#065 - Isometrics within Athlete Evaluations & Performance Training
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing how we utilize Isometric Training across our performance benchmarking & testing, strength and conditioning programming, and several of the technologies we use to collect this information.
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing how we utilize Isometric Training across our performance benchmarking & testing, strength and conditioning programming, and several of the technologies we use to collect this information. If you've been interested in utilizing isometric testing in your pre-participation athlete profiling or sports performance training, this is the episode for you!
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Key Takeaways
- Isometric training belongs across the whole performance process: benchmarking and testing, strength and conditioning programming, and the technologies used to collect the data.
- Isometric testing is a practical option for pre-participation athlete profiling because it is safe, simple to administer, and gives strength data without the fatigue cost of max dynamic testing.
- The same isometric methods used in testing carry straight into training, so assessment and programming speak the same language.
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Episode Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.
[00:00:00] Sport science, strength conditioning, high performance coaching. Welcome to the Dakota excellence show. Everybody, I'm going to pause the show real quick and announce something brand new to the Dakota excellence show. We've created an online community that has exclusive content that you will not be able to get just by navigating to the site alone. If you subscribe today, you will have access to our private podcast online video lecture series, brand new digital
[00:00:44] Content that we are creating to help support you as a strength conditioning coach, a new practitioner in the high performance field. You do not want to miss this material. It's going to help you in every facet of your career. Head over to admringler.com and join the insiders today. Hey everybody, we have a great show for you today in this episode. I'm talking about nothing else than isometric training. It seems to be the rage right now on the internet and this
[00:01:17] Episode talks about how we use it diagnostically, how we use it for training, how we use it to bias our strength conditioning program and the ways that you can use isometrics in your training to better your student athletes. If you are interested in isometrics and the use and practicality of it in your environment, this is the episode for you. Hey everybody, welcome to the Dakota excellence show. This is your host, Adam Ringler. As always, if this is your first time listening to
[00:01:44] The show, welcome to it. It's an adventure in strength conditioning, sports science, everything else in between technologies, performance. You name it, we have it. And as always, if you are a return listener, welcome back. This is the show where I'm going to be discussing a lot about isometrics, how we use them, how we program them, what we do to evaluate some of our student athletes in regards to their isometric strength, particularly when it comes around to the isometric
[00:02:18] Thipole and some of the peak vertical forces we pull off of our dual force plates, but also how do we use isometrics in the weight room for other exercises generally, not maybe necessarily done on the dual force platform. So this is the show where I'm going to get into it. And without further ado, let's jump right in. So I got a message last week that I talked about, hey, Adam, have you checked out Alex Neterra's isometric course? And to be fair, I actually have not, not yet. I think it's probably some incredible material
[00:02:56] And it's on my list of things to look into as far as, you know, throwing, continuing education funds towards because I think I think he's a brilliant mind. But nonetheless, I haven't checked that course out yet. And in addition to that, they said, hey, Adam, what are you doing in regards to University of Colorado borders or your own sort of strength conditioning programming? How are you using isometrics? And that's what I'm going to spend this show on. I want to talk about, first are isometric mid thipoles, what we do there,
[00:03:30] How we do it, any of the other isometric testing that we might do across our student athletes. And how do we use it? What do we look at? We do quite a bit of isometric mid thipoles as our primary bilateral, although we do get unilateral forces off of our dual force platforms, but our bilateral strength movement. Why would you want to program this isometric mid thipole or isometric mid thiposition squat pattern? Well, a number of different things. If you're a strength conditioning coach, particularly working with 18 to 22 year old,
[00:04:07] Let's say female athletes much like myself, then you recognize that doing a one repetition max squat test, let's say back squat poses some inherent dangers to a the student athlete, but also to the program to the win probability likelihood of winning, right? And what that comes down to is, is the athlete sufficiently trained enough or has enough historical training background to successfully grind out a true one rm. You can answer that however you might want to answer that. How do we take a population that is brand new to campus? Let's just say your
[00:04:46] Entry level benchmark athlete comes in, they fill out their PPEs, preparticipation, physical things like that. And then you want to begin to teach them or to evaluate maybe what their force production capabilities are in that bilateral squat position or isometric mid thipole position. I would say I would not feel very confident taking an athlete that I have just met and being able to put a maximal load across their shoulders on their back and asking them to do a one rep max test. Now, you could say, well, hey, Adam, what about doing a sub max test, right? Figure
[00:05:23] Out 75, 85%, something pretty heavy and they have them go to repetition max or repetition failure. That's a valid point. However, if we have the technologies we do to be able to determine what their force production capabilities are in that sort of isometric sort of mid thai knee position, why wouldn't we use that? Why wouldn't we inherently poses far less dangerous to the student athlete? It protects our potential availability of each player being able to practice and undergo skill development and participation availability for games. Why wouldn't we want to
[00:06:04] Do that? So that becomes the first sort of first thought in my mind as far as why would we want to use that isometric mid thai pull as our primary lower body strength movement? The second thing that I think of is that if you're already regularly doing counter movement jumps, right? Hands on hips, counter movement jump, why wouldn't we want to leverage the slower strength type of IMTP movements versus the CMJ and then ultimately getting a dynamic strength index. To me, that sounds very obvious. We would want to do that, right? We would want to be able to say, if you're already
[00:06:43] Doing a CMJ on the force play, if we were to program out some type of slower strength movement, high force movement, i.e. The IMTP to generate a peak force off of that, then we should definitely do that. We do that. And ultimately, we end up getting this dynamic strength index or DSI. And what's really, really cool about that for those of those are you listeners right now that isn't necessarily well versed with force platform technologies or where are the nuances between the IMTP or a CMJ or some of these other tests. If you're to think about it simplistically, the DSI is essentially
[00:07:26] A ratio. It's an index between ballistic peak force and then a much slower isometric peak force. So we utilize that IMTP to generate that isometric peak force production in that squatting slow high force movement. We look at that in relationship to the counter movement jump peak forces that can be generated. And then it calculates or we can't calculate this dynamic strength index. And it is essentially the difference between the athlete's ability to produce force during a dynamic and sort of fast movement and that sort of more slower static isometric test. And what we can do
[00:08:03] With that is that we can better understand what type of bias that athlete's strength conditioning program should be bias towards should it be more about maximal strength capabilities and generating that. Or should we actually be focusing a little bit more on that power production sort of more ballistic more high velocity type of movement. And we all know this in real world time, right? We can recognize that you see athletes in the weight room and they have the ability to produce a lot of force, right? They might be your more proficient squatters. They can deadlift a small
[00:08:40] Buick. They're super strong. But you start to put them on, you know, any type of repetitive bounds or repetitive hurdle hops or depth jumps or plyometrics and you're like, huh, that's weird. I would have figured that they would have been more explosive, more elastic, right? That's an example of an athlete that maybe has a high IMTP peak force or squat force. However, doesn't have that same capability of producing that same amount of peak force rapidly within that CMJ. And what will you would see in that example when you start to look at that, maybe I am that DSI differential
[00:09:22] Between the two is that that athlete would actually have, they would have a really low DSI. And what they would need is more ballistic strength training. So what the literature at least says is that sort of that moderate concurrent training zone for DSI, that range would be between 0.6 to 0.8. And that would be sort of that that concurrent training range. And if you have find that your athletes are producing a ratio where they're below 0.6, then that would be indicative of the need of doing more plyometric, more high velocity low force type of training. This could be squat jumps. This could
[00:10:01] Be trap bar deadlift jumps. This could be speed squats or speed deadlifts or more dynamic effort type of movements and plyometrics, things like that. If you have athletes that produce over 0.8 within that DSI ratio, then at that point in time, that's an athlete that can produce a lot of force in that CMJ. But potentially, they're not producing it a lot of peak force in the IMTP. For that, that would be like, okay, we need to teach maximal force, maximal strength type of training. That would be your max effort type of movements. If you're prescribed to more of a conjugate style
[00:10:38] Of training program. And in that's right, higher DSI typically means more time being spent on developing maximal strength, where a smaller or lower DSI score or ratio or index would be, hey, yeah, you need to spend more time on developing bring that explosiveness or that rate of force development. And that's typically done through that more ballistic plyometrics strength, strength programming or power programming, if you will, power training. So that's one reason why I like to include some of those isometrics, right? Just an IMTP type of isometric. Very initially is low risk to the student
[00:11:17] Athlete, low risk to the program. You're not going to lose availability. Very rarely do you ever see an athlete get hurt, right? Or injure themselves aren't performing an isometric mithyple. You get the added benefit of while you're testing that bilateral squat or bilateral pull, you get to tease out any of the asymmetries left and right, right? Not just peak force asymmetries, which is important. Don't get me wrong. So now you have the capability of looking unilaterally across limbs and saying, wow, did you know that your right leg is producing more force than your left leg? 5%, 6%, 10%, 20%,
[00:11:56] Whatever it might be, right? And you can use that diagnostically to be able to potentially alter your individualized, your conditioning program to include more unilateral strength development on that weaker limb side. Maybe it's a postural issue that you can also refer out to your PT's and your athletic trainers and your physicians to see if there's any sort of more skeletal or postural reasons why that athlete might be producing force, you know, in excess of that 10% sort of threshold that you might, you might set up in addition to that, right? So now you can
[00:12:31] Individualize your training program. It's low risk. You can generate a DSI. One of the added benefits, too, is that from a practicality standpoint, you can test way more often because it's less risky and it's less exertionally fatiguing, if you will, to be able to do a maximal isometric then to ask an athlete to load up 100, 100, 200, 105% of their 1RM back squat and ask them to do that midseason. So all of last year, if you will, that 2021 to 2022 campaign year, we would routinely program this isometric mithi pole just to occasionally keep track of are we continuing to trend
[00:13:18] In the right direction? Are we continuing to get strong? Are we doing what we need to do to maintain the strength qualities so that we are, you know, in a favorable position to use that, to express that force, to express that peak force within that isometric mithi pole because of the nature that it's low risk and that there's not a lot of associated delayed onset muscle soreness or doms associated with maxing out an isometric pole. This was a really good way diagnostically to maintain that we are getting stronger and staying on top of what we need to do
[00:13:54] From a force production standpoint. So that's been highly beneficial for us, right? And that's just one use of isometrics within sport, right? You could utilize, you know, with a sort of truly a barbell, IMTP variation, right? You could do a squatting variation with no barbell across the mithi. You could also deploy different stance positions, right? Split stance, if you're thinking about, you know, men's and women's basketball and the positional requirements that they are often in. So you could play around with doing more staggered stance or split stance variations
[00:14:36] Of isometrics in those positions and generate sort of limb specific, positional specific sport, specific isometric protocols to make sure that the athletes are strong within those position patterns. So let's move on from that. That's that's one aspect of it. Uh, yeah. So that's lower body dominant IMTP squat pattern sort of isometrics in various both bilateral parallel stance positions, but we also kind of teased about the ability of being in more of a sport specific pattern as well. One of the things that we also like to play around with is the athletic shoulder test, right? The
[00:15:13] Ash test, Ben Ashworth sort of the inventor of this isometric sort of shoulder upper limb, upper extremity type of isometric evaluation screen. We do that with our overhead population. So we're looking at our volleyball athletes and throwing population with that. That is essentially just to give you a rundown of what the ash test looks like. If you were to think of an athlete laying essentially in a prone position in front of the force plates and having their one arm above their head in this sort of a 180 degree position, that would be the eye position. An athlete
[00:15:52] Would then isometrically but maximally produce flexion force into the force plate in that 180 degree position or a three to five second maximal isometric. You would be able to tease out both peak vertical forces and net forces i.e. Net, you know, minus the arm limb weight and be able to look at force production capabilities in that right side and left side shoulder in that long lever 180 degree position. If the athlete were to turn slightly into more of a Y shoulder position so that the relationship between that arm and their torso is 135 degrees, that would be your long lever Y position
[00:16:32] And they could produce peak vertical forces in net forces or in rate of power development or rate of force production rfd into that force platform. And now you're getting a different shoulder angle and the athlete's capability of producing force in that Y long lever position. If the athlete were to turn perpendicular to the force platform and now the relationship between the athlete's shoulder and their torso is now 90 degrees, you could have that athlete in what we would call the T position and you could test both isometricly the maximal force capabilities in
[00:17:08] Both the dominant non dominant arm three trials three to five second maximal effort into that force platform. Now I have seen some athletes do a zero degree so this would be like your hands down by your pockets. The athlete's head would turn completely counter to the force plate and that would be at zero degrees and you could do that as well. But the the standard ash test, if you will, is that 180 degree i position 135 degree Y position and that 90 degree T position. Now why would you want to use this? Well, you may want to use this periodically throughout an overhead season to
[00:17:45] Determine if an athlete is losing force capabilities in that flexion position because of shoulder niggles if you will, pains and strains and just soreness through that shoulder. And we need particularly think of let's say a collegiate volleyball season right we go from August to November. You might want to to be able to determine from from August to September, September, October, October to November if that athlete is adapting to your training program i.e. Producing more force in those positions if they are maintaining the force capabilities that they
[00:18:19] Once had in that flexion position and at very least not having a decay of those force production or or rate of force development capabilities. Now that's that's just the evaluation that's the screen that's the routine monitoring that one person may do regularly. Another thing that somebody might want to do is they might want to do a pre participation evaluation and what that would be is that you develop benchmarks right you run your entire team through it in the event that an athlete has a shoulder injury. You now have pre participation e-vows in that 180 135
[00:18:59] And 90 degree position in the event that maybe it is a shoulder labor of surgery that you need or some type of other surgical intervention. Now you can arm your physical therapist your strengthening professional your surgeon with information that says we have benchmarks to try to work our way back to and then obviously objective criteria to get them advancing from so that their shoulder is can be deemed at least from a return to play criteria standpoint a little bit more healthier and that is again that's driven through the use of isometrics in the upper extremities
[00:19:37] Right in that IYT position. So another novel use of being able to do isometrics with the force platform. What are some other uses of isometrics that we use here in Boulder, Colorado and in our University of Colorado athletic department. Well one of which is if we have a lower extremity injury let's say a the injury. Miniscus perhaps maybe it's an MCL maybe it's an ACL return to play. We can do that prone isometric hamstring curl on our VOD performance Nordboard. So rather than using the Nordboard in a classical Nordic eccentric overload type of standard way
[00:20:20] That one might use the Nordboard we can lay down a mat in front of the Nordboard. So it's now a elevated platform for the athlete to essentially rest their torso on and they could go in that long lever position prone long lever knee sort of extended out position and do isometric laid curls on the Nordboard and what this allows us to do is again we can tease out left to right max force capabilities. We could look and say we need to do a little bit more targeting on this left side or right side hamstring. Even in the event of a hamstring strain you could you could absolutely
[00:21:00] Do the same isometric protocol there. We can look at okay from a posterior chain strengthening standpoint we might want to produce or we might want to offload a little bit of our program two sets on one side versus one on the other three sets first one set four sets first one set to get some really targeted overload on the rate limiting side and we can do that for a wide degree of different sort of lower extremity injuries right and we have done that to make sure that our athletes are responding and their force capabilities in a knee flexion
[00:21:35] Position is is is growing closer to more of that symmetrical symmetrical symmetrical non asymmetrical side. We can also replicate a very similar thing with a bought performance force frame. So there's a number of different force e-vows that you can do testing diagnostic e-vows that you can do with that force frame. It's quite versatile hence one of the reasons why we have it. Let's just say it was a groin or hip injury right you might want to do isometric sort of training mode on the force frame and get some targeted long duration isometrics within a particular band for that
[00:22:17] Hip adduction or let's say you wanted to acute groin strain and you're working as a student athlete back from that groin strain. You might want to start off with some shorts but also low amplitude low force isometrics and build a robustness build a tolerance to producing force through that groin in that maybe 60 degree hip adduction sort of groin squeeze and then over time elongate out the duration of those isometric contractions and then eventually continue to raise the ceiling so that you get higher and higher forces under longer and longer durations of isometrics.
[00:22:55] That's another novel use of isometrics within a groin squeeze. You could also look at doing that for essentially a hip pull or an abduction. You could do those shorter duration lower force ab duction holds isometrics and then over time increase the duration of those holds then increase the amplitude over the force production within those holds and those durations as well and then then the sky's the limit if you just think about what you could do you could do internal and external rotation of the shoulders by turning perpendicular and rotating the cross bar the cross beam 90 degrees.
[00:23:32] You could do knee flexion as well in a seated position utilizing the force frame as well and starting again with shorter duration lower essentially lower force isometrics under time under repetitions and then increase the duration of those isometrics and then increase the force production and that's another way of building isometrics into your training program but also using it diagnostically to tease out do we have any sort of asymmetries left and right inner groin squeeze capabilities or hip drive out are abduction capabilities and then we could examine the relationship between
[00:24:10] Hip adduction versus hip abduction and seeing do we have the appropriate ratio of groin squeeze to hip drive out and then being able to see is there any risk factors associated with having an imbalance on one hip versus another so another novel use of isometrics within sport both from the evaluation standpoint but also from a classical strength conditioning physical development standpoint so what might be another use of isometrics in sport I talked about it on our last podcast show vaude performance has come out with the dynamo which is a really cool piece of technology
[00:24:50] Looking it up right now just so I can actually say it vaude performance that's the advantage of having my computer right in front of me the dynamo 300 different strength and uh strength devouse that you can do it's a dynamitor and inclinometer what's really cool with it is that there's a bunch of different attachments you have a palm you have a flat pad curved pad I've used the flat to do like some isometrics into the floor essentially like the IYT sort of ash test without force plates and just using the the dynamo which is really cool but one of the super subtle
[00:25:29] But super robust things that they did is they added the tension links to it and what that allows you to do is it allows you to anchor the dynamo device to a non-movable sort of fixed object i.e. Our squat racks in the weight room and then we could use the ankle attachment to be able to adjustable strap attachment in the the ankle attachment to now be able to hook that fix that dynamo from our rack to an athlete's ankle and now we can do things like a mass uh maximal isometric hamstring curl versus turning around sitting back down 90 degrees in a chair and doing a knee extension uh-huh
[00:26:08] And now we have quad force production the rate of power development rate of force development in that sort of knee extension versus knee flexion position and low and behold that's still what a lot of surgeons and physicians use from a knee standpoint so now you have just another evow utilizing that dynamo device of being able to pull out you know quad symmetry quad or knee sort of extension force production capabilities in left and right and now you can start to draw some conclusions about hey do we need to get this athlete stronger in this position post ACL or post MCL if you think
[00:26:47] Athlete could lay down prone position have a long lever leg locked out and do hip extension and you can end up practitioner assisted providing that maximum external force and now they are checking their hip extension force production in left and right side or you they could lay prone and do a leg curl and be up more at that 90 degree sort of knee flexion position and being able to maximally contract that hamstring into a practitioner sort of held dynamo device and now you're getting sort of that terminal in range emotion knee flexion position in that prone position force
[00:27:27] Capabilities ultimately what i'm trying to say is the sky is the limit with what you can do from an isometric testing capability between the nord board between the force frame between force decks and now the dynamo boy this feels like an advert for vaude performance and i hope it doesn't come across that way it's just that they have performance technologies that allow us to do some really novel testing now it's up to you as a practitioner as a strength conditioning coach a physical therapist a personal trainer whomever you might be to be able to take that information and then be able to
[00:27:59] Program sets and reps and exercises to be able to elicit what the student athlete might need or what your your client or your your person might need that is just a few ways that here at University of Colorado that we utilize isometrics across our programming from the IMTPs with our force decks between you know our squad assessments within the force deck system within utilizing the nord board in the isometric prone position between utilizing the force frame which is truly all about capturing isometric forces in a wide degree of different testing sort of positions and evaus
[00:28:41] And tests there but then also using the dynamo device to be able to pull out different isometrics now it's up to you right in your facility in your weight room to be able to appropriately take that information distill it into what really matters and then be able to program out whether it's short duration high force if whether it's clusters whether it's just long duration isometrics for sort of targeted force production it's up to you so hopefully you took a something away from the last 30 minutes of this sort of micro podcast about how we utilize isometrics here and hopefully
[00:29:18] You can think about oh man okay what can I do in my facility the technologies that I have available at my fingertips to be able to make objective targeted programming for my athletes
[00:29:39] Hey everybody that is going to be it for this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show I hope you took something away from our conversation about the utilization of isometrics within our string conditioning program how we use it diagnostically to determine asymmetries across limbs and maybe some of the ways that you can novelly program out exercises sets reps and clusters and programming to better your student athletes not only physical performance in sport specific sort of type of movements or positional specific type of movements but also in ways to better understand
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