Static Contraction
Static Contraction Weight Lifting
Going to the gym, I notice people blindly bouncing from weight machine to machine until they do enough repetitions to make the target muscle group tired. Isn’t that the goal of working out? Tiring yourself out so your body grows more muscle? No, unfortunately that is not how it works. Working out with the purpose of gaining muscle and strength requires more than just getting “tired” and it must be more than just a habit. One of the best ways to train your body if you want to expect muscular gains is to maximize the intensity of your workout rather than the number of reps. The biggest thing that many people misinterpret is the correlation between “time is takes to lift weight” and “muscle gains”. It only makes sense that the longer you lift weights, the more your muscles will be trained, right? But is that really true? Why is it that a person who can bench one rep of 300lbs. is bigger than a person who can bench three reps of 100lbs? Sure, they both lifted the same amount of weight total, but the bigger person took less time to lift it. This concept can be directly applied to your weight lifting regime in the gym—this system is called static contraction weight lifting. There are two training methods that are integrated in static contraction training: the isotonic method and the isometric method of training. The isotonic method is the more conventional method of weight training that most people are familiar with. It consists of forcing your muscles to lift a certain amounts of weight over a certain range of motion—like bicep curls or bench press, etc. Doing any free weights or weight machines qualify as isometric exercise. Isometric training, on the other hand, offers a different approach to weight lifting. This technique eliminates the range of motion and is done in a static position, contracting muscles while joints remain at a constant angle. Static contraction training takes advantage of the benefits of both isotonic and
Going to the gym, I notice people blindly bouncing from weight machine to machine until they do enough repetitions to make the target muscle group tired. Isn’t that the goal of working out? Tiring yourself out so your body grows more muscle? No, unfortunately that is not how it works. Working out with the purpose of gaining muscle and strength requires more than just getting “tired” and it must be more than just a habit. One of the best ways to train your body if you want to expect muscular gains is to maximize the intensity of your workout rather than the number of reps. The biggest thing that many people misinterpret is the correlation between “time is takes to lift weight” and “muscle gains”. It only makes sense that the longer you lift weights, the more your muscles will be trained, right? But is that really true? Why is it that a person who can bench one rep of 300lbs. is bigger than a person who can bench three reps of 100lbs? Sure, they both lifted the same amount of weight total, but the bigger person took less time to lift it. This concept can be directly applied to your weight lifting regime in the gym—this system is called static contraction weight lifting. There are two training methods that are integrated in static contraction training: the isotonic method and the isometric method of training. The isotonic method is the more conventional method of weight training that most people are familiar with. It consists of forcing your muscles to lift a certain amounts of weight over a certain range of motion—like bicep curls or bench press, etc. Doing any free weights or weight machines qualify as isometric exercise. Isometric training, on the other hand, offers a different approach to weight lifting. This technique eliminates the range of motion and is done in a static position, contracting muscles while joints remain at a constant angle. Static contraction training takes advantage of the benefits of both isotonic and