques popular for bodybuilding.

HIT, like Max Contraction Training claims, has some scientific proof behind it. Notably, studies were done with untrained college students that showed that ones doing one hard set got almost identical results to ones doing three sets. Other studies have shown some similar effects. Of course, the limitations of the studies are that untrained beginners will show results from almost anything, and "field evidence" (for lack of a better term) from a myriad of trainees across the world show that multiple sets have a definite value. It's also dependent on you picking a weight that really is the maximum you could do 10 times, but not 11 or 9. I'll perhaps write more about HIT later but for now, the important thing to note is that John Little was a friend of Mike Mentzer and a HIT proponent.

The book opens with a preface by Anthony Robbins, famed motivational speaker. From there, it goes into a long introduction, discussing bodybuilding history, bodybuilding benefits, and the author's progression of his idea.

Max Contraction Training is based on the simple logical progression:
- Muscle fibers contract all-or-nothing. They either work, or don't work.
- In order to get the most fibers to contract, you need a maximal weight providing resistance at exactly the point in an exercise where the muscle is worked the hardest. At any other point, or with a sub-maximal load, by definition you're activating less fibers.
- The more you can isolate a single muscle, the better you can load it.
- If you can hold a weight more than a short time, it's not a maximal load.
- Therefore, the way to train your muscles is to isolate them as much as possible, load them up to the utter maximum weight they can stand, and hold them there as long as they can. After a few seconds, you should fail, but that's just indicating a good loading level.

The workouts are aimed at bodybuilding, not athletic training or general healthy and fitness. It's all size and strength. They are organized about bodypart splits, with isolation exercises (often machine based), and holding a top contraction for 1-6 seconds in one set of an exercise. Some exercises get a second set and a longer contraction, usually legs, but they're the exception. It does start with a full-body workout, but it's just a combination of various body part-based exercises and it's meant as an introduction to the method before you move onto body part specializations. The exercises, as I mentioned, are almost all isolation, by design. The author explains (in great detail) how compound exercises allow muscles other than the targeted one to contribute and thus prevent proper use of the technique.

The weights claimed (and shown in pictures) are pretty phenomenal, but not very practical. First, the weights involved are so high you'll need assistance to do it - any weight you can only hold at your strongest point for 1-6 seconds is going to be tough to get into your strongest point. So you'll need help from at least one other person strong enough to help you. Also, while someone is maxing out the Pec Deck plus has two people standing on the weight stack arms (seen in the book), it's really just a demonstration of his ability to hold a weight (not move it) in a mechanically strong position. There are repeated claims of large size and strength gains on this system, and it's certainly possible - isometric holds are a valid technique. Scientific evidence does show that muscle contraction is all-or-nothing, and that isometric holds do add to strength. But it also shows that isometric strength doesn't translate to full range-of-motion strength, and that you can hold more than you can lift. You can see that in evidence for yourself - you might not be able to pick up a heavy weight off the floor, but if you and a friend pick it up and your friend lets go, you can stand still holding the weight. This book's main point is that this "hold the weight" part is all you need for strength training. It goes so far as to say that a 1 rep max is really a 1-rep "submax" because it's lowering your weight to meet an "artificial" range of motion. As if the range of motion of squatting down to pick up a weight and stand up (the deadlift) is artificial, but squeezing one pectoral muscle in internal rotation (the Pec Deck) against weight in the strongest position is not artificial. Huh?

I can see some benefit from using this method for a short cycle, or adding piecemeal onto a workout. Certainly maximal and supra-maximal holds of weights have been done before. Famed strongman Paul Anderson used to unrack a weight far beyond his ability to squat it, and stand with it to get used to the weight. People do barbell lockouts and high rack pulls, isometric holds can break sticking points in an exercise, and so on. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept. But this book presents it as the end-all be-all of lifting, the one true method you need to get results. It's probably not even that for people who benefit from HIT and who only want muscle size, not functional strength. For those whom strength needs to be functional, it's never going to be the majority of their program, nevermind the only part.

The book is also very much over-written. The idea of contracting against a weight in the best mechanical position you can achieve for a short period of time is relatively simple. The execution is a little complex only because of the need for the machines suggested and the training partners you'll need. It's not that complex that it needs 224 pages of explanation, but it gets it. This makes the book really dense, hard to get through, and seem a little over-sold. If the technique works, surely you don't need so many pages explaining again and again how well it works?

Rating:
Content: 2 out of 5. A lot of text for very little information, and what's in there is very specialized in a niche program...presented as the only program anyone needs.
Presentation: 2 out of 5. Not very helpful pictures, dense text, and lots and lots of repetition.

Overall: Even if you're interested in doing isometric training and HIT, I can't recommend this book. It's a lot of reading for little reward. Skip it.