Bulletproof Your Body

I love sprinting. It's one of the best things you can do for your body.

Sprinting and isometrics have a lot in common.   So when I recently heard track coach Tony Holler state that sprinting can inoculate you from soft tissue injury it confirmed what I've been teaching, and witnessing in clients at STRONG WOMEN ROCK for decades.

The STRONG WOMEN ROCK way —  five second duration maximum effort isometrics — is the best way to bulletproof your body against sprains, strains, and overloading.

But why?

Won't maximum effort increase the chance of injury?

Nope, it's exactly the opposite. 

Short periods of high effort is the best way to avoid injury because it increases your capacity.

I'll explain.

As I wrote in viiivPRO MAKES WEIGHT LIFTING OBSOLETE, the greatest changes in neuromuscular voluntary activation come from exposure to high loads, and the highest loads can only be reached with maximum effort isometrics in your most efficient joint angles.

In fact, compared to concentric and eccentric contractions, isometric contractions yield, by far, the greatest changes in voluntary activation. 

This means you "raise your ceiling," or give yourself a new "gear" to shift into should you really need it.

But there is something else really cool that comes from increasing your voluntary activation with maximum effort.

During submaximal effort, which is pretty much everything we do most of the time, your voluntary activation actually decreases.

This means that for the same given workload, you don't need to work as hard. You become more efficient.

In other words, your "gas mileage" increases.

As I tell all my clients on day one, as a result of these few seconds of effort each week, everything you do in your life will become easier.

These changes don't happen with low to moderate levels of effort. They just don't.

So picture this: Your max effort ceiling INCREASES while the effort you expend doing anything below max effort DECREASES.

This creates an even greater gap between what's easy and what's hard.

In other words, your comfort zone for taking on any activity of any effort level, EXPANDS!

That's greater CAPACITY.

What's that?

The ability to do something over and over again.

So how does that protect you from injury?

As Coach Holler explains it, "if you can get an athlete to increase their maximum sprint speed to 22 miles per hour, they can sprint 19 miles per hour 50 times no problem."

Or think of it this way: When I see a client exert 300 pounds of upward force on the viiiv Vertical Lift, I know they could haul 50 pound bags of dirt for an hour without ever truly challenging the top end of their capability.

In both cases the chances of getting injured go down tremendously because maximum capacity isn't challenged.

That's exactly what we want!

Raising your maximum force generating ceiling is like an insurance policy — most of the time you don't need to use it, but it sure comes in handy for that one time you really do need it.

This is the unmatched beauty of maximum effort isometrics.

It's why I've heard countless stories from clients over decades about how they are now not only able to do things they haven't been able to do in 20 years, but do those activities with vigor, confidence, and to their pleasant surprise, not get injured. 

It works every time, for everyone.

Weight lifting will never come close to providing the benefits of incredibly brief maximum effort isometrics, especially injury prevention.

Do less. Get more for it.