496: Dustin Oranchuk on Isometrics, Force Production and Elastic Performance

Dustin, welcome to the show. Awesome to have you, man. And can you start by just sharing a little bit of your background in strength training and then what led you into your study in isometric?

Yeah. So my background in strength training, probably like a lot of people that you talk to and probably like yourself and you can correct me. Started like early teenage years kind of a thing. So probably the first time I ever lifted weights was during a middle school or a junior high school, as we might call it in Canada. like phys ed class and uh we started just doing like leg presses and curls and all these types of things under the supervision of our gym teacher

So that was, that was kind of how it started. And then I remember I liked it. Um, there was a gold gym, like 20 minute walk from my middle school. So I was able to. get like a membership and spend some time there and that kind of gave my mom a little bit of extra time between when my school ended and she needed to like take care of me I guess

So that was where lifting really started. And then in high school, started playing football. And like a lot of other football players, you start lifting weights to get better at that. And eventually the same place where I started trying to get better at playing football, weightlifting club there. So I got involved with that and then, you know, kind of builds off of all that type of stuff.

That same place where that weightlifting club was, was also where I had my like second job. My first job ever was pushing carts around Ikea and helping people load furniture in their cars on like holidays when they needed extra temp workers. And then at that facility, just stocking fridges, cleaning equipment, putting weight plates back on weight trees. And that was kind of how it all started. Yeah. So what got you interested in?

the topic of isometrics specifically to the point where obviously now you're doing research on it and really getting in depth. What was some of your early experiences with that training modality and what sparked your interest there? Yes, I didn't really have a whole lot of experience with isometrics in and of themselves while I was an athlete. This was more of something that came about with my PhD topics.

And a little bit with my master's project as well. So the master's was looking at essentially weightlifting derivatives versus loaded jump training and adaptations to.

jump performance and strength and these types of things um so it was really the isometric mid thigh pole test uh where you you know basically it's a deadlift where the barbell cannot move when you have force plates under your feet or transducers on a chain attached to the bar or any number of setups but that was like okay this is pretty cool we can predict performance fairly well from a test where we're actually not moving at all

And then when I moved into PhD program, um, even though the topic was on EQIs or eccentric quasi isometrics, which we might chat about today. The first review that I wrote was on different types of isometric training. So that was different muscle lengths and intensities.

And the intent of contraction, so if you ramped up to max force or you tried to get up to it rapidly, and all these different variables. And that particular review has been by far my most read and cited work that I've ever done. So it's kind of... That was probably where it really started. And then over the last few years, a little bit more interest in delineating between pushing and holding isometrics.

And, you know, co-contraction isometrics where you're almost doing like bodybuilding style posing to train, you know, the antagonist and agonist muscle group of a joint. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the questions. It's something I know you've talked about on other podcasts, the difference between a max overcoming, just pushing into a bar, fixed bar as hard as you can, versus a weight that you're just holding there and keeping from failing. It strikes me on some level.

that as we've become more well-versed in modern barbell technology, it's easier to do the latter versus back in the day. likely very difficult to load something up precisely to do a yielding. You just had to do an overcoming. Or even like Bob Hoffman, that was actually my next question or one of my next questions is how isometrics has progressed since Bob Hoffman.

And I suppose that's probably one of the ways. But yeah, tell me a little bit about how you've seen the world of isometric training or the progression over time. changed since Bob's system. And if you want to explain Bob's system briefly as well, just because I was like going back, I was like, it's almost like a, like a horrific or a thing. Like I know at least on social media or video, if you show an old clip.

there's like instant authenticity. Like if I show an old Soviet training clip, instant authenticity. And I mean, I think that is some great things. Don't get me wrong. I just wanted to go back and see what these people were doing. decades ago. So yeah, tell me a little bit about that origin with at least that training and then how different methods have evolved since then in isometrics.

Yeah, so as far as I know, and again, you can jump in here if I'm off base, but Bob Hoffman was kind of a pioneer in the mostly American or North American strength sphere. I believe he started or at least was one of the people who started York Barbell. And I also, again, as far as I know, he had what he called functional isometrics where you would.

match um fairly closely positions for bench press squat or deadlift or a variety of other exercises but those are kind of the big ones um in a power rack so like Everything could be done in a power rack with really just pushing a barbell against, you know, the bottom of the squat catches that were immovable. So in that language, the sort of pushing isometric muscle actions.

or force tasks or a bunch of these other terms that are used in the scientific literature. But that would be overcoming isometrics is kind of, I don't want to say the layman's.

language but the language that's more popular I suppose in barbell circles and essentially that was his way of stating like well we can use this to breakthrough plateaus because we can get to really high peak forces and we can focus on sticking points in the bench, squat or deadlift and really build a specific strength, which is a little bit interesting because specific strength you would think is just going to be moving the barbell and doing squats and deadlifts.

but he had a little bit of a different perspective on that. Um, so that's my understanding of Bob Hoffman's approach. Um, and I think recently, probably the last 10 years, isometric trainings. kind of come back into vogue or popularity with um maybe even less so power lifters which is kind of where bob hoffman was and more into i don't want to say functional but people who are preparing for non-barbell sports or perhaps even like aging and longevity. So just a few weeks ago, I don't want to...

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to drop names or not, so I won't. But just a few weeks ago, I was talking with a sports scientist and a strength conditioning coach for an NFL team, and they had been using a lot of both overcoming and yielding isometrics. both with machines and dumbbells and holding split squat positions, and eventually working up to more Bob Hoffman-like things with very heavy loads in a squat rack.

Really just talking about like trying to own every position throughout a range of motion. using isometrics at a variety of different muscle lengths and different, um, contraction durations to try and rehab after like a pec tear, uh, or a quadriceps strain, um, or something like that. So.

I think the main evolution is getting a little bit less towards building peak strength for barbell purposes. and a little bit more universal utility for rehabilitation and longevity. Yeah, certainly. That was actually my second question, but you had mentioned it there.

I was going to ask, what are the most common ways you see isometrics implemented in modern strength programming? And so in at least the sports performance world, I would agree it does seem like a lot of it's used more for... longer holds to help like tendon health and those types of things you don't as often see just like the maximal like power lifting hey we're going to use it to assist our power lifting numbers so much as a lot of

tissue health and then resiliency. And maybe something that can offshoot off that and something that can dig into some research that's been done and I find interesting. And there's so many ways to do it, right? Like you have run specific isos like Alex Soteras to almost have one end of the extreme, like where it's like very specific, smaller joint angles, like more elongated positions that are more specific to an athlete in upright positions.

And then on the other end, you would have like a, like a split squat. You mentioned like a split squat isometric or something like that. What fundamentally is the difference in how we adapt when, with some of those like really like.

shorter really like neural kind of positions and then the longer drawn out ones yeah well i think the keyword that you just used joel was was neural so i think we can start from there My understanding of Alex's work, and I've done a project with Alex where we have a big, big review that we're just trying to get published now with him and a couple other people that are just...

real experts in different areas of sports medicine and physiology and whatnot. So I am a little bit familiar with Alex and he's got a course out there. But these run-specific ISOs, these position-specific ISOs are, as the name would imply, very neurologically or at least...

I wouldn't say very neurologically specific, but the intent is to be neurologically specific. Whether they are or aren't requires a little bit more, I guess, research to sort of prove it. But I think Alex is having good success, so I wouldn't discount that. But for anybody who isn't really familiar, there's a lot of like swishing positions between right and left legs or pushing with a certain amount of intent.

usually again using overcoming isos where the ankle knee and hip joint are very similar to the ground contact that you might have while sprinting or jumping off of one leg or something like that And the whole idea there is to be a little bit more neurologically specific to running, to jumping, cutting, sports-specific performance movements.

kind of end of the spectrum still potentially using the overcoming or pushing into something immovable would be at longer muscle lengths where you're you know really stretched out so you're your pec muscle and your pec tendon or your quads and your teletendon are kind of a little bit towards maximal length or at least longer. And while that...

Probably isn't going to as closely match nearly as many sports. You might be able to find a couple of sports where you're really at long muscle lengths. The general or the more popular goal with the longer muscle length.

movements or lack thereof would be morphological adaptations um so instead of matching a position you're just trying to get the most sort of bang for your buck out of the isometrics as far as causing hypertrophy or being able to target tendon rehabilitation or build work capacity or some other sort of little bit more. morphological adaptation got it yeah so one of the things that I was curious with some of the shorter range as well like let's say maybe be it like a heavy bench hold

And funny enough, I remember I had some book, I don't know what happened to it, but the whole premise of the, this was when I was like 22 or 23, one of those early library books. And it was a bodybuilding book, but it was on very short range.

training like it was really branded as some secret like oh this is the training secret like everything always is and like a quarter range like presses and all this stuff and I think that a thing that it mentioned or tried to convey was also like the tendon strength that went along with that, which I could see if it's just heavier loads.

Like you said, are you getting the lengthening, the fascicle lengthening and that stuff? If you're an athlete, you're missing that. But the short range, even like a run-specific type movement or heavy hold, is there... more of like a tendon what's happening with like the tendon like the Achilles and stiffness and things like that is that something that could create a change that makes could make the system stiffer if it needed to be and versus the longer hold what

Is there a difference there? So as far as I'm aware, the tendons will typically, at least under most contexts, and I'll get into other contexts in a moment, if possible. is that unless you're using other means like blood flow restriction or something like that, tendons tend to need a certain threshold of intensity to get... noticeable or meaningful adaptations. So what exactly that threshold is, I'm not sure. I think it's probably somewhere around 70% of like MBIC.

or max isometric contraction of a pushing iso. And kind of anything under that to a point is probably not going to result in dramatic changes in tendon stiffness.

or thickness or anything else like that. It might with a certain amount of volume, but again, probably around 70% plus or at least 60% plus is going to be what's necessary. So when you were talking about like... quarter rep training i don't know if that's like the best thing to do like long term but probably introducing some of that might not be a terrible idea for tendon training because if it's a really short range of motion

there's going to be sort of a limited amount of tension that's going through the muscle throughout the whole range, but the tendon might actually be loaded relatively efficiently. So I could maybe see... how that might be beneficial. Athletic performance is built on a spectrum of training methods from high velocity skills to power training to strength work.

And on one end of that spectrum, on that strength end, you have the most targeted work in the form of machines. And this is part of the reason that so many top speed and strength coaches have their favorite machines to deliver that targeted stimulus. For decades, Hammer Strength has been a top provider of reliable, effective machines that are trusted by coaches and athletes worldwide. They fit seamlessly into that total performance program, delivering that targeted strength stimulus.

When it comes to your machine-based strength training needs, think hammer strength. Yeah, I think a thing I thought of a lot, and this was a long time back. Like you said, isometrics being more popular. in the last 10 years but this was something I remember thinking about even in my early 20s I was having a conversation with a high jump coach out of the track and he was like yeah my guys we peaked by doing like 600 pound step ups on a 3 inch box and

I'm like, that sounds pretty gnarly. But then I'm also thinking, well, I don't know if you just did like hurdle hops and depth jumps and bounding, like it's kind of the same thing, but more specific. Like we talk about the multi-body weights and plyos and it's a lot less like. compression strain for a high jumper's frame, too. I would think that would be nice, but I guess the thing I...

I think about with that stuff though, and even like that, like a heavy hold, like I think it might've been Poliquin or someone else who talked about using heavy like bench press holds as a primer for just regular because it's like neural inhibition. It just, it. throws the reins off your nervous system if nothing else and then you go to your regular bench press it oh this feels really light um what's uh

Have you done any work looking at that contrast effect or using the overcomings or partial range as a warm-up for some traditional strike work? Yeah, so I haven't myself. The closest thing was there was a friend of mine and their like master's project had to do with, yeah, that post activation performance enhancement type of a thing. We didn't really see much. We were one of those studies where.

And in that particular, in that particular field, you know, some studies show, you know, big effects, some studies show no effects, some are negative effects. And we were like, we were one of those no effect ones. But, uh, that being said, uh. Um, even though I have not been a part of that, uh, another, another, I guess I don't say big researcher, uh, cause I don't want to refer to myself as a big researcher. Danny Lum is, um.

strength conditioning specialist and he does quite a bit of really nice applied research in Singapore and I know him and some of the other people that he works with have been examining like if you do you know, very heavy isometrics and you pair that with plyometrics and other speed work and all that kind of stuff. Like, do you see...

more adaptations than if you just do the isometrics or just do the plyometrics. There's another research group in Tunisia that works a lot with like handball athletes and they've been doing a lot of stuff in that area as well. And I don't really want to be misquoted because I wish I, you know, if I had the studies up in front of me, that'd be great. But I believe there's been at least some subtle.

benefit to doing them both as opposed to one versus the other um you know whether you do six sets of one six sets of the other three sets of one and plus three sets of the other it does seem like the combination leads to um you know modest benefits um but the actual mechanisms i don't think have been looked at you know they haven't you tried to use like emg or any of these other things to try and like

Find the mechanisms behind that. It could just be that doing three of one and three of the other leads to less fatigue than doing six of one and six of the other. It could be that there's that neural inhibition and that allows for more.

or a fuller effort during the plyometrics as opposed to not doing the ISOs before, I can't really say for sure. Yeah, I would love to see more research in that realm just because, and like you said, isometrics kind of died out and then it came back but at the same time it's like there's these little pockets in the world like you mentioned Tunisian handball like that's not showing up on my social media feed you know like

What's going on there? But that's, uh, but like, uh, Gillies committee or committee, I probably, I pronounce his name wrong every other time. Uh, you know, French sports scientists and I bought the books that are all in like Spanish or. you know different languages and trying to use like AI and deep L scan through and see what's going on you know trying to get what I can and I don't know just like that same

On one end, it's like there's that, oh, it happened in the past, and you have that kind of mental heuristic of it's so good. But I feel like to actually be there would have been mind-blowing. Because going through the book, that guy had all the combinations.

wall sits with stim on your quads now do jumping and you know he's been through everything but what's interesting is like you try to find iterations of that and the closest thing i could find is like it seems like soccer has taken it on at least from my

understand the most like i'll see videos from like the early 2010s like soccer players kind of doing plyos and then going to do some skill work and mixing that together so i'm like it's alive and well somewhere but honestly those soccer players doing it just doesn't have i kind of have this like meter of like stimulation in my the back of my head always like how stimulating is this thing truly like doing like 10 hurdle hops just to do them is one thing versus like you know

five depth jumps up to a target there's like objectives or isometrics where things are being measured so there's I think there's a lot of nuance there yeah well if I can just add a bit of an anecdote I suppose is like I, I've at some point worked with a couple player people who have worked with like professional soccer players and.

I don't want to give anybody a bad name or anything, but like what I hear pretty consistently is that soccer players are pretty tough to buy in, to get buy in for a strength conditioning. They want to just. They want to be kicking the ball and they want to be playing soccer. They don't want to be in the weight room, which is, you know, different than like American football, right? Or, or some of these other, um, you know, what we would.

think of more obviously as being strength and power sports even though of course soccer there's a lot of power going on there a lot of the time so like i think that the the essences and the sports scientists like put ball drills in there in between hurdle hops and whatever, just so that the soccer players like show up and put effort in. And of course that's not all the soccer players, but as a general theme, that's kind of what I've gathered over the years. Yeah.

I love that. I mean, even though I went in, I'm like, okay, if I had my track head on, track and field coach head on, I could make this much more output stimulating. But for those players, like you said, because the ball was there, like... And I've seen it so many times in the weight room, especially sports like tennis is one where you see the athletes in the weight room and you look at their like stimulus and they're kind of getting into it, but not really. And some are really dragging.

And then as soon as they're on the tennis courts, it's just like big, big, big. And like just emotions and just. And I'm like, man, if I had half of that in the weight room, you guys would be. You know, squat and bench and 40 pounds more. Not that that necessarily make you a better player. I mean, hopefully we can take some robustness and injury prevention and things. We get a little faster and stronger. But anyways, I always found that.

that interesting. And so, yeah, I would watch those late iterations of Kometi's work and I would think, I did have it in my head, I'm like, these guys probably don't like lifting very much. This is, yeah, this is what they enjoy more fundamentally. Yeah. Well, when I was chatting with those two guys on the NFL team staff, I asked them, you know, cause they were, they were saying, well, we, we do all these things. We do these EQIs and the holdings and the pushings and.

whatnot and sometimes really long durations like 60 seconds or 90 seconds at a really long length to try and get the peck you know back back uh healing and i and i asked them Cause I'd worked with football players before myself and this was sort of before I got into, you know, the isometric research. So we did some olds and whatnot, but not all that many. And I asked them, I was like, how do those, how do those guys like respond to that?

Are they okay? Do they get bored? Do they put in effort? And I think what I gathered was that because like aches and pains or full-blown injuries or whatever are so common in professional football. they tend to really get buy-in from those players because at some point, every player that they're working with, they're pretty darn close.

has a strain, is really sore, or has a full-blown tear or reconstruction or something. So when they're more in a rehab mode, these athletes are less likely to be like, well... this doesn't look anything like my sport and that's okay because I'm hurt right now. And then after one or two sessions, they're feeling way better than they ever have before. Like the last time they.

strained a pack that took them x number of weeks to get back but now that they're doing these long holds at long muscle lengths and two weeks later they're feeling a lot better it might still be a little bit anecdotal

because no injury is exactly the same. But then they're like, okay, this works. I like how I feel regardless of the actual adaptation occurring. And then... throughout the rest of the year or the next five years for their contract and the S&Cs incorporate isometrics into their lifting programs when they're healthy.

You're just building this like culture of like, it's okay for our S and C work to not look obviously like anything we do on the field. Yeah. Yeah. Getting, getting hurt, hurt and injured. I think it's. could be a light bulb for a lot of individuals with that kind of thing. You know, I was even thinking about those soccer players. Like, how do you sneak...

you know, how do you sneak or creatively sneak the strength in? And I was thinking like flywheels would probably be interesting to a lot of those athletes if you drug some out of the field, you know, and you did some of those and then have them go through their drills. Even like bodyweight asymmetric holds, like lunge holds and you're throwing it.

med ball or something that distracts their attention and makes it a game or yeah you're doing like headers or something yeah yeah yeah and again like i'm i'm i'm no expert in uh in soccer or you know football in that way but yeah anything like that would get a ball or some sort of apparatus that's similar to the sport players are gonna are gonna love it and parents are gonna love it too

And sometimes that's who you got to win over. True, true. Yes. Almost a humorous level in some respects. Yeah, I agree. With the stimulation and intention. Do you have any take on, because I see this a lot and I was thinking about like, you know, just pressing into the pins like an overcoming, but like on feedback.

So let's say you're doing an isometric, an overcoming, and you're just pressing into immovable resistance. One person just does it to do it, and the other person actually gets a number, how many pounds you're doing. We all know that you're going to push harder when you get the feedback, but...

Yeah, I'd just be curious your take on that because it's not always so accessible. Like, right, like I have a big group of people. Maybe I'm just at home and I don't have force plates sitting around or whatever. Yeah, any research or just thoughts on...

How worth it is it to do like an overcoming if you can't measure the exact output? Sure. So. The first step or the first part of that, I think, is that that is one of the reasons I'm almost certain why the isometric stuff is built, you know, kind of come back in the last 10 years is that the ability to measure it is.

becoming more accessible it's still not that accessible because again like even if you happen to have four force plates or something like that but you happen to have an entire american football team you know red shirts and all training at the same time there's no way you can really make use of that um you'd have to have you know at least two assistants and whatnot anyway but those types of things strain gauges you know

even really affordable force plate systems are certainly more ubiquitous in performance settings than they were 10 or 15 years ago. There's no doubt. But... Yeah, if you can't measure, which is still the majority of teams and S&C coaches, I think you can still get some big benefits out of it. A, because you can still have...

Everybody cheering people on, you can create a really good weight room environment where there's camaraderie and there's competitiveness without any objective measurements. And then even so, pushing into a rack is almost always going to be able to be done at a higher intensity than holding something.

to the point of like bob hoffman for example that is especially if you're using barbells going to be more accessible than holding a position until close to failure or doing an eqi or something like that if you have training partners or whatnot, then it might be the other way around. And the maximal amount of force you can push into something is almost always...

more than the maximal amount of force that you can hold for the same amount of time. You got me thinking too about, well, I had a couple of thoughts. One is, yeah, I tend to see this a lot for some reason. Maybe it's just my perception, but I see a lot of high school athletes.

doing the overcoming where they have like the bar it's like a lunge position and the bar's under the front leg and then you're pulling up into a wrap so basically like a functional split squat which I think is a great movement um i use a loaded version a lot of times so maybe i'll get to why i kind of like that i mean i think they're both great but like i'll watch high schoolers do that sometimes and you see

just like you talk to like a range of results in the studies, like you'll see kind of a range of efforts. Like if you're watching the person where I'm like, I think that person's probably going about seven out of 10, you know, that person's going like 11, they're going, they're getting after it, you know, but it's.

yeah I just think it's interesting I almost feel like on some level there's like its own it's its own skill you know like there's its it's its own skill that you learn if you don't have a force meter as well just to like get a good position and really

like sustain a burst. And I was thinking even about like a, you know, Zass, like Alexander Zass, like breaking out of prison. And whatever happened there, I don't know what the bar, I don't think the bars were or whatever, but like you almost have to.

It's funny to think, how many times did you have to press against that before it actually moved? Or what did you perceive even happening? I have a really, really, really small horseshoe that someone gave to me in my garage gym because I have a... picture of the mighty adam on my wall it's guy like he's like 70s like bending a horseshoe guy big strong man like in the 30s 40s and i mean guy bent horseshoes up to his like 70s and 80s it's crazy but i

It's this little teeny horseshoe. I mean, this thing is small, man. If I show myself trying to bend it, I would look like this wimpy guy. If he was bending things that, I mean, just massive horseshoes. And I'm like pushing as this thing. I'm like, it's not moving. I'm like, how do I train myself to?

be motivated, you know, to, to sense progress, even though this thing isn't bending. And, and yeah, it just gets my train of thought going with how do you get the most out of something when there isn't a number and yeah. yeah and that's that is the that is the tough thing right like motivation is motivation is a big limiting factor in isometric training For that reason, like more than, more than regular training, I think, because it is in a lot of ways.

that delayed gratification you didn't you didn't lift anything and you might not ever lift anything and that might actually be okay depending on on the goals and the and the context so there are some You know, there's some crazy people who are just super intrinsically motivated all the time. And like, they don't care about whether the thing moves or how many Newton meters they're putting into a gauge or something like that. They just push hard because that's just how they...

are built mentally and they're going to do that until they're 80 years old or something like that. Um, and, and doesn't really matter. And then other people really need that feedback, whether that's from a coach or a gauge or something like that. So I don't really know what the, what the solution is there other than, again, this feedback, like, how do you feel power? Maybe your dynamic.

lifts moving and if there's like a connection between just how much effort you're putting into the isometric work and what's changing in the in the stuff that you can actually measure um but i i think that i think sometimes it's just people are Whether it's the way they were raised or there's something in their literal genetics and the DNA about the intrinsic versus extrinsic feedback and the ability to delay gratification. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan John teaching, well, it was in one of his recent emails, he talked about what compresses expands. I think he was talking like, an anecdote he gave was if you don't have a lot of choices in one part of your life, like... You have to wear a uniform to school every day or you don't like that part of your life is compressed so other things can expand. And I think about an isometric is almost like an opportunity for someone with a very strong willpower to put.

everything into a small compression so after you're done with that you get the expansion I saw I think it was Josh Bryant Yeah, it was bench press training. It was like, you know, isometrics just into a pin at the sticking point, like three sets of five seconds, and then he went and benched.

But I like that's awesome. I think about people who have that hunger and drive and willpower that probably is going to be really good for them. But someone who's kind of a beginner who maybe hasn't learned to really harness that yet. I don't know. You know, it's and I think about.

like longer isometrics and tell me what you think about this one but like I think a long isometric with a weight I guess or body weight but if you get to a point of failure like let's say you're holding a you know split squat with a bar for

you know, I don't know, like it's like 200 pounds, you're holding it for 30 seconds, you're starting to fail. Well, you kind of turned it into an overcoming a little bit at the end. It just took a long time to get there. But that kid who only pushed with a 7 out of 10 is going to be forced to...

get to a 10 at some point it's just a little bit more of an ugly road uh but yeah i'd be curious your thoughts on some of those longer holds like might be it weighted or or body weight really long holds anything like that yeah so The long holds are, it is really a complicated puzzle there when we're talking about like tendon versus muscle versus neurological versus like whatever else is going on there.

Cause hypothetically during a really long hold, that is at least kind of intense. Like it's, you're not just like hanging out for six minutes straight. Cause you can, um, you know, now you start getting into like blood occlusion a little bit. and deoxygenation of the tissues, which can lead to a whole host of other adaptations. And I think there is, again, that sort of mental toughness.

And the fortitude to just stick with something until it gets really hard, even if the first minute or two minutes or whatever is really, really easy. But I think it might be a really good way. to go back to kind of like owning a position and feeling a muscle and a joint through different sections of a range of motion. Because a lot of times, and I've had this myself with like, you know, I hurt my hip.

really badly and it took like a year before i could really like do everything i wanted and even there i would try some different exercise or try and hold at a specific point of a range of motion and be super good on my one side, but not so good on the other. I do single leg hack squats or something so that I could almost do a pistol squat without worrying about balance. And that was like, okay, this is how I'm going to get my hip better for squatting.

And if I did through the whole range of motion, there really was very little difference up until a couple of weeks ago between my right and my left leg. But if I were to try and stop halfway down and hold that position, the right leg I could hold it for. You know, 45 seconds in the left leg after 20 seconds, I'm just shaking and I fall down to the bottom of the hack squat. So the holding for really long periods is, I think, a nice way to find where you're weak.

um with imbalances or motor control so then like morphological adaptations i like the idea of almost treating it like a little mini journey Like, hey, you're going on a journey. And you have a diagnostic ability to these things that are a little bit different. There's a lot of talk about, you know, jumping strategies.

So people will change their jumping strategies when they're tired or post an injury, or you can maybe hypothetically look at jumping strategies and your ratio of impulse versus peak force and your... the depth of your counter movement on a force plate and when those things change dramatically like with fatigue then like you might want to

give the the athlete a little more recovery or rest or or you know give him a day or two off so that that doesn't change so much to maybe prevent an injury and that's a diagnostic tool and i think he can use that in in the weight room with, again, machines, holds at different joint angles, especially when you're recovering from some sort of trauma or injury.

Because again, if you just look at how much they can squat or lunge or leg press. It's really difficult to see that. There's different utilizations of the stretch at the bottom of a leg press or a squat. So if you're doing slow movements that even might not be... highly specific to a sport, you're still able to diagnose or detect dramatic imbalances from pre to post injury or right to left side. Yeah, that value of...

Yeah, either like isometric or slow has grown on me year over year, really, since I started coaching. You're always going to find something. And there's a lot of really interesting pieces. So tell me a little bit about eccentric, and the long word, but eccentric quasi-isometrics. I like EQIs. EQIs sounds cool. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that specific training method.

And how is that different than just holding? And what can we get out of it? Yeah, so EQI is an abbreviation for eccentric and then quasi-isometric. And it could be called, you know, quasi-isometric eccentrics or whatever. But yeah, EQI is kind of what we landed on when we were writing some papers. By Weed, that was... Andre Nelson, who was my tertiary PhD supervisor, kind of came up with the general idea for a project. But regardless, it is kind of a combination of...

Isometric holding or the holding isometric muscle actions or the yuling is what some listeners might know it as, but you're holding a position isometrically. you know, the dumbbell or a barbell or your body weight or a cable stack, or it doesn't really matter. And then you're holding that position.

for essentially as long as you can. So the effort gradually builds until it really becomes a maximal holding isometric. And then there's going to be some sort of a lengthening after you can't hold it anymore. So you can imagine, you know, doing a chin up and then lowering yourself a little bit to like halfway and holding that as long as you can. And then eventually you can't hold it anymore and your biceps and your lats and whatnot.

can't maintain that position, so they lengthen and you lower. That's an EQI in the studies that we did and some other people have done. You essentially go all the way through the entire range of motion with the eccentric after the failed hold. But that's not really needed for it to be an EQI. You could go down an inch. You could go down, you know.

10 degrees, you go down the whole range of motion, but that's an EQI. A holding isometric, taken to failure, plus at least some eccentrics. Compared to just holding it to failure, what is... the lengthening at the end perceived to be accomplishing there like why do the extra bit on the end is it like i guess it makes me think like a drop set on bench right you go till you fail then take some plates off and keep going but yeah what

What exactly is happening under the hood there? So that's a tougher question to ask from a mechanistic standpoint because, you know, those types of studies have not been done. at least not that I'm aware of. Maybe somebody's doing them. You know, we've got, again, when I say we, I mean, Andre and I... Got some muscle samples in a freezer somewhere in Melbourne that got interrupted because of the COVID stuff. And if I'm being honest, probably nothing's going to happen with that.

we've kind of both moved on from that and there's not enough muscle there to like do a real study and whatever else from a mechanistic standpoint but at least hypothetically the lengthening moment at the end To your point, you're kind of going beyond failure and you're really just accumulating a lot of time under tension and total work, total, you know, eccentric impulse.

Um, basically, so you've held that position as long as you can, and then you're kind of continuing to put an effort into trying to maintain a position while being forced through that.

You can hypothetically get just additional impulse, additional load, but now you're also going through an entire segment of a range of motion as opposed to just being... static so maybe you get some um additional benefits through the rest of the range of motion because isometrics can be Very specific, especially when the muscle length is short or a little bit more morphological, which is going to contribute to the entire range of motion or non-specific strength.

with the ad. The negative is that mentally EQIs are very difficult to push hard and to push hard regularly. I've never been able to like incorporate them into a training program with frequency. and regularity and intensity for longer than like three weeks where i'm just like i just like don't want to do this anymore um so i think if you were in a team setting um it would be a little bit different it makes me think of times i've just done

Because I've done plenty of like isometric lunge and push-up bolts to failure. And yeah, there's a certain amount of time after like a certain amount of weeks, just the adrenaline conjuring up the adrenaline.

a challenge and you wonder if there's more efficient ways to get the stimulus. It is nice to take it, you know, to take your will to the house periodically. I think that's good, but to... consistently stress your body physiologically to do that is is tough and it kind of oh yeah sorry go ahead and I mean the the other

The other potential benefit there is because you're essentially removing the concentric portion of a lift, right, or a movement, and the concentric is pretty much always going to be the weakest. Well, again, now you're able to like load those tissues in a way that is actually really pretty efficient time wise.

And at a weight that is substantially lighter than what you would have a maximal eccentric contraction being like if you loaded up a super heavy barbell or body weight and you had somebody force you through a range of motion.

I guess at the end of the day, I'm probably not going to be doing a whole bunch of additional research on EQIs, although I think there are some people that will keep pushing it forward. Because... I think with the combination of the lack of motivation and the ability for people to really stick with it, the practical applications of it are more limited.

Um, and there's so much like additional noise involved in that type of a thing versus just holding or just pushing, like how far out through the range of motion do you go? How long should you be able to hold an ISO and how long should the eccentric phase be? uh the change from set to set there's just like that extra bit of noise or confusion compared to a single joint angle um and i guess that's my view on that

Harder to study, too. More little things, more little pieces that are happening in something. Yeah, and while I still find it interesting and potentially super beneficial, and again, I've...

talked to lots of people about this stuff over the last few years and there's a few people uh again who just seem to like love it under certain contexts again going back to those nfl guys i've mentioned twice already uh they seem to be a big fan of it And again, I think that's a little bit different when you're dealing with pro athletes coming back from an injury in a team setting where they're supervised all the time. There's something there. But I...

Personally, I'm not like sold on it being better than doing eccentrics and isometrics separately. Yeah. I think, yeah, sometimes too is some of that really difficult stuff, but the will needed to do it. It's almost like when an athlete is in a place of injury and they need to get back, it's like it forces kind of this battle in the mind.

I think it makes it easier to conjure up the will to do those things. It's almost like a very internal drop set. Like I mentioned, the bench press drop set. It seems like those things are very internalized, very specific to the tissues and injury drop set.

Yeah, exactly. If you're a pro athlete and that's your living and somebody tells you, you know, especially people who have experience in that, your strength coach, et cetera, like this is the best way to get you back to being healthy. That's much different than me going to the gym. as a 36-year-old university professor who just likes to be fit and feel good is just much different.

Same idea if you're trying, I think actually like there's probably some more utility to like EQIs and things like that with like elderly people, for example.

and and training um you know where you don't have to worry about the concentric so much you're trying to get like just morphological adaptations that increase muscle mass and make your tendons feel better but like again just just the mental energy and the drive to do that is i just think it's questionable to be able to adapt to people who who already have uh

lower motivation than a professional athlete or, or lower mental energy than a 25 year old or something like that. Yeah. I think of a, almost a simpler way in some respects too. I, are you familiar with something like Jay?

training methods like extreme isos and slows. I think, yeah. I think about the extreme slows with that. It's almost like all just kind of one thing. You start at the top versus extreme iso, you start in the low position and go down and the... extreme slow you said the top position slowly go down and they both are they both suck

Yeah. You get a lot of activation. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the last, the last talk I had with people, we, we did bring up Dre Schroeder and it's funny enough. Like I thought it was just, I thought it was funny because when I was. I mentioned at the very beginning of this talk, the first, my first like weight room experience really was in middle school grade, you know, uh, oh, I guess that would have been grade seven or something like that. Maybe grade eight. And.

When I got to high school, grade 10 in Canada, anyway, the football coaches who were running like the sports performance class and all that. they showed us this Jay Schroeder, Adam Marchaletta draft prep stuff. And I was like,

Awesome. And also it was funny because my favorite football team still is the Rams. There was St. Louis Rams back then. And that was the team that drafted Adam Archuleta and whatnot. Like they were greatest show on turf. They won the Super Bowl in 99. And I was like 10 years old.

old and I was watching that with my dad and I was like cool the Rams are my team and you know I stuck through them for a lot of a lot of terrible seasons and now they're good but anyway it was just really kind of funny that Jay Schroeder stuff came up in this talk and the last talk and like that Adam Marchaletta was the guy and I had an Adam Marchaletta jersey when I was a kid and it's just really funny how, you know.

30 plus, well not 30, 25 plus years later, this is all coming back into my life in some way. But yeah, they had the super slow training and then they would also periodize that as part of the program for Adam Archuleta and then they're doing drop bench thrust catches. And extreme plyometrics dropping off the huge boxes and doing concentric only.

nordic curls with a 25 pound plate held against the chest and and all these types of things which are you know really cool and of course you know a 30 minute or an hour long video can't capture the entire process of building Archuleta from, uh, you know, a 12 year old kid stepping in Schroeder's gym to being a first round draft pick. I think it was first round draft pick.

Yeah, it's a place I would have loved to be a fly on the wall or just be there to just the environment and things like that. And one of the things you mentioned, I wanted to ask you about this. It's almost like the opposite of the QI. would be, I mean, probably more standard would be just like pause to concentric reps. So like you're doing a bench press, pause it at the sticking point or any chocolate chest and then rep it. Because I think in that video with Adam, it's like.

That's happening if it's explosive. It's like hold, hold, just explosion, and then back to that sticking point. Relative to an EQI, what's your take on the benefits of something like that in training over just... extender drops yeah so there's a couple of thoughts there the the pause can be used um in a number of different ways depending on

and how heavy you're going, how long you're holding these pauses, where you're holding these pauses. So there's just a ton of different utility to all these things. Of course, there's the idea of if you're using it specifically for to improve like a squat or a bench or a deadlift or anything like that, maybe less so for the deadlift, but the squat and the bench anyway, you know, you had to pause in there and now you have.

you know, a dramatically lower stretch shortening cycle utilization, right? So you have to hold, you don't get that tendon or muscle recoil that you would if you were doing, you know. Maybe not even necessarily bouncing a bar off your chest, but just going up right after the eccentric phase. So you can train the muscle in a little bit of a different way and make that elastic energy. you know dissipate and train the muscle i guess more directly which i think is um great utilization

to be honest, I think, um, it's very smart. And of course, if you were a power lifter, you got to train the pause on a bench press anyway. Um, you know, so that's, that's going to be a hyper specific for your sport. There's also like, different pauses throughout the range of motion that may be less specific um to to a power lifting movement so again if i use my example of doing my single leg hack squats in the gym and learning that i'm

really bad at the middle of the range of motion and actually pretty good towards the top and the very bottom, then I can add a few second hold in the middle of the range of motion on the hack squat on my left leg so that it can get better.

catch up with my right side. And that's far enough away from where I would get an elastic energy recoil out if I was just doing a regular pistol squat or a barbell back squat to full depth. And that... I think is really a great way of training the neurological system to say post-injury or anything else like, hey, it's okay to be here.

Like you're not going to hurt yourself. You're not going to cause any more damage or pain by hanging out in this position. And you might need to start really, really light. And you might need to kind of train yourself up to do that because, hey, maybe that's the range of motion that you got heard in in the first place. Sometimes it's really hard to tell, but it's okay to be here.

The muscle can work hard here. The joint can stabilize in this particular position and be okay. I guess that's my view. I might have missed a point there. Yeah, in putting it all together, I mean, there's so many ways you can use ISOs, right? Like, I mean, literally, it can be, and it's not infinite, but it's a lot. Almost, in my head, it's almost like, maybe there should be like some quadrant, almost like.

like EQIs are in one realm, like heavy holds are in, or heavy pauses, pauses and heavy weights are in another, but then it's almost like you have for non-strength sport athletes or non-rehab because I think rehab and strength sports are one end but what about like a soccer player or like for me it was like track and field high jump and bouncing off the ground is kind of like the opposite of holding a squat at the bottom.

Yeah, I found doing that stuff actually funny enough. When I hurt my back, I was 25 in my first back injury back this morning. And to come back, I just did a lot of squats with like 303 tempos. two, four, two, like hold the bottom four seconds and then come up. Man, my standing vertical got awesome real fast because I had never worked that utilization, but I found I did not get the same return for my running one foot, that super reactive jump.

If nothing else, it actually may have diminished for a small period of time. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on like just general principles for like if you're deciding if I'm working with a group of athletes and I'm saying, all right, here's all these ISOs I could do. Do you have any general principles for ideas on what types to include for the athletes you have in front of you for strength as opposed to, hey, we're just going to do three sets of 10 or three sets of five?

maybe i'll waltz it at the end you know that kind of thing yeah um so it's been a little while since i've worked with athletes really like you know i the last uh it's been over two and a half years since I've really coached anybody, um, with the exception of like.

writing a program and kind of showing exercises to uh my wife actually so that's so i mean just so people know again i'm i have pretty good strength conditioning background but not necessarily recently and not really during this whole time where isos have been like

a big part of my research and what I've talked about. So I do get a lot of anecdotes though, however, from like people like Alex and Danny and, and you know, those guys in the NFL that I, that I mentioned. But that being said, I think. that ISOs can definitely be part of like a periodized plan. And as we kind of know, a lot of the listeners are going to know that periodization is really just altering variables.

throughout a year to match up with um games and off seasons and all that kind of stuff right that's that's all it really is at the end of the day and typically at least in sports where you have like a season and then an off season and it's not kind of one of those year-round sports then you periodize isometrics the way you would a lot of other variables right longer holds lighter weights more morphologically driven adaptations the farther away from games and playoffs or competitive seasons

And then you get more specific with things as they get close to competition. So... Again, this is not like groundbreaking stuff, but hypothetically early in the off season, after they've got some breaks, you might utilize longer muscle length holds. for longer periods of time to hypothetically prep the muscles and the work capacity. And you can do that for a few weeks while also slowly building up your regular squats, lunges, split squats.

you know, pull-ups, whatever happens to be, you know, good high success movements for that particular athletes or sports you're working with. And then as you get closer to the season, maybe you start going with... Shorter muscle length, really specific high intensity, pushing isometrics, kind of like what Alex and Tara, you know, talks about. And you might still have like long holds at relatively low intensity.

following game days or something like that. So again, anecdotally, those NFL guys are saying, well, after game day, if somebody's particularly beat up in a particular spot, We'll do like two sets of like one minute holds at longer muscle lengths for those key joints the day after a game or two days after a game to try and...

just kind of recover the system, get some blood in there, stimulate the tendons and the muscles in a relatively non-specific way. And then as we get closer to the next Sunday or Thursday or Monday or whatever game. they're playing we're getting more specific and more intense with this type of loading yeah I definitely agree with like the

the morphological or the muscle structure to neurological. I think Alex had mentioned that moving from general strength training, typical stuff into the specific, run specific. I do. I would say, and again, I can't speak for every time I see this, but I do think it's a trend for people to jump into like the overcoming stuff, like even a split lunge, overcoming when they could have definitely done.

An athlete could have benefited with like 30 second hold with dumbbells or a barbell under the leg for.

a several week period prior to that or or or longer honestly for younger athletes even the whole season in my opinion versus before you you have to you know dump out the real explosive stuff right yeah Well, I'm realizing this more again, if I can use myself, because that's the only person who I really train regularly now is myself is, um, yeah, just like consistency, consistency, consistency, like.

you know, again, 36 now. So not, not old, but certainly kind of past the point of like where gains come easy. Um, and like the last year and a bit, I've just. Way more than any point in my life training, whether that was either for sports or just to like feel good and look good and all these types of things is just like pick 12 different exercises.

and just do them super consistently you can change the reps and sets so you know a little bit like you know i've done like the safety squat bar uh or safety squats and and that single leg hacks and like the chin ups and you know incline barbell press and i'm not really like getting too far away from these things and some of the accessories have more variety but it's just consistency and i've had

you know, pretty good gains in the last year and a half. I thought, oh, I don't know if I'll be able to get a stronger squat into the later part of my 30s. And lo and behold, I've been set PRs every handful of months. Um, yeah, you don't need to like reinvent the wheel. You probably need enough variety to keep athletes and kids and whoever you're working with interested. But I think the key building blocks can just really.

you don't really need to ever get away from them or bury them. Yeah, I think for developing athletes, they can be consistent with some of those lower weight, longer positional holds for a lot longer than a lot of people have in it. But it is the... is the athlete boredom yeah are the athletes are they are they you know hopefully they can maintain that and that over time but yeah i know yeah i mentioned dan john i know that's one of his big things and one of his mentors had said

Like the basics are really simple. It's like the eight years that gets people. I love that. Yeah, just closing out. I just did want to come back to briefly, you know, with the methods you mentioned at Danny Loom and like the. the contrast of a max ISO and then a plyo. I just think that is really interesting in the sense that sometimes I think about, well...

Either one of those is really like what I would call a natural occurrence. Like how we move in sport is pretty natural. Like how you even run and jump is pretty natural. But plyometrics are taking something and really exaggerating it and taking an ISO is taking something and really exaggerating it.

Kind of makes sense. You just need a little relief. One from the other can use a little relief and interplay. You mentioned the fatigue, so I do resonate with that in the implementation. I think that makes a lot of sense to me and my experience as well. Yeah, you can... liken that to yeah the separation of qualities so even like a marathon runner for example right they might have periods or days where they do have relatively long

run at a modest intensity and then they might just on another day do 20 minutes of relative speed work or even 10 minutes of relative speed work and you know you just you're you're breaking these things down and, and that seems to work really well. And again, I don't know that much about marathon training. That's the complete opposite of, of what I really focus on, but yeah, same idea. You're just, and I.

I think that really comes down to intent and being really good about your intent. It's a lot easier to really focus on strength when you're pushing against an immovable object and then it's really easy to focus on.

you know springiness or explosiveness if you like that bird when you're doing plyos and that becomes um you know a little bit more muddy super fast concentric out of a bottom of a squat or something to try and somehow meld maximal strength with uh explosiveness yeah yeah those those isometric and pilot tools are like they're both really simple too and just taking two simple things and merging them i remember

It was when I was in college, I found that if you did step-ups on a low box, which is not that far off of a max ISO push, just because the angle is kind of small and the impulse is short. I mean, it's not quite the same thing, but mixing that with bounding, the first time I did it, I was like...

I started calling it the secret weapon in my jumpers. I was really trying to sell them on it because honestly, it felt good. I had done so many bounding circuits in my life and only plyo stuff. Even bounding, I would always mix up the type. It'd be like left, right, left, right, left, left, left, right, right, right, and that kind of thing.

just get boring to do it the same anyways but like the first time I mixed like a step up with a and it wasn't like ultra heavy but you know like medium weight with a bound I was like oh this is this just feels good I just really and I always did notice you know good results there. Running down to questions time, I want to make sure I can get you out of here on your way. But real quick, I think this is one of those physiological questions I think is valuable because

it's one of those things where it's like, well, could you get this doing a set of 10? Do you need an ISO? You mentioned occlusion. And you mentioned post-game recovery, and I think of blood flow restriction and like, hey, let's recover after a game or I'm feeling a little beat up. That BFR is better a lot of times if you're beat up and not feeling great and has good benefits.

Would a long ISO give you something from an occlusion perspective that a set of 10 regular reps wouldn't? Or is there a way to compare that? For sure, there'd be a way of comparing that. You'd probably have to use near-infrared spectroscopy. Maybe there's other tools that I'm not familiar with.

Yeah, I think with the longer holding of an isometric or even doing an EQI or something like that versus a set of 10 of a squat, I think, yeah, A, you're going to probably get... pretty similar benefits in terms of like you are doing some sort of a movement like the day after a game or with an injury or your muscles are sore kind of the same idea as like low intensity cycling right after a game

or the next day to just get blood flowing, get it into the muscle. There's probably some neurological, you know, sympathetic, parasympathetic balancing that you get out of really just doing anything and not just like... sitting around being sore. I think potentially a benefit of doing some relatively low intensity ISOs versus dynamic movements is that you are not really moving the joint through.

a range of motion. So if you've already impacted, you know, the tissues in your knee joint, for example, in the game before doing some ISOs at sort of a medium muscle length. It just means that the joint kind of isn't getting loaded to the same way through a dynamic range of motion. I think that might give you a bit of a benefit. So that's my thought there.

And then just while you were talking about stuff, my mind was going, I just kind of want to share that my senior year of university, my practicum supervisor, I'm sure you've talked to him, Matt Jordan. I don't know if you know that name. Yeah, I figured. And I'm pretty sure, I don't want to credit him for something somebody else said, but I'm pretty sure he one time said to the group of S&C coaches that were working with him, like...

use the best tool for the job. And I think that kind of just you talking about using like ISOs for strength, plyos for power and not trying to like muddle it too much, really kind of. fits really nicely into that like use the best tool for the job if you want to if you want to build max strength there's probably not that many better ways than using a max pushing iso um you know so

It's just kind of funny, again, how the mind works with these memories and these other people that you talk to over the years. It's bearing joints, too. I think about the best recovery day or one of my favorite recovery days is just writing. long duration, body weight, ISO holds, full range. And it's just like that. And then, but on the next day, you might go do max sprints and plyos a lot of times. So it's almost like you polarize one day, huge joint demand, tendon demand.

Other day, no joint demand. And we don't think about things on the little joint so often. So I think that's a cool way of also like just framing how you design training up in your mind. Yeah, I think that's a really good point with that. no joint movement it's like compresses that so that everything else the blood flow and the muscular and all that can expand and restore so I think that's a really that's a good way of putting it

Yeah. Yeah. And we could go all day on this compression and whatnot, but it's like, you know, every once in a while you see like something, but like, oh, like these. billionaires swear by just wearing the same clothes every day so they don't have to think about that and they can just focus on their business right yeah yeah uh dustin anything that you're researching now or any upcoming research topics that you're

you want to share about or any, anything that, or what's next for you? Yeah. So, um, I guess it was preview. Um, again, so, so Danny, Alex, some, you know, people that we've mentioned, Andre, um, Laura Schaefer, Frank Bittman in Germany. So we've got our big review about pushing and holding and that comparison. So we're working on getting that into a journal somewhere. But as a little bit of a...

Something for people who are interested in the space to pay attention to. Danny ran an actual intervention study comparing pushing and holding isometrics for the knee extensors. I think that'll be really interesting. That should be out in like February. So you can kind of keep an eye out for that. And then there's...

One of the other people I know doing some research in this space is an Italian PhD student. Giuseppe is his name. And he'll have some really interesting stuff coming out soon as well. That'll be on like chest fly type stuff, pushing versus holding and the recovery process in the weeks or in the week after doing a big session. So there's a lot of work being done in this area.

One project that I'd be excited to kind of get going at some point is... looking at what's actually going on in the muscle because one of the things that's been holding back that pushing holding review is just some of the language that we've used and we get a little bit of pushback with reviewers about like what's going on in the muscle is the muscle

action actually different or is the intent different between pushing and pulling and just kind of getting into the weeds with that so I want to use some ultrasound imaging actually during these movements and see if the fascicles and the tendons and the muscle shortening and whatnot are different between them. And I think that'll be something that'll...

So take off probably middle of next year would be my best guess. Awesome. That sounds really interesting. And yeah, thank you so much, Dustin. It was great talking to you on the show today and appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks to all.

Learned a couple of things from you as well. And it's fun to talk about these things. So hopefully the listeners agree.