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Forgotten Way to Build Muscle
Bruce Lee Doing Isometric Training
Unless you been in the iron game for the last 50 years you would not have heard that Bob Hoffman promoted Isometrics for massive muscle gains. That he claimed that many gained an extra 20lbs of muscle in 3 months was isometrics.
Hoffman was certainly thinking ahead of his time with of innovative new isometric techniques. Many York lifters gained significant strength and muscle in a short amount of time.
"Isometrics" means exerting specific muscle strength and muscle tension without producing any movement or changing the muscle length. It means, holding a weight dead-still at specific joint angles. This helped The York Barbell Club sell a ton of their power-racks which were needed to do almost any useful isometric training which the lifters were doing in those days.
Unfortunately for isometrics fell out of favor and many bodybuilders and weight trainers today don't even know what isometrics are, let alone actually used or encountered them using the type of power rack which was specifically sold for this training style. Those isometric training and equipment that were built in order to do isometrics have been forgotten in the new strength training world, particularly Olympic weightlifters.
It is very unfortunate that isometrics have lost popularity, because they are an extremely effective tool for you to amplify your hypertrophy and strength progress. When isometrics are used correctly, they're actually very effective tools for strength training.
University studies that have been done by a number of well-respected sports science departments have clearly shown that isometrics still remain the fastest possible way to increase strength. They do have a few disadvantages however, the biggest being that any strength gained will only be applicable at, or very close to the specific joint angles where your isometric training was originally done.
The research indicates that any strength gained will start at the joint angle of around 15 degrees less than where the joint was trained, ending at around 15 degrees more than the angle where you did your training. This means that the effectiveness of isometric training specifically for strength increase gets less, the farther you are away from the specific angle trained during isometrics. A good solution for this would be to simply train all the various angles.
