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This week’s newsletter is an ode to the humble isometric hold. It is a simple exercise that is so versatile, so accessible, and deserves to be celebrated for all that it can provide to your workouts. Specifically, we are going to be covering the overcoming isometric and how to use it as a way to re-connect the homunculus to the body to reduce muscle guarding and improve mobility.

If you haven’t read my last few posts about the homunculus and muscle guarding, you may want to start with those or this post might not make as much sense. But I won’t judge you if you want to skip the recap and go right to the action items!

An isometric exercise is a muscular contraction that produces no movement. You are working hard, but going nowhere. Some common isometrics are planks, wall sits, handstands, and hollow body holds. They are a vital part of any fitness curriculum for building endurance, improving neuromuscular control, building connective tissue strength, and making people really wish they hadn’t come to class that day.

I want to focus on a specific type of isometric that is a little less common in general fitness: the overcoming isometric.

All of the isometric exercises I listed above are yielding isometrics. That means that there is a set amount of force required to prevent the exercise from turning into an eccentric movement. If I’m holding a plank and I start to relax below the minimum force required to hold my body weight, that plank will start to turn into a melted downward phase of a push-up.

In yielding isometrics, gravity and weight dictate the amount of force your body must produce.

For an overcoming isometric, you are putting force into an immovable object. Think of pushing into a wall or a bar that is fixed in place or the floor. There is no way you can produce enough force to move it, but at the same time if you relax completely nothing will change. This gives you, the mover, 100% control over the amount of effort that you put into the contraction.

In overcoming isometrics, you choose the amount of force your body produces and you can change it depending on what you want to do.

This ability to manipulate the amount of force makes overcoming isometrics extremely useful for neuromuscular work, where we want to facilitate better communication between the brain and the body.

While muscles don’t actually “turn off” or “go to sleep” they can be difficult for us to consciously activate. This happens when our brain’s connection with that area becomes blurred through injury, overuse, under use, trauma of various types, and other complicated factors. When this happen we can end up with muscles that just don’t turn on and work when we’d like them to, and other muscles that can’t turn off even though you keep asking them nicely to pipe down.

When this happens it is tempting to start hammering away at the muscles themselves by trying to strengthen the quiet ones or stretch and massage the tight ones. But if the neuromuscular connections don’t change, it’s going to be hard to create sustainable change. Many folks find that, in trying to strengthen the quiet muscles, they end up just getting more crabby shouting from the over-activated muscles.

Rather than focusing on the light bulbs (the muscles themselves) we want to see what’s going on with the wiring (the neuromuscular relationships). In order to do this, we have to throw out everything we know about traditional strength training and lean into our progressive underloading. Because it doesn’t matter how great your light bulbs are if you can’t flip a switch and send it the juice to turn on.

When our wiring is on the fritz it is often because the brain is having difficulty “seeing” the body. While we do use our eyes, our inner ears, and our memory to understand our position and movement, our primary tool is proprioception - the feedback that our brains receive from our muscles, fascia, and bones. Figuring out how to drive better information from our tissues to the brain, and then helping the brain deliver precise, accurate instructions to the muscles, is our primary task.

Overcoming isometrics are very useful because they can enable us to feel the entire range of muscular engagement all in one place. There is no floor that determines the minimum amount of effort needed, so we can make the movement as soft and quiet as we need to in order to feel those quiet, shy muscles.

I like to imagine my overcoming isometrics as having a volume knob. When the knob is at zero we are completely relaxed, when it is at 11 then we are rocking out as hard as we can. We know we have good neuromuscular control when we can feel and control our muscular contractions through the entire range.

Here are two examples of overcoming isometrics that I like to use with clients to address common sleepy muscle issues:

Hamstrings are notoriously sleepy. We sit on the poor things way too much and this makes them prone to shutting down. Combine that with bossy, overactive hip flexors and you have a recipe for hip and lower back sadness that can be difficult to address since every time you try to use your hamstrings you just get shouty little hip flexors.

The muscles that help to control our shoulder blades and connect our shoulders to our backs (serratus anterior, lower traps, teres major, teres minor, infraspinatus) also fall victim to too much sitting and hunching over our devices (I’m doing it right now damnit). As our shoulders hunch up these muscles check out. It can be very hard to bring them back online without getting a lot of upper traps, pecs, and even neck muscles.

You would think that being mostly relaxed and just doing a tiny little push with minimal effort would be the easiest thing in the world. You would be wrong. When our homunculus is blurry and our wiring isn’t firing, this work can be very challenging indeed. It can take a long time to get the over-active muscles to chill out, and it can feel nearly impossible to do a very quiet contraction if you are used to trying hard all the time.

There is also an emotional challenge. When we always operate at full volume, and we have been told all our lives that we are only progressing when we push into painful, stressful, exhausting movement, the whispered overcoming isometric can feel very sad.

Clients have routinely used words like “depressing”, “frustrating”, “unsatisfying”, and of course “boring.” If you experience any of these emotions as you lay there, trying to whisper to your hamstrings or teres major, know you are not alone. Also know that the investment in your brain, your homunculus, and your muscular wiring that comes with these irritating little exercises pays off. The better your internal communication, the better your performance when you do kick out the jams and rock out at full volume again.

This is not a step backwards, it’s an invaluable skill with its own novel challenge.

Lots of love to you and your homunculus this hot, summer day!

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Happy Bendings,

Kristina