The World's Fastest Workout: The 10 Minute Exercise Biohack Scientifically Proven To Produce...

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. I've been getting lots of questions about.

The video in which you can see me grunting and groaning against some unmovable contraption in my basement gym. I'm doing a high intensity isometric workout in that video. It's over on YouTube somewhere.

Everybody asked me, what's that crazy exercise device?

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In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, what he said was, even if you could get a few percentage points above and add in another set and a bunch more reps, what you would actually do to your recovery ability at that point totally just makes that not something worth doing because it eats into your recovery too much. Five pounds worth of muscle is going to burn an extra 30 pounds of fat a year, all day long, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, while you're sleeping, while you're just watching tv, just because you have metabolically active tissue on your body doing what it's doing.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. And there was this video that was circulating a couple months ago of me doing a stem cell injection on myself, among other crazy protocols in my home. And the video opens this sound of some random dude me grunting and groaning in the forest. And then it kind of goes into my gym where I'm there just basically going to town on this workout machine, just crushing myself with what are called Single sets to failure, where I'm using this special machine. It's an isometric training machine to quickly exhaust my muscles and get this crazy strength training workout done in about 12 to 15 minutes. Now, I have gotten a ton of questions since that video came out about what the heck is this special isometric force plate machine I'm using to do these super efficient strength training workouts. So I finally managed to get the inventor of this thing onto my show. It's called a Peak Fit Pro. A Peak Fit Pro. And it sits in a corner in my gym. I get on it right now once a week for this very, very quick isometric strength training workout that again, absolutely crushes me in a very short period of time, but has some really compelling science behind it in terms of how it actually works. So the guy I've got on the show who made this thing is Dr. Chris Montanaro, and he's a chiropractic physician. He also has a nutrition certification and he teaches a whole bunch of doctors around the country. Chiropractic medicine, naturopathy, also homeopathy. And he happens to be a pretty impressive guy himself when it comes to his feats of strength. Chris, you actually have a background in weightlifting, don't you?

A little bit. I mean, I played basketball in college and did a pretty significant amount of lifting there.

Yeah, but you have like, like some, some decent PRs.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Isometrically speaking, I haven't done regular PRs in a while. Full range lifting, meaning. But with the isometrics, Absolutely.

How much can you, how much force can you generate via isometrics?

On the. The best that I've ever done is about £2,780 on the leg press.

Wow. What about deadlift?

The deadlift, I stopped at about 680 pounds. I just, I didn't like all the compression on the spine. It got to be a lot for me. What about that?

The, the belt with the squat on? That's another one that I do on this machine. What can you do on that?

The belt squat, I got it up to almost 1500 pounds. It was 1487 was the best that I had as a peak. And as you had mentioned, you know, you can lift for different periods of Time. Doing that for a three minute lift, it takes one reading per second. So over the 180 seconds that I've been doing that lift, I've taken it from £26,000 up to £160,000 in that same three minute period of time.

That's £160,000 total. How's that measure? Is that weight per second?

That's weight per second, Yep.

Okay, so pounds per second is what you were able to generate, and then you add that up over the course of three minutes and that's how many pounds you lifted over the course of three minutes?

Yes.

Okay, cool. All right, before we get too deep into the math, let's, let's back up. First of all, I want to know a little bit about how this thing is actually made in the sample workouts that you can do on it. But let's first define what isometric training actually is and how you got interested in this form of training in the first place.

So fill me in the most basic breakdown of the wording of isometric. ISO, meaning same and metric basically being the same distance then. So when you're pushing or pulling against the bar or a wall, nothing's going to be moving for you like a traditional lift where you'd be going through that full range of motion.

I first really learned more about isometric lifting listening to a video that was done between Tony Robbins and an individual named Pete Sisco. Tony is always well known for just finding the best of the best in a particular field and learning from them. And they just, they had a good half hour talk that they had together that really kind of started pushing the boundaries of what I thought was possible from a lifting perspective. You know, they're talking about gains that I had never seen before and gains that lasted for a much longer period of time. I had thought back to playing basketball in College. I spent six months getting to my personal record of a one full rep max on my bench press of 315 pounds. And you know, a month and a half into the season when you're not lifting, I probably lost 100 pounds of that. You lose it very quickly. And he was talking about taking six months off and setting personal records for himself. And that was.

Who was talking about that?

Pete Cisco? Tony Robbins.

Now I know who Tony Robbins is, but who. Sorry to interrupt. Who's Pete Sisko?

He's one of the bigger names in the world of isometric training. He's been featured in Ironman magazine and a lot of the popular weightlifting magazines, bodybuilding magazines over the years.

Okay, now he was actually training Tony Robbins.

Yep. That's where Tony originally got interested in moving down that road and studying isometrics and lifting that way.

Now, I know that Tony Robbins has advertised before or been using advertisements for this, like a four minute exercise machine. Is this the same concept as that or totally different?

I'm not 100% familiar with that machine, but I'm sure that the concept is very similar.

All right, you got to read the back of airplane magazines more. Apparently seen advertising those too. So you saw these guys talking about isometric training and the way that Tony Robbins trains with isometric training. What'd you do then?

Then, you know, back, jeez, it was maybe 15 years ago, there was a particular machine that Pete had talked about that does what he wanted to at the time. And I bought that from my office and started using it was kind of for myself under the guise of using it for my patients, because I just wanted to see what it could really do. And, you know, they talked about two research studies that Pete had put together. One was a group of professional power lifters, and they did one rep and 10 rep maxes, lifted this way for 10 weeks. And then they did one rep and 10 rep Maxes again 10 weeks later in their full repetition lifts. And their one rep Maxes went up by about 28%, 10 rep Maxes were up 35%. And their.

Static lifts went up roughly by about 50%.

But those, those lifts that they went up in, were they isometric lifts or actual power lifts?

They were actual power lifts. They lifted isometrically. But then when they went back to actually doing full range traditional lifts, they. They went up by that much in those particular lifts.

Okay, so what you're saying is there's a direct crossover from the isometric training and to the actual power lifts. You know which lifts they were doing?

They did the same basic 10 that we use with the Peak Fit Pro. Usually the first set is going to be all of your pushes. So your bench press, a tricep press, leg press, calf press, and a shoulder press. And then when you flip over to the opposite side, you'd be doing a lot more of your pulls. So your deadlift, your shoulder shrug, your lat pull downs, there's an abdominal exercise so you're really full body. And those are the average games that they all saw over that period of time.

And. But what, what power lifts were they doing?

They were doing one rep and 10 rep maxes for every one of those lists.

Oh, for each one of the ones that you described okay, so. But those aren't traditional power lifts. Like some of those moves. I. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, like weightlifting. Yeah, like the actual maximal weights on squat, bench and dead. Like those would be the main power lifts, but they were doing 10 different moves, and then bench was included. Measuring. Okay. Yes, Gotcha. Interesting, interesting. What about squat? Did they measure the effects on squat?

The squat wasn't available. It was just a. A leg press at that point.

I gotcha. Okay, cool. But. But regardless, what they found was, was some pretty significant percentage in. What did you say the percentages were again, that they went up in?

So their traditional one rep max went up about 28% in 10 weeks. Their 10 rep max went up about 35% on average. And then their static lifts were 50%. And that's for people that are serious lifters. They had another group that was just kind of your average, not really in the gym that often type of an individual. And their average gains were about 80%. And I'd have to say that I was pleasantly surprised when most of my patients were going up 100 to 200 or 300% in some cases, with a lot of their lifts in an incredibly safe way.

Yeah, for me, so far it's been nice. Just with as much travel as I've been doing, I do a lot of body weight, a lot of suspension strap, a lot of blood flow restriction band, and a lot of elastic band when I travel. But then when I get home, being able to just hit this thing with as much force as possible for these very short periods of time, so I can kind of like, like inject a bunch of strength into my routine and disappear back out again to travel has been pretty convenient. And when it comes to trained versus untrained, I would probably put myself into the former category. But using the little app that ties to this thing, and I want to talk a little bit more about how that actually works, I'm seeing big increases in the amount of pounds per second I'm generating and the total amount of force generated during each of these lifts. Although admittedly, I can't. I can't produce maximum force production for three minutes like you can. I'm up to about 75 seconds that I can push against this thing or pull against this thing as hard as I can go, and then I'm toast. That's about. It's about the longest I can last, man. So I gotta work my way up to these three minutes. But that kind of relates to the question I wanted to ask you next. And that is this whole idea of doing one single set to failure isometrically, meaning the joint is not moving through a range of motion. So you're just pressing as hard as you can at a certain point in the range of motion. What's the actual idea behind this single set to failure training? I mean, delve into the science behind this and also how it actually looks when fleshed out when you're doing it on a machine like this.

It kind of goes back to some of the work that was done by Mike Mentzer, who is a Mr. Olympia winner. He was a huge proponent of basically doing one set. Now, he would do a lot of times traditional sets where it would be very, very slow in the positive, lifting a weight up, for example, squeezing as hard as he can for another seven seconds in a isometric position, and then the negative another seven seconds, very slow. And he would basically talk about doing that type of a lift where you could pick a weight that you're basically going to completely die on somewhere between 6 to 8 reps.

The idea was that you're going to give an incredible stimulus to the body, more intensity than the body has ever had at that point. And that's all you need at that, and to get the stimulus for growth. And then the idea is to go home and let your body actually recover from that and actually grow.

What he said was, even if you could get a few percentage points above, add in another set and a bunch more reps, what you would actually do to your recovery ability at that point totally just makes that not something worth doing because it eats into your recovery too much.

Okay, gotcha. So, so how long are you supposed to recover between these sets, these single sets, to failure?

The idea, and with doing that, is that you want to recover to the point where you have gone up. You know, when you work out, let's say that you work out on a Monday. The next time that you work out, let's say that it's Wednesday, there's three real options that can happen at that point. You either can go down in weight, which I experienced playing basketball in college. You lift on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Friday, you're toasted. You don't have a lot left, and you just. You haven't even recovered from the previous workouts. If you could make up a number, say, lift 100 pounds on one day, and the next day you're only lifting 90, then your intensity is going down and you haven't recovered even from that previous workout. So that's exactly how you know if you're going to be recovered or not. If you haven't built muscle up from the previous workout and gone up in intensity in some form, whether it's the peak amount of weight, the total amount of reps, or, and, or all of that combined in a lesser period of time, then you know, you just haven't recovered from your previous workout.

Well, I can tell you based on heart rate variability training, which is what I use to measure the recovery of my neuromuscular system. You know, I just use basic muscle soreness and how I feel to gauge musculoskeletal recovery. But for neuromuscular recovery, this thing seems to do a pretty good number on me. Like, like surprisingly high amount of, of drop in my hrv, meaning neuromuscular system.

Not. Damage isn't the right word. Right. But it's certainly working. My neuromuscular system. Yeah, fatigue, exactly. Thanks for putting that complex word in my mouth. Fatigue. So I experienced neuromuscular fatigue that I don't bounce back from for a good four to five days after I use this thing, which is very surprising. You know, it's like you're lifting a burning car off of a baby for a very short period of time and then you're done. But you're just, I mean, you're, you're wrecked for a while. I mean, I'm not trying to scare people away from this thing because there's not really much soreness. But I've been surprised at what happens with the neuromuscular system when I'm paying attention to my HRV after using this thing. So for me, it's been like four to five days that it takes to recover, which comes out to me only needing to do a strength training workout on this thing. Like I mentioned, one to two times a week. Is that generally what you're seeing in your training? Is it one to two times a week? Or do you kind of structure things differently?

You always want to. So let's say that you're doing five lifts actually.

Well, by the way, Chris, I should qualify. I've been going full body. So you mentioned like splitting up into push and into pole. I've just been doing it all in one workout.

Okay. The, the idea ultimately is you want 80% of your lifts, you know, to basically be going up. And if you haven't gone up, then you need to add more time. I've gotten to the point where I had started out at one week intervals and have to go to 2 and 3 just this very last time with three of my lifts, I had to go eight weeks in between. But then I took another big jump in that positive direction. I'd say most patients, they'll start out doing it once a week and as they get stronger and stronger and you've got those bigger loads, it takes longer for the body to be able to recover from it. And obviously, you know, you add in a whole lot of other things on top of it as far as, you know, all your recovery things that you do, whether you're going to be in, you know, doing your ice baths and your nutrition and all the other things that you add to it, you can obviously speed up your recovery capability in between. But there just comes a point in time where you're putting massive loads on the body and it needs longer of a period of time to be able to recover. And you're always better off waiting a little bit too long than going too early and not having fully recovered and gotten the gains from the work that you've already put in.

Now, when it comes to the actual push and pull workout that you're talking about, can you walk people through that? Like what a typical workout would look like using this? I believe you said you got the A workout and the B workout based on what you learned from Pete Sisko.

Yep, absolutely. So the A workout is typically your pushes. So start off with a bench press, go directly into a tricep press, a shoulder press, and then it used to be a leg press and a calf press in a seated position. Now the machine has the capability of doing the belt squat. I have people doing a belt squat when they're capable of doing. I might have a 90 year old that I'll have them sit down and do a leg press. But for most patients, I'll have them doing a belt squat and then still having that belt on in a erect posture and doing a calf raise basically from there. Still getting those same basic lifts with all of the pushes like that, each one. For Most patients, they're 10 seconds in duration, times five exercises. You're really at 50 seconds of all.

Out intensity, just 10 seconds. But you're doing three minutes yourself.

Right. And that kind of I, when I was training for the Ironman World Championships, you were one person that I had consulted with and actually had consulted with Pete Cisco as well. And I told him, you know, I followed your work for a long period of time. I love everything that you've taught. I had. You're one of the original machines. But my problem is whenever I would lift that way, within five or six weeks, I could be up 12 or 15 pounds of muscle. And I just carrying that around for an ironman. It's not something that I was really interested in doing, but I wanted his input. He said, all right, well, here's the deal. What I want you to do, what the best information we have at this point is to try to do three minute lifts, but you can't use your machine. It's like, wait, what are you talking about? This machine's been incredible. And he says, well, you're gonna get a peak weight, but if you have no data over a three minute period of time, then that's worthless for us because we don't know if you're recovered and what your gains are. It's almost as exciting as pushing against the wall every day. I mean, it becomes pretty monotonous and not something that you'll keep up. So that's where it kind of spun off and where I wanted to create the technology to be able to measure all of that information for those isometric lifts over any period of time and get that total number that was never available before.

Yeah, that's actually one thing I thought about when I first got your machine. I'm like, why don't I just push against the wall as hard as I can and then like pull against the, you know, the pull up bar and a squat rack for as hard as I can and then just find something so heavy I couldn't move it like a, you know, car, and try and lift that as hard as I can. But the thing is, I can't quantify any of that. You have this app that ties into the actual force plate that you're standing on that allows you to see, like you were talking about earlier, how much weight per second you're generating. Total amount of force produced. And then also it measures, you know, it beeps when you've gotten to 10 seconds or 60 seconds or three minutes or whatever you've set the actual time for. But we're coming back real quick to this idea behind 10 seconds. Why 10? Like, is the research behind the actual time under tension necessary to elicit a result, or are you just randomly choosing 10 seconds that you're starting your patients off with?

I mean, originally it started off just following a lot of Pete's work. You know, he actually said that somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds is all you need. Think of a sprinter. You get Usain Bolt. You can only keep up that level of intensity for 10 or 15 seconds before you start dropping. So that all out effort is what you're looking For. And you just. There's no way to keep that up past 10 or 15 seconds if you're truly at your highest level of intensity.

Yeah, well, that's what I did initially when I got the machine was I did 10 seconds per lift. I felt like it was extremely fast and explosive and effective. But I wanted to get, especially after you told me that you did three minutes. Minutes. I wanted a lot of that growth hormone effect of the lactic acid buildup and also the endurance. You know, you started using this when training for Ironman triathlon. I know. You know, and you're a big guy training for Ironman. And I wanted to. I wanted kind of that benefit of the muscular endurance that the longer sets could generate. So I started going longer and longer. But the idea is, and this is something I like, there's that little button on the app where you can have it beep when you begin to fail. Like when you drop off to about 60% of the amount of force you started generating in the first place. And I find, you know, 20, 30 seconds, sometimes my force will drop off to the point where I'm below 60% now. Now explain to me the. The drop and whether if I drop below 60%, I should just stop the entire workout right there or the entire exercise right there. If there's any benefit to kind of pushing through even as your force production drops.

Well, like you said, there's two different ways you can lift. You can go based off of time. If you want a predetermined time, or in that case where it's a percent drop, you're doing it based off of your performance.

And that performance drop, you can actually change to any percentage that you want to. And it actually was intended to be more like a lift that you would do one set to failure, like Mike Mentor would do, where you just get to the point where you have somebody help you with that very last rep into the positive, you squeeze on the static and then you're lowering it as slow as you can while you're basically in tears and screaming as hard as you can, letting it down through that negative where you truly have absolutely nothing left. You know, isometrically on like a belt squat in three minutes. By the time I get to three minutes, my legs are shaking so bad I can barely even stand up on my own with my own body weight. But the question would then be, at what point do you give the body the stimulus it needed for growth and not have to go beyond that and make it harder for your body to recover? Yeah, I think Only future studies are actually going to answer that perfectly. 60% seems to be a 60% drop. Seems to be a decent starting place with that. But some researcher somewhere might find out that there's a very specific percentage or maybe it's just different for everybody.

Well, I think you emailed me research. It was like way back in the 50s, the paper where they did a maximum, or they found a maximum muscle strengthening effect with one daily isometric contraction. And I think that one, they were using like an effort level of about two thirds of the maximum power. So that would come out to around 60, 66%. And that was a six second contraction that they used in that study. I don't know if those are trained or untrained subjects or do you know the research study I'm referring to?

Yup, yup. And that's the basic idea. Somewhere between that 5 and 10 second range is what most people will benefit from when they're trying to put on muscle and build their strength capability.

Okay, so if you're in it for the muscular endurance game or you really want to increase lactic acid tolerance or growth hormone production post workout, you could go for the one minute or you know, if you're Ironman, for example, you know, all the way up to three minutes. But what you're saying is like a six to ten second time range is all that it really takes as long as you're pushing as hard as you can, right?

Yeah, you have to get that peak up real quickly. Sometimes when people first get started, I actually like to go up to 20 or 30 seconds because there's something unique happens where the brain figures out how to fire more and more motor units. And as that's taking place, you actually see they're not. You'd think that they'd be tiring out after five or 10 seconds. And sometimes that number keeps going up and up and up because they just don't even know what it's like to really truly contract their gluteus maximus, for example. And all of the motor units there, their brain has never found they're sitting on their gluteus maximus all day long. They've never really had to figure out how to do that. And even people who are relatively seasoned lifters.

Sometimes they tend to bounce a weight a little bit, use a little bit of momentum and never really truly contract the muscle. The way that they say when I'm doing it isometrically, they're just, wow, I've never felt the muscle in that way.

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Yeah, it's a weird feeling to actually push as hard as you can using the different moves, you know, these pull and push moves that you've got loaded into the app. Now the, I know like Charles Atlas had his dynamic tension method that was back in, I think that was like the 40s. And you know, there's this high muscle tension is stuff that's been studied, I believe since the 20s. But as far as anything that's come out, you know, in terms of research on isometric contraction, you know, I mentioned that one back in the 50s, you mentioned another one with these power lifters where they found that this isometric training induced increases in powerlifting lift.

I guess it was the actual. Were they measuring power production or strength in that particular study?

Yes.

Okay, so what about since like, are there any of the research studies behind this stuff as far as like the amount of time under tension or any other things that we can use to advise us as to the best protocols?

Well, it's a little bit. If you go to PubMed, there's thousands of research articles on there that are regarding isometric force of some sort. It's kind of frustrating that a lot of them just have to do with grip strength and they're talking about a percentage of your maximum grip strength and its effects on cardiovascular output. Like man, it would be amazing if when they were doing that study that they actually had the PeakFit Pro, had Real numbers and do a full body lift. I've never really thought about just doing a grip strength and how that can affect the entire body.

Yeah, that's interesting. But what about what's happening physiologically? Do we know what's happening physiologically during isometric training that would elicit those kind of results with such a short period of time spent lifting?

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that all four types of muscle fiber are being engaged and you're recruiting every possible motor unit.

Get into that for me. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Absolutely. So you know, you go running, for example, let's say out of a 10 out of 10 capability that somebody has to contract those muscles. For most people, maybe you only need 30% of your muscle Fiber to actually run. Nobody's ever at 100% unless maybe for a short five or 10 seconds, you're at an all out sprint. So that has to do with more of the amount of motor unit, amount of muscle fiber that you need to recruit to do a specific lift or a task. And with traditional lifting, you automatically are going to be picking a lighter weight to go through that full range in your weaker range of motion. And just by the nature of that, your body is not going to have to recruit as much of the muscle fiber and as many motor units to be able to do this.

Okay.

Intensity level is decreased. So you're just, you're not gonna get the same stimulus to the body.

So in a way you're, you're almost fatiguing the slow twitch and the fast twitch muscle fibers during the course of the lift, assuming that you're lifting to exhaustion and reaching as high a peak as you can during the lift. And then in addition to that, you're also seeing an increase in the number of motor units that you're recruiting. Again, if you really are doing a peak lift to failure with as much time under tension as you can produce.

Exactly.

Now, what about the cardiovascular response? Like I interviewed Dr. Doug McGuff about how strength training can count as cardio and we talked about the physiological response to super slow training. I think the way that he described it was that you, during dynamic exercise, like let's say doing dumbbell curls, you would see a volume load on the heart and you would, you would see an increase in things like cardiac output, for example, or heart rate or stroke volume. But with static exercise, what you would tend to see is like a huge increase in mean arterial pressure. And so you get this big, big increase in arterial pressure and then a subsequent beneficial drop in blood pressure post workout. Almost like you're getting a, a cardiovascular training effect from a blood pressure standpoint. But have you looked into any of the research on cardiovascular training and isometric training, and for you, especially using this thing for Ironman, what did you find as far as the cardio results?

I mean, I don't have any specific numbers as far as the cardiovascular side, but I can tell you that you get close to three minutes lifting that hard, I'm completely out of breath and have nothing left. I have to imagine that there's pretty significant gains. I mean my biking alone, I've seen my watts on the bike go up significantly that I can sustain over a 40k time trial on the Computrainer. So I know that all of the different numbers are going to be very consistent, apples to apples comparison.

So some of those kind of things have been very significant. But as far as double blind randomized studies with, you know, 20, 25 subjects, 50 subjects that are going to do that, I mean, that's, that's part of where we need to go as a company and get those research results.

Yeah. Well, what about in terms of the cardiovascular training, the necessity to include actual high intensity interval training or running, et cetera? I mean, I assume you're doing workouts other than just the isometric workout a couple of times a week.

Absolutely. So still going to be doing a lot of the other biking, running and swimming that's involved with it. I would argue that if an ironman athlete was going to put any workouts off to the side and not get them in during the week, a lot of times it's their strength training sessions because they just want to put in more hours into whatever it is that they're going to do. So it makes it really convenient to get such an intense lifting workout in, maximum amount of strength built and then being able to just spend all the other additional time doing more sport specific training, whether it's going to be technique focused or just putting in the hours that you need to for a distance race like that.

Now, playing devil's advocate, don't you see kind of a loss of either range of motion or athleticism or what we might call functional fitness when you're just pressing in a single range of motion? Like for example, I believe the instructions that you give, and this from what I understand is based off of what you learned from Pete Sisko. So you're supposed to do a single set to failure isometrically at the point in the lift where you are least efficient, if I understand correctly, and you're actually your strongest. Right, I'm sorry, you're most most efficient. So if you are squatting, you'd be at about 30 degrees of knee flexion with that belt on, just squatting as hard as you can. Or if you're bench pressing, the elbows are just slightly bent, kind of sort of towards the top of the lift, but because the joint is not moving through any range of motion at all. Do you see kind of a trade off in terms of the amount of functional fitness or athleticism you're building because you really aren't moving through a range of motion. So how do you tackle that?

Well, in a couple of different ways. First, have you ever seen, you know, somebody like Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan on a fast break getting Close to the basket, going down into such a deep squat that their butt is practically down to the ground and then exploding off and dunking. About basketball, you know, a full range for an athlete like that is just something that they really don't use. It is going to be closer to that 30 degrees. They get a little, you know, in a very powerful lift to get off the ground. Or you take, you know, one of the athletes who have the machine as well, he's played in the NFL as a lineman for four years with the Titans, and you would never hit somebody and offensive lineman, where you've got your hands almost up against your chest and trying to push somebody from there, you're going to have your arms out in front of you where you've got the most amount of leverage. And that's where the functional power comes in with almost all sports.

Now, I did see one study in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research, this was just like two months ago, and the National Strength Conditioning association put out the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research and looked at the, I think it was the deadlift. And they did find a significant increase in strength on the deadlift, on the, the full range of motion deadlift after simple isometric training with the deadlift. So we know, and you kind of alluded to a similar study earlier, that it can help with actual weight training movements to train isometrically. But I guess one way I think about this, and I'd like to get your perspective on it, is anytime you're moving through range of motion, you do, you do get more of an eccentric training effect. You get more muscle fiber tearing, you get an increased risk of injury, say like doing even a barbell or a hex bar deadlift versus an isometric deadlift in which you're not moving through range of motion. So when it comes to the athleticism trade off, I mean, do you kind of couch this in terms of building strength just as well or better without actually increasing risk of injury by moving through a full range of motion?

Yeah, I weight that very heavily. I think that you'll get for sure way more strength lifting isometrically. And when you decrease the possibility of getting injured, you know, that's how a lot of athletes actually ruin their career before it even gets started. Especially in like a high school workout gym. You know, a lot of times those athletes just their ego gets ahead of themselves a little bit. They throw on way more weight than they should even have on there just to try to look as good as the last person that was lifting. And their biomechanics are off, they screw up their back, they screw up something else, and then they're just constantly back and forth between injury and a little bit of recovery and they never really take off. Off as an athlete, no, I don't.

Want to give people the wrong idea because I'm still doing like my obstacle course training workouts where I'm running, going over walls, climbing ropes, you know, hanging from monkey bars. And then I'm also doing right now my, my training for some of these other like train to hunt competitions and stadium races that I do, like sandbag deadlifts and sandbag get ups and burpees and, and you know, full range of motion type of exercises. So I, I'm not saying that this would be all the only style of training that you would want to do to say like go to a Spartan or go to a triathlon, or get better at basketball or soccer or tennis or something like that. But when it comes to the actual strength training effects and getting a high amount of benefit in a very short amount of time by doing these single sets to failure, in my opinion, I found it to be about as efficacious as like the, the Doug McGuff style super slow training. Do you know the type of training I'm talking about, Chris?

Yep, absolutely.

Yeah. Where you've got like five lifts. The overhead press, the lat pull down, the seated row, the leg press. There's one other, I forget, the chest press. Right. And it's like 30 to 60 seconds up, 30 to 60 seconds down. Usually you last about five to eight reps and then you're just toast and it's 12 to 18 minutes to failure. This is kind of a similar concept, except you're generating even more force because you're simply lifting in one single joint range of motion. You just have to have this single all out isometric contraction. Not to kick this analogy to death, but again, like you're lifting a car off of a, I was gonna say car off of a burning baby. That's not right. A burning car off of a baby. So the question that I have for you though, related to this, that I know a lot of people are gonna ask, is the whole component of muscle and size, because like I mentioned just a few minutes ago, there is no eccentric contraction. There's not a lot of actual muscle tearing or muscle damage going on. And that, from what I understand, is the actual signal to the satellite cells to proliferate and cause an increase in hypertrophy or muscle size. What do you see as far as hypertrophy or size when it comes to this style of training.

Well, the ultimate stimulus for muscle growth is going to be progressive levels of overload.

And because we can measure it so closely, I can know every single lift is going to be with that progressive overload. That's really the major stimulus that anybody needs for muscle growth. And you know, to go back to what you were saying as far as, you know, other sports to, you know, there's absolutely scenarios, especially like a CrossFit athlete or somebody who's doing Olympic weightlifting where they can get massive improvements from lifting isometrically and get a lot of strength. But there's no question they have to go back to, there's a lot of skill involved with a lot of those lifts and they still have to work that skill. You know, take a basketball player. Yeah, absolutely. You can get incredible amounts of strength gain lifting this way in a short period of time. I'd rather they go spend the extra time shooting free throws and dribbling and passing and working on sport specific skills that are going to, you know, take their game that much further.

Yeah, it makes sense. And I think one thing. Well, I've got, I've got two observations on that. First of all, I did find some studies that found that the average muscle cross sectional area in response to a maximal isometric contraction. And again, it's kind of like Tabata training, right? It's like people talk about the magic of a 20 second hard 10 second easy for 4 minute style of training and then folks go do that at the gym and go at like 70% for those 20 seconds. Like it has to be all out. We're talking about a hundred plus percent of VO2 max to make something like a Tabata training set effective to allow you to actually get significant mitochondrial density and cardiovascular gains with just a four minute workout very similar to this. These have to be a maximal isometric contraction as we've kind of alluded to. Like it's a hard contraction even though it's over with in a relatively short period of time. But anyways, I did find one study in 2002 where they saw an increase in average muscle cross sectional area of about 12% after isometric training. And that was following a drop off period. I think it was about a 60% where they kind of stopped the, they stopped the set when the people had generated as hard a force as they could and then dropped off to 60%. And then as you alluded to, we know that there's a significant increase in the amount of motor units and muscle fibers that are recruited during a maximal isometric contraction compared to an eccentric or a concentric contraction. And so we do, we do know that you can build muscle, that it can serve as a stimulus for muscle growth. You know, not to mention the growth hormone release that occurs after if you're doing some of these longer sets because growth hormone is a response to buildup of lactic acid. And so if you're doing a one minute or a two minute or God forbid a three minute isometric set to failure, you are going to see a growth hormone effect. But one of the things that I was kind of messing around with and I want to get your feedback on this was I used your machine. I used this Peak Fit Pro and I did isometric training but then I followed it up and this was actually based off of an article that I read on T Nation about isometric training. I followed up the isometric with full reps to failure. I did this a few times and even though I didn't get get that sore after doing just the isometric training on the Peak Fit Pro, it was like I can barely move my muscles sore musculoskeletal response when I would do for example isometric set to complete failure on the Peak Fit Pro and then drop and do push ups right after doing the the bench to failure. Or I did another one I did was the deadlift. I did the deadlift isometric about a 75 second all out contraction. Then I went over to the bar where I didn't have a lot of weight loaded. You know, it was like 135 pounds so plate on other side and just ripped the bar off the ground to failure. You know, I think it was like 12, 15 reps, something like that. Have you toyed around with, with kind of mixing up other forms of training in with the isometric training to see if you could get more specifically more muscle or size or hypertrophy.

I haven't specifically done that. Most of my additional working out is just, just more specific to Ironman for myself.

You're just, you're walking a line where you want to create the stimulus but then not make it too hard to recover from so that you can get your next workout in. You know, like almost like Phil Maffetone's training when you're going to be running at a certain heart rate that you can recover from and do another workout later tonight or tomorrow if you're going to do an all out max lift on the PeakFit Pro isometrically and then adding in a bunch of other sets or reps of a particular lift. You know, there's absolutely potential to be gained from that. But at what point are you making it harder to recover from? You know, if you end up sore for three or four extra days and you really can't get your best workout in the next day, that might be more cardiovascular. You might, you know, go for a long run or a long bike ride and you can't put in your best effort there. It's going to be something that is probably more on an individual basis. Need. Need of what you're looking for with your training.

Yeah, I will. I was pretty useless the next day, the next couple, but I honestly, I've done it a few times since and, and you know, again, like, if you're listening in, you're like a bodybuilder and just size is your, is your pure goal or hypertrophy is your pure goal, or you're whatever a high schooler who wants to just put on a bunch of muscle mass. I, I kind of like that idea of going isometric and then following that up with like a, like a set to failure off of the machine. I think it's a pretty interesting way to train for hypertrophy.

While you're at it, you should throw on those ischemic bands.

Oh, like blood flow restriction? Yeah, that'd be a good idea.

At the same time, make it as hard as you possibly can.

Yeah, well, you'd probably get an even more enhanced growth hormone response from those blood flow restriction bands, although admittedly they reduce the amount of force you can produce. So I'm not sure if there'd be kind of a little bit of a trade off. But anyways, another, another question that I have for you is just about kind of the way the machine is, is built, because we haven't really gone into that or described for folks how it actually works when you take the app that ties into this force plate and then actually do a workout using the app. So can you go into the actual, I guess the, the invention itself, Right, like how it actually works and how the app combines with the machine?

Sure, absolutely. So the machine itself, it looks relatively simple if you just were to see a picture of it. But sometimes things that look simple, there's a lot of design and ingenuity that goes into it to be able to pretty much do any exercise you could think of. One of my favorite pieces of it was what we added into the middle of the base plate. I call it the universal joint because that's where you can attach the chain for the Belt, squat or a chain for almost any range of motion for any lift that you can kind of make up at that point.

And then there's just two upright bars, a bar at the top for stabilization, and then you've got the bar in the middle and it can slide into position from one lift to another very quickly. And in the guts of the machine there's a 5,000 pound load cell. So the. I've never seen anybody come anywhere close to the £5,000. I'm actually the closest person I've ever seem to even come close to £3,000 at this point. But I'm sure that there's people in the ultra strength world that will push some of those numbers over the course of time. The data then goes to a Bluetooth board that we had designed and that all goes to the app. And that's really where all the magic takes place is on the app that could just easily be downloaded on the itunes app store.

So basically you've got this force play that is detecting the amount of pounds generated, sending that signal via Bluetooth to the app. And once you start the lift and you press start, you know, for example, I have mine set for a 10 second countdown. So if I'm gonna do the deadlift, I press start on the app and then 10 seconds later it beeps and I have it set to go for, I think right now, like I mentioned, 75 seconds. So lift as hard as I can for 75 seconds. And during that entire time, the phone app is gathering data about how much force I'm generating pounds per second, total amounts of pounds generated or produced over or lifted over the course of those 75 seconds. And then also a comparison of how that particular deadlift corresponds to the deadlift that I did in my previous workout, say five days earlier or seven days earlier. So I can see what kind of drop or increase in strength production that has been generated.

Exactly. You'll be able to measure your peak weight and compare it to the last time you'll see your total weight.

So yeah, an incredible amount of data that you'll have there for sure. And even while you're in the middle of your lifting, you'll know you can look at the live readout of exactly how much you're pushing. Give you a little, it's a little bit of a catch 22 because you're going all out and half the time your eyes are closed and it's hard for to concentrate. But if you know that you're trying to reach a certain number and you're Watching your iPhone or your iPad to see if you're breaking through that or not. It can give you a little extra motivation.

Yeah. I don't look at the screen at all. I can't, I literally can't focus on anything except the ceiling. So I, my eyes roll back in my head and I just grunt and go as hard as I can. So I just listen for the beep on that app to tell me once I've, once I've reached that total of 75 seconds. So.

And it's a little deceiving. I'm kind of like you where you're grunting for the whole time. And sometimes I even lose my voice a little bit for a day or two afterwards because I'm just grunting so hard for, for all that period of time. But you know, I've even got 80 and 90 year old patients in the office and they're just giving the best effort that they've got. And it doesn't look quite as like you're delivering a baby for a lot of those people as well. So it is something that people of almost any age can do.

Yeah. And, and you generally again, you split it into the A workout as a push and the B workout as a pole. And that's based off of. Off of some of the stuff that Pete Cisco recommends.

Yes. And then we'll do individual things that are based on need. Like I.

Come up with a, basically a wrist strap around my foot and around my opposite wrist and go into a running gate position and just seeing what I can do from building that neurologic pathway where I'm lifting the opposite. So I've got like my left leg is lifted, lift the foot, the hip, contracting the abdominals in between and lifting the arm like you would be when you're running and doing that on both sides. A little bit more sports specific. In that case, you could grab you familiar with those elbow straps that you'd hang from and lifting your doing abdominal work. I'll do the same sort of thing with that where I could do different neck exercises or you could even take somebody who's training in jiu jitsu and put your arm through that strap and lift up like you're putting somebody in a guillotine or a rear naked choke and make it very sport specific at that point. Yeah, I even had one a couple weeks ago. Well, about a month ago now. I was at a Syracuse basketball game and the big man didn't have the strongest hands in the world and I just wanted him to be able to grip a basketball isometrically and build as much strength. Strength as he could during the middle of that left. That'd be perfect for a basketball player.

Yeah, yeah. And what about one other thing I wanted to ask you? Was any effect on body fat reduction? I mean have, have you looked into that at all in terms of metabolic rate, increase, body fat production or body fat reduction, amount of calories burned? Like, like is this helpful at all for weight loss? Because that's something it doesn't seem like if you're just pressing against something as hard as you can without moving through range of motion, you're gonna be burning that many calories.

For example, the, well, it doesn't have to do so much with the calorie burn during workout. Where you get the benefits is, and there's plenty of studies throughout PubMed that have very, you know, you put on, let's just say something as simple as five pounds worth of muscle. Five pounds worth of muscle is gonna burn an extra 30 pounds of fat a year, all day long, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, while you're sleeping, while you're just watching tv. Just because you have metabolically active tissue on your body doing what it's doing. And that's really where you're going to get the biggest benefit from a burning fat perspective. You know, you could absolutely. You're not going to get your thousand calorie burn the same way that you are on an hour bike ride or a couple hour bike ride. It wouldn't be the same as that because the workout's just over 2. But really, truly the benefit is having the extra muscle which comes on very, very quickly. Now, even people that are hard gainers. I had a good friend of mine, he's basically built like a twig. He's 45 years old and he had spent a lot of his younger years just taking weight gainers. And he's 6 foot 4 and weighs 135 pounds. And I'll give you an idea of his size. And he would take weight gainers and lifting all the time and just couldn't put on weight. Lifting this weight with me in the office. He averaged £1 of gain every single week for 12 weeks straight.

Wow.

Which, you know, it's a huge gain for somebody, you know, put on 12 pounds of muscle on somebody. You know, you're looking at the potential of 30 to 60 pounds of fat that could be burned or the equivalent in calories over the course of a year like that.

Yeah. There's some interesting research Too behind some of the. Well, I mean, for example, you look at blood sugar control. I know one study that they did on isometric training and insulin. Insulin resistance and beta cell function was actually really interesting. They found a significant improvement in insulin sensitivity and in pancreatic beta cell function with something like isometric training. Not something like isometric training. This was actual isometric training. In this case, they were doing back extension and abdominal flexion isometrically and saw significant reduction in the type of things we would associate with diabetes. The Journal of Clinical Hypertension did another one where they found not only some of the benefits on blood pressure that I mentioned earlier, but they saw increase in muscle bulk, they saw upper and lower body strength, as you'd expect, significant improvement in that. Big increase in bone density, big decrease in bone fractures. I mean, it's very interesting, this idea of what happens when you, in very simplistic terms, just push or pull against something as hard as possible without being able to actually move said object, which is essentially what isometrics is.

So I'm actually have a very specific story associated with that. You know, hopefully the FDA is not too upset at me for saying this, but I had a patient who went to see his medical doctor, got his blood sugar taken, and it was 465, which is awful. Charlie, people don't know what that. Yeah, so. And. But at the same time, he had a little bit of an issue where he showed up to the doctor late a few times and he was kind of fired on that visit from coming back to the office. So he was never put on a medication. And he came into the office that day and he said, so here's the deal. I've got my blood sugar monitor. I can measure this and I don't want to go on drugs. Oh, first thing we're going to do is change up your diet for sure. And then we're going to try to put as much muscle on your body so that you can burn off as much sugar as possible. And within a two month period of time, he was back into a completely normal range. I'm not saying that that's going to happen with every diabetic on the planet, but just there's steps in the right direction. If you cut a lot of extra sugar out of your diet and you're building muscle, which is abs, there's just scientific fact more muscle on your body is gonna burn more sugar. And as a result, it made her. I obviously love to have 100 patients that I could test that on, but that was one awesome case. That really made a big difference.

Wow. Wow. It's super interesting. You know, the idea behind this extremely short effort and what happens physiologically. I think a lot of people just feel like you gotta crush it for an hour to an hour and a half. And don't get me wrong, I actually kind of like I'm one of those guys that likes to go to the gym and just wander around and lift on stuff for a while. But at the same time you have to accept the fact that if you want to be a hyper productive person or get a lot done or extreme efficiency is important to you, this is the, the type of training that can actually make that happen. So you know, for, for me, on a busy day like yesterday, case in point, I did about 15 minutes of high intensity interval training on the bike and then just went in there on the peak fit pro, did a set of deadlift set, a squat set, a bench set, a shoulder and a set of lat pull downs. Just, just. And each of those was about a 75 second contraction in between each. I like to do some mobility work, right. So I'll do like some side to side steps and some cat cows or some opposite arm, opposite leg extensions. I never like to just sit there on the bench recovering. But you know, I spend about two to three minutes between each set kind of moving and doing some mobility work and then do the next set and I'm, I'm in and out within about 18 minutes is, is what I've timed it to be. So, you know, something like that. I've got within a half hour my entire cardio training and strength training done for the day. So that's an example, the type of thing this can be used for. And obviously it's not, I mean this is a pretty, I mean a lot of R D behind this machine. It's a freaking force plate. It's, it's, you know, it took me about an hour to assemble when it arrived to my house. But I can tell it's, you know, it's not an inexpensive amount of technology that's put into this thing. So I understand this is a little bit different than say like investing in a set of elastic bands and you know, a couple of dumbbells. But fill me in exactly on what's going on as far as the price point on this thing and whether it really is something people are buying for their homes or if this is just something you'd buy if you were a, like a medical clinic owner or a health club owner or a gym owner owner.

We're actually at about half and half right now with owners of the PeakFit Pro. Half have them in individual homes and then the other half are in some type of a commercial setting, chiropractor's office, physical therapy office. There's one that's like a cryotherapy rejuvenation location.

So it is about half and half. The price point is at $6,500.

And you know, there's a lot of very thick, strong steel and technology built into it. You might get the sense of looking at it like, oh, you know, that's actually what I thought to begin with. I was like, wow, you know, I probably could make this for five or six hundred dollars, sell it for a little bit more than that and go to town. And it ends up being a whole lot more expensive than that when you're actually producing it with the kind of quality and durability of it.

It 6,500. Do you have any kind of payment plan or anything like that for folks?

Yep, absolutely. There's any number of different situations where they can basically lease to own it. They just over whether it's a one, two or three year lease to pay for it in a home or a commercial location. Those are, those are options for sure.

Awesome. And I know we've got a discount code for people too. It is Greenfield. That saves a couple hundred bucks if you use code Greenfield. And I'll put that also if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com iSometrics I'll give you guys a link to the Peak Fit Pro and then also that code as well as the video that shows me grunting and groaning on this thing. If you actually want to see what the thing freaking looks like and how I personally look like a hack using it, grunting and groaning out here in the forest.

And if people are ever interested in calling, asking questions and they even just mention that they listen to this podcast or any number of your.

Videos or information that you've put out there, then you know, absolutely. They'll get that discount as well.

Awesome. Got it. So. So it's called the Peak Fit Pro. If you're listening in, I own one. I've been using this thing. This is the one that you guys have heard me talk about a few times. If you've ever heard me mentioning over the past few months, single set to failure training. This is it. I understand it's, it's an investment, but, but I mean as far like if you're just going to put one thing in a home gym Put this, maybe slap an air dine next to it and you're good to go. That's all you need the rest of your life when it comes to kind of the marriage of cardio and strength. And again, if you want to throw in some range of motion stuff. Yeah. You can also combine full range of motion exercising with it. But like Chris mentioned, you're, you're going to do so at the risk of a pretty significantly long period of time required to recover because it's, it's, it's very effective, but also it's, it does a number on your neuromuscular. And then if you add in the full range of motion stuff, your musculoskeletal system too.

So either way, there's always that potential of injury. You know, full range, you go. Do you bring your bench press all the way down to your chest? That's where your AC joint is most. Compromised position. Things can happen.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. Good point. So also really, really helpful for seniors or for people who are injured as well. You know, I had a back injury for about, about three months and I was still able to deadlift and squat bench, shoulder press and lat pull down with this thing because again, I wasn't having to move through full range of motion. So good point, Very helpful for that as well. So again, I'm gonna put a link to everything over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com iSometrics, including the discount code, the link over to Chris's site. I'll also link to that podcast I did with Dr. Doug McGuff for those of you who want to kind of wrap your heads around this idea of how strength training can enhance blood pressure and cardiovascular health, as well as. And Chris, in the meantime, thank you for coming on the show for sharing all this stuff with us and for inventing a very cool device here.

I can't thank you enough. I really appreciate it.

Awesome. All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Chris Montanaro signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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Sam.