I currently focus on things like fat grips, rows, and farmers walks for increases in grip strength, but the idea of having an objective grip strength metric like "closing a level 3 CoC" is pretty appealing.

But is there a lot of carryover between crushing strength and isometric strength? What have you found?

Which causes muscle fatigue faster, assuming the same load is imposed to the muscle? For an example, doing squats vs holding a contracted squat position and why?

Why is it that an isotonic contraction cannot be considered completely isotonic?
It was mentioned in my physiology class and I can't find anything about why it can't? Is it because you have to stop the flexion/extension at some point so you experience some isometric contraction, or when your muscle fibers max out in terms of shortening/lengthening? It was simply mentioned with no info as to why.

Okay, I'm very confused. My class uses Foundations of Kinesiology by Peter Klavora, 2nd ed.

The book defines isotonic contraction as a contraction in which tension remains (nearly) constant as the muscle contracts. (p. 108) It then appears to contradict itself by saying that the tension increases or decreases during the contraction.

Every other source seems to agree that isotonic contraction involves constant tension. So why would the textbook say otherwise? If this is an error, what did Klavora mean to say?

Thanks to Rule 5 we have been able to filter out most questions about pain that used to be frequent to this sub. To anyone that still asks these questions I fully agree that the answer is go see a health professional for diagnosis.

Now that we have gone over that I thought I would post some useful content for those who have been diagnosed with a tendinopathy or have some form of interest in it. As volleyball players (especially those at the elite level) a vast majority of us will have experienced or currently do experience some form of tendinopathy. I personally have dealt with it for year but am also very much interested in the research around rehabilitation. Whether it is patellar tendinopathy (some for of Jumper's knee), achilles tendinopathy, hamstring tendinopathy the are a few things you should be aware of in current research.

First up see this presentation by Ebonie Rio. I would suggest it's essentially viewing for anybody that wonders about treating tendinopathy. The presentation goes through tendinopathy in general but I am going to focus on patellar tendinopathy as it is generally the most prevalent in the volleyball community. A quick summary of the research is the following:

• Tendon rehabilitation requires time under tension
• Research was carried out for 18 months on multiple factors for tendinopathy
• The research looked at Isometric exercise (5 x 45s on the leg extension machine @ 70% Isometric maximum voluntary contraction (MVIC)) vs Isotonic exercise (4 x 8 repetitions, 3 second concentric, 4 second eccentric, 100% 8 rep max) (see this point in the video). Both had 2 minutes rest between each set.
• Results showed significant pain reduction from isometrics and mild pain reduction utilising isotonics.
• For patellar tendinopathy the load used was 27.5kg (single leg) or bodyweight in a Spanish squat for 5 x 45s.
• Final points, the load has to be challenging to hold for the time. If the pain reduction isn't being seen either load or time is too low OR diagnosis needs to be revisited.

Note that this also supports that doing nothing is not helpful for tendon rehabilitation.

I hope you enjoyed the post (there are plenty of videos at that same account for tendon info). Use the information as you will but maybe it can help determine whether you think you have a good medical diagnosis or if you should seek a second opinion.

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Every so often I break off to do a 6-8 week block of isometrics. I used to loathe doing this and only began including it for two reasons - to work around nagging injuries and to gain greater familiarity with it when I was considering personal training as a 2nd job. How can one recommend or reject something they haven't taken a deep dive with?

Now I view it as somewhat mandatory, isotonic being better at creating muscle and movement patterns, isometrics being better at programming the brain to use that muscle. Is also one of the best ways to train around and with injuries, and the absolute best way to improve tendon density and either stiffness or elasticity, depending on how it is applied. Is a solid way to train muscle and movement patterns that are difficult to load with conventional resistance gear, and a really good way for folks stuck with very light resistance equipment to get some high tension work that compliments high rep/low weight - there is no excuse to not "train heavy".

My approach this block is based on a few common principles:

- initial effort should generate force as quickly as possible - don't ease into it.

- muscles should be trained at the longest length possible that still allows for good contraction force and includes the muscles you're targeting. This is very important as it improves strength across the entire ROM. Some compound movements require a little tweaking to get the posture right as the various muscle groups do not contribute equally throughout. Train at the longest muscle length you can manage that you feel activates the target muscle(s) sufficiently.

- use of stronger muscle groups to overload weaker or leverage disadvantaged ones. This cannot really be applied to Squat and DL. For those I keep tweaking the load to floor distance to recruit the best blend of motor units. Upper body movements are used in a DL or squat posture, using those movement patterns to overload the upper body muscles I'm working on.

- use of fast, blood flow encouraging movements between exercise selection, this can be sprinting in place or jumping rope as fast as possible with high knees.

- attempt to "hold" tension on inhale and increase it on exhale. The use of long hold Valsalva is not a good idea esp for hypertensive or pre-hypertensive such as yours truly. Generate some back pressure but keep the air moving.

12 seconds on (three exhales under load), 35 seconds off. The 1st exhale is a jolt, as hard as possible, 2nd

Do your worst!

They were cooked in Greece.

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

I've created a 10 minute program to fix your lower back pain and poor posture forever. And did I mention its only 10 minutes a day?

It is ubiquitous throughout our day: sitting at work, sitting at home or sitting driving. The fact of the matter is that we can't get rid of sitting completely, so we just have to come up with a way to mitigate the damage it is causing to our posture.

Lower Crossed Syndrome

What is it about sitting that causes back pain? When we are sitting, our hip flexors are in a shortened position. Over time they become hypertonic, in other words tight. This lack of hip flexion mobility can get so bad that you can't even stand up straight without excessively arching your back and can cause tightness in erector spinae or lumbar region of our back, which causes the CNS to inhibit your rectus abdominis, leading to diminished ab strength. Tight hip flexors can also inhibit the function of our glutes, leading to underactive or weak glutes by restricting the range of the glutes to the point they can't even contract optimally.

When these four symptoms present clinically, it's called lower crossed syndrome. The reason it is lower crossed syndrome is because if we look at a picture and draw connecting lines between the tight areas, and then the weak areas, it results in a cross.

Long story short, lower crossed syndrome can be a major cause of LBP, and it causes APT - which is the tilting of your hips that causes your lower back to arch excessively.  To fix both of these problems we just have to realise that all we have here is a collection of symptoms. If we can address the root cause of each of these symptoms, then we can get rid of back pain permanently! We simply need to mobilise the areas that are lacking mobility and strengthen the areas that are lacking strength.  That's it, and it only takes 10 minutes a day!

As there are essentially two groups, one that lacks mobility and the other that lacks strength, it follows that we can make a program with two parts; one that mobilises and one that strengthens. Looking at the diagram again, we have tight erector spinae, rectus femoris and iliopsoas. Conversely we have weak or inhibited rectus abdominis and both gluteus maximus and medius.

Posterior Pelvic Tilt

For the stretch the hip flexor group effectively, we need to familiarise ourselves with the movement of posterior pelvic tilt. It is simply the reverse motion of anterior pelvic tilt, so we need to be able to perform that movement

Because she wanted to see the task manager.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9961/

I find that a lot of people say a problem with isometrics is it only trains 15-30 degrees of where the static hold is, and because of that it doesn't build strength for full ROM making it inferior to dynamic exercises. Interestingly enough this myth started being spread around bodybuilding forums due to misinformation and also because isometrics went against the status queue. This led to widespread misinformation regarding the viability of isometrics for overall strength due to the belief it didn't increase all of your strength. Since then angle theory studies have been examined it were found when accounting for leverage, isometrics gave the same strength gains across the full ROM as dynamic exercise. Muscles done change where they are affixed to they are always stuck to fixed points by the tendons, it doesn't matter where you are in a loft, you are working your entire muscle, meaning whether it be dynamic, or isometric, you are strengthening your entire ROM. Many studies have been put out now supporting this, along with the fact isometric exercises recruit up tl 10% more muscle fibers then dynamic exercise leading to better strength gains on account of larger muscle recruitment. I wanted to post this as a saw many posts on this forum pushing the angle myth In regards to isometric exercises.

A large number of studies supporting what I said below, copy and pasted from different places and on my phone so excuse the formatting

Verkhoshansky, Y. & Siff, M. C. (2009). Supertraining, chapter 4.2.4 (6th Edition) 2. Steinhaus, A. H. (1955). Strength from Morpurgo to Muller—A Half Century of Research: Journal of the Association for Physical and Mental Rehabilitation, September-October 3. Hoffman, B. (1964). Functional Isometric Contraction: System of Static Contraction 1. Petrofsky, J et al. (2007). Muscle Strength Training and Weight Loss from a Combined Isometric Exercise and Dietary Program: Journal of Applied Research, vol. 7, no. 1 2. Image courtesy of Daniel Walsh and Alan Sved. 3. Hay, J. G., Reid, J. G. (1981). The Anatomical and Mechanical Bases of Human Motion 4. indstedt, S. L. et al. (2001). When Active Muscles Lengthen: Properties and Consequences of Eccentric Contractions, News in Physiological Sciences, vol. 16, no. 6. 5. Bonde Peterson (1960). Muscle Training by Static, Concentric and Eccentric Contractions, Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, August 6. Laycoe and Marteniuk (1971). Lear

Heard they've been doing some shady business.

but then I remembered it was ground this morning.

Edit: Thank you guys for the awards, they're much nicer than the cardboard sleeve I've been using and reassures me that my jokes aren't stale

Edit 2: I have already been made aware that Men In Black 3 has told a version of this joke before. If the joke is not new to you, please enjoy any of the single origin puns in the comments

BamBOO!

They’re on standbi

A play on words.

Pilot on me!!

Christopher Walken

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Or would that be too forward thinking?

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

When I got home, they were still there.

I won't be doing that today!

My daughter, Chewbecca, not so much.

Where ever you left it 🤷‍♀️🤭

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

[Removed]

You take away their little brooms

It was about a weak back.

Hindus, on the other hand, never had any beef.

There hasn't been a post all year!