One small study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found exactly that, showing that isometric contractions before certain vertical jump drills enhanced performance in those jump drills. There’s carryover to both strength work and athleticism, and research agrees with that. Or use an isometric midway through your workout to focus in on your middle-back muscles before some heavy rowing. You'll do this by doing a few sets of isometric reps before doing, say, your heavy deadlift work. You can use this to your advantage by using isometrics as primers before a traditional lift or using them as mid-workout supplements in classic workouts. Your muscles, however, are trying to apply maximal force, getting a lesson in the force they need to produce in order to work past 'sticking points'. It also means your skeleton and bone structure is never moving under load.

That means your muscles won’t change in length. When you apply force to a force you can’t move, your muscles also don’t move even though they’re clearly straining. Isometric training has several useful strengths that can aid your traditional workouts. How Isometrics Prep Your Body To Move Big Weight And once you incorporate this into your program, you’ll be moving bigger weights and dominating your workouts in ways you’d never expected. You will, however, be challenging your body using one of the most underrated methods of training in the gym.

But the object that you’re trying to move simply won’t go anywhere. If you put your all into each one, you’ll have to strain your muscles and your entire body, even break a sweat. Think of pushing against a wall, or trying to pull an airplane. What's an isometric contraction? It essentially has you applying as much force as possible to a resistance that you simply can’t move at all. Do this right, and moves like your bench press, deadlift, and squat can take major leaps. Your goal here: Use several isometric contracts to 'prime' your body for bigger traditional lifts. but now you're going to use them in a new way. Isometrics aren't new, and overall, they're a more versatile training tool than you think.

Those are the traditional methods to push your biggest exercises to bigger heights, but there's another hidden weight room weapon that can teach you to produce the force you need for big lifts: The isometric rep. You could reduce your rest time between sets, or you could slow the pace of every rep, increasing time-under-tension. You could add more weight to whatever exercise you’re doing, or you could do more reps. If you want to push yourself to bigger gains on big lifts like the bench press and deadlift, you have several tried-and-true methods.

When to use isometric exercises