 Our first question is from Grant Satterthwaite. How would you recommend programming isometrics and dynamic tension for strength? Probably one of the most underrated, undervalued exercise techniques in resistance training. The benefit and the value that you get from training and utilizing isometrics or dynamic tension is they're well documented. We decades of studies on high level athletes, Olympic lifters, power lifters now start to utilize some of the stuff. The value with this type of training is tremendous, super, super undervalued. I almost never see anybody program this in their workouts and that's too bad. Yeah, it's interesting. Like I never saw it. I never saw it in the gym. I never saw anybody utilizing it until I got into college and was around some strength conditioning coaches that were using this with athletics and ways to improve very specific mechanics with their athletes. And to do that in a way that wasn't as damaging as power lifting and some certain things like that where they were like, they're really trying to hone in on developing and building and strength in that specific skill. And so it's very much an underutilized method that's out there that we tried our best to kind of incorporate them in some of our maps programs mainly because I just don't think people have been exposed to them and the benefits of them. I use it a lot as a trainer. Did you guys use it a lot? I use it a lot as a trainer. I did and I used it more as a correctional method but the performance aspect I also underrated and I'm just too bad at it. So I agree. So I did not use it the way we've programmed it in some of the programs. Maps performance, that's why we put it in there. It's phenomenal in there and that is not the way that I used to use it. How I used to love to use it as a trainer was as a way to teach a good form and technique. So one of the hardest things is when you, and we've kind of like talked about this a little bit where if I got a client and they had an athletic background I could always tell and Justin talks about like this too, like how that was like the easy client for him and he really struggled with the opposite side. And so did I. I think a lot of trainers do like, when you've been training for a long time and you've got good form and technique and then if you've trained athletes they pick things up really quick then all of a sudden you get a person who's been an engineer for 30 years of his life never lifted a weight ever and you gotta train them. And it is so foreign that it's like you could demo the exercise slow and a hundred times and they just do not have the communication there. It's just not there, the body awareness. And so getting them to perform an exercise correctly I would have to like break it in segments. And so I'll use like a bicep curl cause it's so basic for people to visualize. But I mean, I would take somebody and I would like, here's your starting posture that have them holding dumbbells or something, right? And then I would manually grab their shoulders, put them into place, pin their elbows by their side. And then I'd say, okay, now I let them bring it up like six inches and then hold it there. Now hold that position. Then I'd go back and correct. Cause right away their shoulders would collapse forward. Elbow would rock forward. I'd bring the elbows back. I'd pull this and they'd be holding that position and I'd want them and then I want them to feel like that's where you need to be. Now bring it up again. And then I bring them up a little bit. Another six more inches have to go kind of adjust their body again. And I used it like that a lot to get somebody who has really bad body awareness and doesn't have good form and technique to coach them through that like literally inch by inch. And that was like, I would say the single best thing I did for helping clients that did not have that athletic background or did not have a weight training background that exercise was so foreign to them to get them to get the movement down. Yeah, similar, but more on the performance end of it. Like it's so, I would look at sticking points. And I know a lot of power lifters and people that are like actually competing and lifting weights, they've actually broken it into segments like you're talking about in terms of where those sticking points might lie. So for a squat, that bottom portion is usually the most difficult, the most challenging amount to be able to summon enough force to be able to drive everything back up with the weight. So I would actually have them stay in that position and really like connect to it and squeeze. And it's amazing how much more you can recruit by just like literally focusing on squeezing harder and training your body to give you and provide you more force in that susceptible position. Now, do we explain the difference between isometrics and dynamic tension? We didn't yet. No, no, no. So there's different ways to strengthen these types of training positions. One is to push against an immovable object. So it would be like I'm underneath a bench press. The weight, let's say, rather than having weight on the bar, I push the weight up against the safeties. So the bar is up against the safeties, I'm not gonna lift the whole cage. And I just push into that, for example. You're not moving at all. You're not moving it, but you are pushing hard against an immovable object or the wall or something like that, right? The other way is to create tension intrinsically, which would be like just pretending to push against something real hard but flexing all my muscles and creating a lot of tension. Now, here's the things you need to understand about these techniques. They build muscle and they build strength. And the way they do it, first off, they build muscle in similar ways to other forms of resistance training where you're creating damage, you're sending a muscle building signal out stuff. But there's this other unique thing about these types of training that they're better at than almost any other form of resistance training. They are excellent at increasing the outage, increasing the juice that the central nervous system can send to muscles, the connections. So think about it this way, right? Imagine you have a laptop and the laptop it has a wire connecting to a big robot and you give the robot commands with the computer and you tell the robot to lift something heavy or whatever. The problem is the robot's, the communication is limited by the skinny little, you know, USB wire that I have attached to the robot. Now I could attach really fat cables that allow more juice, more power, better communication to go to the robot in which case the robot performs better. This is not unlike your body. Your muscles don't just act on their own. They act because the central nervous system communicates to them. You literally send a command to these muscles. This is why somebody who let's say has been bedridden for a long time or in a coma doesn't just jump out of bed and is able to walk. Besides the fact that the muscles themselves are weak and atrophied, they have like no more connection to the muscle or someone who got a stroke, for example, where they have to relearn how to move and walk. So those are extreme examples, but isometric and dynamic tension increases the power. So when you can increase the power, you get now a louder muscle building signal. You lift heavier weight, it's under better control. You feel stronger. And look, Bruce Lee was a huge fan of it. This is when I really first started paying attention to it. I remember reading about Bruce Lee's workouts and he wasn't particularly strong in traditional sense. Like he couldn't bench press a ton of weight, but he could do crazy things like hold a 100 pound dumbbell at arm's length for long periods of time with just incredible tension. And generate power like with a one inch punch kind of thing. He was well known for having this incredible power and rigidity in his wrists and his arms when you would punch or ankles and feet when you could. So to the dynamic tension, like if you think of it too as just creating more tension through these types of movements. So if I'm doing a pushup and I'm also then, you know, actively trying to turn my hands out, even though they're not moving anywhere, but I'm focusing on different areas that I can increase the tension of muscles to recruit more of a louder signal. So that way, you know, when you start to really like manipulate that and create more tension, the tension provides more security around the joints. And so now this command gets louder as a result because everything is telling the body that we're secure. We're, you know, we're stable. We're able to now apply even more force. So that way, you know, you actually get stronger overall. Yes, and there's a few ways you can implement this. By the way, the athletes that inadvertently on accident utilized tension movements or bodybuilders, believe it or not, just through flexing and posing, you know, Arnold used to talk about as he'd get up to a competition, he would practice posing three times a day and he noticed it sharpened and hardened his muscles. What was probably happening aside from getting leaner was that his muscles, he was able to control them better. But in terms of programming, it's a few different ways you could do it. You either can start your working out with these types of techniques, which give you better connection to the exercises when you get into them. That's where I like to use it. That's how you, I like to use it that way also. The bodybuilder method, they tend to do it at the end or in between sets. So you're doing your traditional workout. Let's say you just finished working out your legs. Now at the end of your workout, you're doing the squeeze and you're focusing on tension and isometrics. I've done both. I think both have their value. The one I prefer is what like when, you just said, Adam, I like to do it at the beginning of the workout. I just feel stronger in all my lifts. You know, this conversation reminds me, I've been meaning to shout out our buddy across the pond, Coach Eugene Tao. He won the whole COVID thing hit. He was one of the few trainers that I saw do this. I saw him do it, yeah. And I just, I think, I love when I see coaches that think this way. I mean, I think you saw all over social media when COVID hit, everybody's home. Everybody's lifting their couch. Yes, you saw all the creative stupid exercises come out. The soup can stuff, lifting the couches and doing weird shit. And just, and to me, that's all the simple-minded trainers went that direction. Curl your dog, then. Yeah, yeah, whatever. For whatever reasons, but they're just getting it for doing it for likes or you really think this is a good way to teach clients. And he went all this direction. And he would, almost every day, I saw a different exercise that he was sharing. And like all he would use is like a towel or a T-shirt or something. And he'd show people how to get a great back workout, leg workout through isometrics and using just a towel or a T-shirt. And to me, that's just a sign of a really smart coach that understands the value of something like that. And here's a great opportunity for people to, knowing that a lot of people probably don't utilize it. And here you are limited because you don't have a gym. Now is a great time to implement this into your team. These techniques are some of the unsung heroes in mass performance. When we get comments and reviews, this is a lot of times what people comment on and say, I did not realize how big of an impact this would have. We don't talk about it a whole lot. I think we forget about it, but it's extremely valuable. So in terms of programming, beginning or end of your workout, and you should be totally fine, that doesn't add too much in terms of damage to muscles. Can you overdo it? Of course you can overdo everything. But I would say a couple of sets at the beginning of your workout would probably just give you benefit and not really any detriment.