Isometric Tension and Gymnastics Training

I think they do hit the biceps pretty hard though. They do. Okay. Well, okay. So now I'm going to challenge you on that because when we talked about the deadlift and the lats involvement of that, well, the lats have to keep the bar pulled back. Yeah. Okay. So you are getting that stimulation. If you're doing a, if you're doing the pec deck, your biceps are getting some because they're flexing the shoulder and stimulating the arm or stabilizing the elbow. But people don't think about that. They don't. They don't. I feel like, well, that's the reason why I said very small or small is because in my opinion, maybe this is just. maybe this is mostly me when i do a deadlift i obviously i have to engage my lats but the amount just seems so insignificant because uh compared to something such as like the bicep uh support needed in order for you to do a peck deck unless you are bending your arms at a much greater degree angle than you trying to straighten it out come out be controlled not locked out of course but you know what i'm trying to say no totally doing so you know you want to prevent your arms from hyper extending whereas for a lat it's like if i release the lat for a second it'll throw me a little bit off balance but my joint isn't going to break yeah so it just the the amount of stimulus feels not quite the same the joint's not going to break but you're going to affect t-spine extension which is going to going to affect the lumbar spine so if you lose that it's not like the shoulder is going to get fucked. Your lower back is probably going to get fucked if you lose that. Right. So there's, again, there's consequences to everything, especially if you're not like paying attention. Yeah. Let's see, you, you made up a good, you made a good point with that, where your biceps and you can fit, you do a pec deck, let's say do 10 sets of pec deck and you don't do any biceps next day. Your biceps are absolutely fried. Right. In gymnastics, because I do a lot of that stuff too. I don't even do bodybuilding anymore for myself. It's mainly like gymnastic stuff and Olympic weightlifting. And that's all I've done for like the last four or five years. Um, there's, if you look at gymnasts, especially guys on the rings, you're going to see massive, massive biceps. They don't do a lot of curls. Most of it is straight arm strength work, but see the evidence-based community will say, no, you, you're not going to grow. It doesn't create the right tension doing straight arm work. You have to actually bend the elbow and get the muscle to contract. And I can tell you from experience and also talking to lots of gymnasts, that's not true. Tension is tension. I do feel like that's not necessarily true. You can argue that that's not necessarily as true now as well because of all the evidence around lengthened work too. If you're going to have so much isometric force and the most lengthened position, how could that not cause some hypertrophy in your biceps? yeah and the thing is it wouldn't also like i've got this uh the way i look at like isometrics right so let's let's let's let's define an isometric okay what is an what does isometric contraction mean hold holding so you basically you're tensing the muscle without it changing length it's not shortening it's not lengthening it's just maintaining the same position but there's tension being pushed in the muscle so if you a true isometric would be if i pushed on your wall the wall is not going to move and if i'm pushing and keeping the joint from opening and closing i'm creating isometric tension without without any joint opening closing or muscle length right changing muscle position now if i do a deadlift people will say well you're isometrically working your your upper back and your lower back and your spine and i would i would say i disagree because the difference between those two things is when gravity is a constant force and we have to battle our entire lives. When I go into a deadlift, if I'm not actively concentrically contracting, you're going to fold in the flexion, right? So if you take a, if you take a camera and put it on say high frames per second so that you can slow it down and look at it and post edit, you're not going to see in a deadlift, somebody's back being completely isometrically strong. You're going to see it wavering. It's going to go into flexion and to go into session flexion. So it actually is the muscles are changing. They're not lengthening and shortening too much, but there is like this almost like a wave of flexion extension that's happening and lengthening and shortening in those muscles. So it's like if we're going to say isometrics don't build muscle because the muscle doesn't change shape, well, what are we actually considering an isometric and not? And so if you're doing a peck deck, that's to me, not really an isometric because,

you have these forces that you're trying to equalize across the elbow joint and across the shoulder joint. So if you, if you're pulling the weight stack is trying to pull you back to the beginning position. So there's always this happening. So you have these little, like very small moments of time where you're actually probably lengthening and shortening, but it's at, it's at a non-visible rate. You actually can't see it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Which is funny. Cause I I think Jeff never just posted a video showing like there was not really any difference between doing lengthened partials versus full ROM. And they were still trying to discuss which one might be different in the future. But from the experiment, it seemed they were about the same. So, I mean, it's kind of interesting because like you're saying, you're doing literally microscopic movements of reps, I guess, in a lengthened position. It's just not visually like you can't really see it. But anybody who's done any of this work will know. If you're getting sore, something's happening. Charles used to call it the Geronda, Vince Geronda EMG technique. Do 10 sets of something and wherever it hurts the next day is probably what you worked. And I think that's pretty good, right? But look, everybody's always, they're chasing the secret. They're chasing the secret. And is it lengthened partials? Do we do one and a quarter reps in a lengthened range? Do we hang out and stretch in a lengthened range under load? And I would say, you could throw a dozen things at me and say, do I do this? And I'm just going to go, yes. The one thing that people are forgetting is the most important thing is effort. If you're not training hard, you're just not going to grow that fast. If you just do mid-range movements and you train as hard as you can, and you have somebody who's prioritizing length and range, and they're training 15% less than you, you're going to get better results than them, period. Yeah, I agree. Before we had exercise science telling us what supposedly works and doesn't work, people were getting fucking massive. Yeah. Just going to the gym and fucking doing the work. There's a lot of variables, I think, when you're considering trying not to get injured, depending on how hard you're going and how far you're going with your own personal range of motion. But I think in the end, it's like if most of us decide to change our type of training, but we are either advanced or have had at least multiple years training, I think we can all sense that we're still going to the same point of failure and we're still exerting the same amount. Yeah. So I think as long as we're doing that, that's the most important. And then the tracking of progressive overload that we do is just us making sure that we're not getting fat and we're still being productive. That's it.