Bruce Lee's Unique Isometric Training Routine Explained (Overcoming Isometrics)

if you've been watching this channel for a while then you'll have heard me talk about overcoming isometrics so overcoming isometrics are a fantastic tool you can use to build more strength and power and control without necessarily piling on more muscle mass on the back of those videos i've had a lot of people asking well how do you go about programming overcoming isometrics how many sets and reps should you be doing how long do you hold it for and how does it fit into a broader program so i thought today it'd be cool to take a look at a example of an overcoming isometric program used by none other than bruce lee himself bruce lee was a fan of alternate training methods and this is a perfect example of that and when we get into it we might even see that overcoming isometrics could have been one of the key cornerstones of bruce lee's training and one of the reasons that he managed to perform such incredible feats so without further ado let's dive in [Applause] so for those who aren't familiar with the concept let's take a quick look at what an overcoming isometric actually involves basically this is an isometric type of exercise meaning that you're not moving through a range of motion so concentric is shortening the muscle eccentric is lengthening the muscle isometric is staying in one place but still contracting still exerting force you have your yielding isometrics which is what many people instantly think of when you think of isometric systems like holding weights in position until you start to fail essentially it means that you're leaving some strength still on the table you're not exerting yourself maximally with an overcoming isometric the whole idea is that you're pushing or pulling as hard as you possibly can against an immovable force so that might mean loading up a bench press to 200 kilograms lying underneath it and just trying to push so i thought a cool example would be this tree branch which i doubt i can push straight off the tree i hope not i'll feel bad if i can and i'm just going to try and push it as hard as i can and that's your overcoming isometric and you hold that position so why is this useful well essentially with an overcoming isometric what you're doing is you're performing a one rep maximum or as far as your nervous system is concerned you're performing a one rep maximum whether you're pushing against the maximum that you can lift or whether you're pushing against something you can't lift you're still exerting force you're still calling on your body to recruit that kind of strength now we're not going to get the same kind of muscle damage because we're not going through the range of motion there's no eccentric phase and we're not going to load the body with so much weight so it's not going to brace the core in the same way or build bone density however we'll get a lot of the same benefits in particular when it comes to neural drive because you're telling your body it needs to recruit as much strength as possible and when you push and nothing happens this sends a signal that you need to get stronger when you lift weights to do so you recruit motor units i've talked about this a lot they contain slow and fast twitch muscle fibers and depending on how heavy the weight is you're going to recruit more and bigger motor units to move that load then overcoming isometric what you're able to do is to practice sending that signal to the body to recruit as many large motor units as possible and as you practice this as you rehearse it you're going to be cementing the neural pathways that make that possible you're going to be increasing your neural drive so that you become better at recruiting the maximum and ideal motor units then when you do go through that range of motion you'll be able to tap into greater power or at least that's the idea and there are actually some ways in which an overcoming isometric is superior to a regular one rep maximum or a very heavy weight because when you perform a one rep maximum the whole movement lasts maybe three seconds whereas typically for an overcoming isometric we're looking at a contraction lasting six to ten seconds so that's much longer than you're spending performing that maximal exertion at the same time when you perform a bench press or a squat or a deadlift with a very heavy load you're only actually performing a maximum effort at one point of the strength curve because there's momentum there's changes in the lever length i've talked about all these things before so some points of the movement are going to be harder than others however when you use overcoming isometrics you are exerting maximum force for the full time the full six to ten seconds this is a much longer and more intense example of exerting maximum strength and the results can be impressive studies looking at overcoming isometrics show that they demonstrate significantly greater activation in the muscles as compared with max effort through a regular lift and another very interesting study looked at overcoming isometrics on a leg extension machine and that showed that it could also decrease co-activation of antagonistic muscles some old-time strong men such as maxic talk about how relaxing antagonistic muscles is one of the keys to amazing strength this not only trains your ability to recruit more motor units during an exercise within a single muscle it can also help you to better perform the movement using the coordination of different muscles and this is where it's really interesting because if we look at bruce lee who used mainly compound lift with his overcoming isometrics we see the way that he looked like a rigid board many people question whether bruce lee was authentically a powerful fighter whether he'd perform well in mma for example this is a moot point though at the end of the day bruce lee was highly athletic and you can see that from the way he moves that's why we still talk about him today he moves with power and speed and precision and his whole body moves as one rigid unit i talked about how strengthening your core can help with this in a previous video but it could also come down to the fact that he'd practiced using all those muscles together and exerting maximum force to plug those energy leaks and to become this one solid unit to move like one muscle old-time strongmen also use this technique very commonly especially for strengthening their grip they'll do things like trying to bend bars or roll up frying pans which until you manage it is a form of overcoming isometric luckily for us bruce lee kept copious notes about his training mainly for his own purposes and thanks to the work of john little who's certainly the leading bruce lee archivist we have access to these through books like the art of expressing the human body which is a fantastic book collecting bruce lee's training notes and advice on building muscle mobility etc i highly recommend checking it out but there's one routine in particular that seems especially refined and you'll see this talked about quite often all over the internet and this one looks like so so it starts with a press lockout where the bar is above him and he's doing a military press just three inches away from his lockout position then he moves on to a press start where he's pushing it up from his chin position then he has a rise on the toes where the bar is on his shoulders as though doing a squat and he's going to do like a a calf raise and you have a pull where the bar is six inches above his hips then he had a parallel squat would get into parallel and try and squat a weight that wouldn't move then he'd perform a shoulder shrug where the weight is now lower down still and he's trying to shrug it upwards then a dead weight lift as he called it where the weight was two inches below the knee and he try and deadlift it and then he also had a quarter squat we'll try and squat from a quarter position to do these bear in mind bruce lee wouldn't use a really heavy barbell obviously because you just crush yourself you can't hold that position and it be an overcoming isometric instead what you do is he put the barbell in the rack use the pins to set it in place it wouldn't move and then just try and push or pull against it so some of you might have spotted a potential issue here that being that you don't necessarily have access to a power rack that you can pin in place or that if you do go to your gym doing this is going to get you some really strange looks fortunately there are some other ways you can perform these movements one is to come somewhere like this and then just find trees and logs that you can try and pull and lift or push and obviously you're going to be a little bit dependent on what you find on the day or alternatively you can use a device such as the isoflow from bull worker essentially two separate straps that are easily adjustable so you can change the length like so and using these creatively you can actually create all kinds of different positions to emulate an overcoming isometric with a barbell you could even attach these to a bar the cool thing is that we know bruce lee from his notes used to use a bull worker the original one that you would push together which you can still get and incorporate into your training this is a relatively new thing it's just quite nice that it has that lineage it's from the exact same brand that bruce lee used himself because they fantastic company they're really cool bunch they've been sending me these products to try out with no strings attached which is just awesome of them find a link to it in the description down below this isn't a sponsored video in any way but i do get a small commission if you buy using that link so it's a great way to help out the channel loads of people have asked me what this is this is just a piece of metal that came from a flat pack desk we got another desk i kept this you can use anything there's a tendency on the internet for someone to write an article then everyone else to regurgitate it so you might be thinking that's the only overcoming isometric routine that bruce lee did as we'll see later he actually did loads and this was just one example but this is certainly a great example of what he might have done and i actually really like this program so one of the big limitations of overcoming isometrics is because you're in just one position you're not strengthening yourself through the entire range of motion so if you're using an overcoming isometric here say with a chain attached to the floor then that's the only position where you're going to build strength there is a spillover of 15 above and 15 below although that's not an exact science we don't know a perfect number but it's something like that so if you were using overcoming isometrics on your biceps you'd probably want to use three different positions in order to make sure you're strengthening the entire range of motion what bruce lee seems to have done here is to not think in terms of individual muscles but in terms of the full body and if you look at what he's done he's done positions all the way down and all the way up it's almost like he's gone through a kind of clean where he's pulled the weight up all the way over his head and he's pushing up as well and he's doing pushes and pulls at each position and this is just a really interesting way to break down the body and to potentially strengthen yourself all the way through it baby you better train every part of your body it's not perfect however and there are some limitations to this program one of the big ones being there's no rotation in there now in another one of bruce lee's overcoming isometrics routines this is another one he wrote for students he would have them practicing punches against the wall and talking to the kung fu genius podcast john little said the same thing that bruce lee would also practice punches standing a certain distance from a wall and then trying to perform a punch this was helping to send out the punch faster but if you also try to put a bit of rotation in there and if you use a good solid stance then you can also train those rotational muscles and learn to exert force through that motion as well and it would have been really nice if he included something for his grip there but he did train his grip an awful lot in a load of other ways but if you're doing something similar i'd recommend throwing in there something especially for grip training even just squeezing tennis balls is a great overcoming isometric workout for your grip of course if there's a horizontal push you're looking for one of the simplest things you can do is just try and push down a wall or of course a tree or if it's rotation you want grab a tree a lamp post or a door frame and then try and twist your body whilst keeping that arm locked out and holding yourself in place so bruce lee would hold each of these positions for about six to 12 seconds which as i described earlier is actually what's pretty much recommended for overcoming isometrics it didn't say how many sets and reps he did he might have only done one but the general advice on this is to do three sets of one repetition so you're treating this very much like a one rep max this is quite intense on the nervous system not as intense as doing a one rep max but it's still you need still need time to recover and you can't do too much of this or you're gonna burn yourself out with that said you'll want to rest anywhere between 30 to 120 seconds in between each repetition you can see how your body feels start with a minute that's a pretty good place to start one of the big advantages of this kind of training is that you actually don't create those muscle tears so recovery happens much quicker in the long term and while it doesn't say which days did that particular routine on we can guess that it might have been three times a week because if we look at some of his other overcoming isometrics routine such as one he wrote for his students it actually says to do those on monday wednesday and friday for example he might have had another overcoming isometric routine for those students so perhaps he's training overcoming isometrics every day but three times a week is a really good place to start in fact two times a week would be fine and you can do this alongside the rest of your training because it only takes about 15 minutes if that so there's nothing to stop you doing this at the start or the end of a workout immediately after doing overcoming isometrics you might benefit from post activation performance enhancement or post activation potentiation two slightly different concepts but each of them results in you being slightly stronger because you're able now to recruit those motor units more quickly they're kind of fired up and ready to go and you've just rehearsed that movement pattern so if you perform an overcoming isometric deadlift for example just once you might then find it's easier to perform a normal deadlift with a heavy weight straight afterwards it's like contrast training essentially like doing heavy barbell squats followed up by box jumps for example there are a bunch of other uses for overcoming isometrics as well you can use them for example to overcome sticking points so if you have a particular point in a range of motion that you find difficult if you constantly get stuck in the same point in a squat or a bench press then performing an overcoming isometric at that point can help you to strengthen yourself there because that's exactly where you're exerting the strength likewise it can be fantastic for rehabilitation and for remaining strong when you're recovering from an injury because there's no range of motion there's no tearing of the muscle you can even use it to develop explosiveness ballistic isometrics a form of overcoming isometric where you're basically pushing explosively or pulling explosively without moving so that might sound like a contradiction but it's the explosive intent and as you're doing these movements make sure you're still breathing through them a typical mistake is to hold your breath as you push and this is one of the actual benefits of using overcoming isometrics it's the perfect opportunity to practice breathing through maximal exertion another tip is to build up to this take your time and listen to your body this is intensive and if you get the wrong movement you could easily pull something strain something or even pass out from exertion so build up to it slowly it's a really useful skill a really useful tool once you get the hang of it but make sure you've got experience with these movements first and don't go held to leather right away so i hope you found this video useful interesting guys if you did then please leave a like and share around that would help me out immensely let me know in the comments down below if overcoming isometrics is something that you would use in your own training and whether you think that this was a big part of what made bruce lee so special in terms of his physique and his performance if you like using alternate training methods to build a body that's not just strong and aesthetic but mobile fast balanced then you might enjoy my ebook and training program super functional training there's a link to that description down below i also have a print book functional training and beyond which you can find on amazon which is a guide and introduction to functional training subscribe if you want to see more like this hit the bell button if you want notifications either way thank you so much for watching this one guys and i'll see you next time bye for now

Channel: The Bioneer

Views: 276,162

Keywords: bruce lee, bruce lee isometrics, bruce lee overcoming isometrics, overcoming isometrics, bruce lee training, bruce lee workout, bruce lee's training, isometrics, isometric workout, strength training

Id: PkCTpBaj-AA

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021