David Nordmark - Power Isometrics: The Complete Course that allows you to Build a Strong and Athletic Body in only 30 minutes a Day!

If you are looking for a way to get in great shape and get stronger while sculpting your body in the least amount of time, then isometric exercises are for you. Why does this exercise system work so well? Let me explain.

Like many words i sometrics is derived from the Greek. Iso meaning equal and metric meaning distance. When we refer to isometric exercise we are talking about an exercise system in which, although force is applied to the muscles, the muscles themselves never contract. Their muscular length remains the same. This is called an isometric contraction and it is the key to this entire course. Heres how it works.

Any muscle in your body is made up of thousands of muscle fibers of varying lengths and abilities. Some are explosively quick, others posses great endurance, while still others are extremely powerful. Any time your body needs to move a muscle your brain commands whatever muscle fibers it needs to start contracting.

Here is the key point when it comes to isometric muscle building - your body is very efficient and it only activates the bare minimum number of muscle fibers required. To demonstrate this, imagine you pick up a paper cup. As it only takes a few muscle fibers to generate the necessary force to contract the muscle to pick up the cup, that is all that is used. If you go to pick up something heavier like, say, a jug of lemonade, your body will use more muscle fibers. Still, it will never use ALL of them if it doesnt need to.

This is the whole principle behind workout routines like weightlifting. The reason you have to do 3 sets of 12 repetitions when performing a biceps curl is that you are trying to tire out and work ALL of the muscle fibers. So, as you initially start curling, your mind activates only the bare minimum of muscle fibers required. However, as you keep going, those fibers tire and our brain has to activate others to keep going. This process of muscle fibers tiring and being replaced in the task by others continues until (ideally) all of the muscle fibers have been worked. When you reach this point you may find it impossible to perform one more rep. This is called muscle failure in weightlifting and it means youve worked every muscle fiber in your biceps.

Now, instead of performing biceps curls with weights, what happens when you work your muscles against each other? Imagine you place your hands together palm-to-palm in front of your chest and you start squeezing as hard as you can. Your brain is getting the message that it is trying to move your right arm leftward and your left arm rightward. In order to do this it needs to contract muscles in both arms. It starts to do this but because there is no movement, no contraction occurs. How does your brain respond? It keeps recruiting more and more muscle fibers together in an attempt to contract the muscles and move the arms. It has no idea that this is a futile exercise as the arms are acting against themselves! In a way with an isometric contraction you are tricking your brain into using ALL of the available muscle fibers at the same time. This is why it is possible to exhaust ALL of the muscle fibers in 7 to 12 seconds. This is the secret of the isometric contraction and isometric exercises in general.