Mark Bell's Power Project - Why Isometrics Are the Missing Link in Your Training | Ft. Keith Baar

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Dr. Keith Baar joined us to break down why sprinting is largely isometric at top speed, why stretching doesn’t reduce injury risk, and how heavy lifting combined with low-load, long-duration isometrics can build stronger, more resilient tendons. We also get into TRT and brittle tendons, BPC-157, collagen with vitamin C, grip strength, and how to balance muscle, speed, and elasticity for performance and longevity.Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=e#PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

What is an isometric? Technically, what it means is that you're contracting your muscles and you're not changing the joint time. So the longer hold isometrics, we do that for kind of health. The shorter isometrics, we do that for performance. So metabolically, as well as mechanically, we have very little fatigue. And the result is that I can do these every day. I can actually do them twice a day. I haven't taken anti-inflammatories.

I haven't iced it. I haven't done those things. I've just used movement as an anti-inflammatory. I heard somebody mentioning that they felt that sprinting was kind of an isometric activity. Once you get up to top speed, then everything else is isometric. So stretching was the number one thing that people test, and it has no effect on injury rate. Lift a heavy weight, you decrease musculoskeletal injury rate by about two thirds. Tendons actually get more what we call brittle with testosterone.

Big muscles, and we have small brittle tendons. That's a bad combination. I've heard from some people recently, and I didn't even really look into it a whole lot further, but I do find some of these things to be interesting. Sometimes when the body's moving around a lot, have the assumption that there's all kinds of things happening with the muscles and all this different stuff. But I heard somebody mentioning that they felt that sprinting was kind of an isometric activity. And I was like, that seems really, and I was like, oh, kind of like your muscles

aren't really moving as much, you know, I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? So sprinting has got two components to it. You have the acceleration component. So that's zero to 20 meters for elite sprinter. The first three steps, you're almost, you're up to, what, 85% of your top speed or something. And once you get up to top speed, then everything else is isometric. And the more isometric you can be, the better you are as a spanking. What's meant by that? So what that means is, and, like, how could that be? The muscles are moving around so much. Yeah. It's, it's a great question. And the best way to actually visualize it is to watch T-44 Paralympics sprinting. So what you have is you'll have, single biological leg, single amputee, and double amputees working or sprinting the same race.

And so what will happen is in the zero to 20 meters, the double amputee will be last every single time. Because what muscle does is muscle overcomes inertia. The role of muscle is to overcome inertia. So if I want to move weight and I want to push it off of me, I am going to use muscle. If somebody throws me a weight and I have to slow it, I use muscle. What happens in the acceleration phase is that I'm using my biological tissue, my muscle, to overcome inertia. So the one with one biological leg has more muscle, they can overcome inertia better. They can get up to speed. They get up the 20 meter mark first.

Then what happens is all the double amputees come flying by at the end. Because all they, once you get up to speed, then it's about maintaining that speed. And when we maintain that speed, what we're doing is we're contracting the muscle isometrically. All of the tendons, all of the movements, all of the movement. is happening because we're storing all of the energy in the tendon and we're returning that. The better we are able to store and return energy, the faster we can go. And so the less muscle mass I have at every race over 60 meters, the faster I'm going to be over that race. And so that goes not only for sprinting, but that also goes up to your distance runners.

So Andy Jones, who's still the under 18 British half marathon record holder, even without the fancy shoes. He's older than I am. Sorry, Andy. But he's kind of the physiologist for the under two, the breaking two hour marathons. And he studied all of his friends when he was kind of a young, outstanding runner and a burgeoning exercise physiologist. So he had all of the elite runners in Britain come into his laboratory and he studied them. And what he found is that he could do a correlation between how good, how close they could get to their toes in a sit and reach test. And so if you can't get close to your toes, you're passively stiff. If you can get past your toes, you're really passively very flexible. And then what he did is he put them all onto a treadmill and you had them all go at 16 kilometers an hour, up a 1% grade because that means you're running 16 kilometers an hour. That's basically 10 miles an hour. And you're running equivalent to how you run on ground.

Because if you just have the flat treadmill, you could jump and it would be not running. So going up the 1% grade is physiologically. discovered that, right? Like that he put it up on one. That was Andy. Okay. That was in himself. Yeah.

So then what he did is he had them all run at 16 kilometers an hour and he measured how much oxygen it took them to run at 16 kilometers an hour. The better runner you are, the less oxygen it'll take you to run that speed because the oxygen is basically how hard is it for you. And what he did is he had them all do this. The ones who came close to their toes or beyond, they used a lot of oxygen. The ones who barely could come to their knees, they used less oxygen. the more you used your passive stiffness, all of your tendons connective tissue, and the more you just contract your muscle is symmetrically, the better you are as a runner.

Because what your muscles should do when you run is it should contract isometrically. There's a beautiful actual animal study by T.J. Roberts, and it's in nature. He took turkeys, and I always tell the joke that he did this around Thanksgiving, and then he had turkey for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. But what he did is he implanted piezoelectric crystals into their muscles and into their tendons. And he had them run on treadmills. And when they ran on the flat treadmill and he had them run, the muscle would contract with good force, but the length wouldn't change. And then what that means is that it's contracting isometrically. And so the only time your muscle contracts in anything less than isometric when it shortens is when you go up a hill.

And that's the reason why when you go up a hill, you breathe harder. So here in Davis, we have Mount Davis just over there where you run over the, over the, over the, over the 80. And that's the only hill we have in the whole plate. That's the only hill we have. But if you do that, you're running along and you'll do like a long run in Davis, 18 miles, you change maybe 15 feet of elevation change over the whole place. And then you go over the Mount Davis is the only time we actually start breathing heavier. Because now your muscle actually has to overcome the inertia of the hill. And overcoming inertia of the hill means we have to contract it as a motor. And when we contract it as motor, it has to short. When we're running, we contract it as a strut, which means we contract it asymmetrically. It's interesting. I think I've heard that Kipchoga, I mentioned it before, that he can't touch his toes and that would track. Absolutely. Yeah.

You know, I have a question about that because I think if, and it could be right, but I think when somebody hears that, something that where my mind goes is not necessarily stretching, but more so your passive resting positions, like sitting in the Saza position, right on top. of your knees and your ankles because when you get yourself to the ability to do that, like you now have a level of a lack of tension in those structures when you're in those positions. But I think then one would then wonder like, wow, if I'm becoming comfortable in these resting positions, does that then mess with my ability if I want to do something that forces me to create force quickly or require stiffness? Because the reason why I ask this

I think it's very important to be able to handle those positions, but then I think it's also important to have practices like a jump rope, right, or sprinting that force you to be able to create tension, right? What are your thoughts there? So there's really important understanding is that there's two types of stiffness. Okay. There's passive stiffness. So that's being able to sit in that position means that you have decreased passive stiffness

through the knee, through the ankle, through all these joints. then there's active stiffness. And so active stiffness is that I'm going to use my muscle to increase the preload on the tendon. So you have any of those like grip strength things with the spring, right? So if I'm just at rest, there's no load on the spring. And so now when I go, it's kind of easy to go. But if I go and I preload that,

and you can either preload it by moving it, adjusting the spring so it's at a longer length. and now it's harder to do that movement. So think of active and passive tension this way. Your dancer is a great active stiffness. Massive amounts of mobility through the movement. They can put their foot up straight up over their head. But also they can put their foot in the ground and jump three feet in the air without a problem.

What they have is they have stretchy tendons because, or they have low passive stiffness within those structures. But then what they can do is they can instantaneously use their muscle to contract that, or their brain to contract the muscle so that when they hit the ground, they can store all that energy and return it. The difference is that it becomes really important when we're a distance runner, is every time I do that, I'm using my muscle to do that. So I'm loading my muscle and I'm using oxygen and energy to do that.

When I can do that using passive stiffness, now my muscle is contracting asymmetrically, my tendon is stretching and recoiling. When I have to contract my muscle and shorten it to preload the tendon, that uses more energy. So it's less efficient. So I can't do it as many times. Same thing, a dancer can do these incredible moves,

but if you're in a road race and you're behind a dancer, you know it because they're dancing down the road. You know because they're bouncing up and down, because they don't they have to produce this active stiffness in order to not collapse into the run. We all also know this because we've all been in a fairly dark environment. We're walking along with somebody who's got our full attention. We don't see that there's a little step down in the road.

And you go and you take that step and you miss the ground. And so what happens is you look like you're going to fall down. And suddenly you have to create all of this force to lift yourself. up. Because what happens is we anticipate where the ground is going to be. We turn on our muscles to be able to hit the ground and preload our tendons so that we can store and return the energy. When the ground isn't there, we turn off the muscles. And then we don't have that active stiffness. And that's what causes us to basically fold into ourselves. So passive and active stiffness, two different things. We need to use our muscle for active stiffness. That means it's less efficient.

So the reason that our runners, whether it's sprinters, whether it's marathoners, have a little bit higher passive stiffness is that it's more efficient. Got it. So when they have to hold top speed for 80 meters, if you have better passive stiffness, you can do that because you don't need as much energy. Some of them also might be getting stiff from the position that they're in all the time. You know, when you become a high, high level marathon runner or something like that, you're spending hours and hours standing. running on your feet. And I'm sure not all of them are the same. Many of them are probably different.

But to Encema's point, it's like, just because you want to improve upon that doesn't mean that you shouldn't stretch. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't work on a capacity to be able to move better and to be able to express your movement patterns better. And you're saying that you don't really think it would make someone worse necessarily.

I agree that you want to work on your movements, but I don't necessarily agree that you need to stretch. The difference is what we do, do as a way to improve our movement patterns is we do isometrics in those positions. And now what I have to do is I actually have to keep my muscle contracted. Now what I get is I get this signal that's basically a physiological signal to my system. When I'm doing passive stiff stretching, what I do is I have my two proprioceptors, my gold gut tendon organ, which is telling me how much tension is on the tendon.

And I have my muscle spindle, which is how long is my muscle. And when I'm doing an isometric, my gold geottenor organ is saying, oh, there's a lot of tension here. And my muscle is saying, oh, we're really long. Those two things go together really nicely, and now my whole body can adapt to that properly. When I'm doing a passive stretch, my muscle spindle is giving me a,

oh, that's really a lot of length that we have here. My gold tendon organ is saying, no, there's not very much tension here. And so we can get into problems if we do a lot of just passive stiffness or passive stretching. And I always give the example of our NCAA athletes,

If you look at NCAA, the athletes with the highest rate of Achilles tendon ruptures are gymnasts. Those are the ones that have the greatest passive, the greatest passive movement. They can move their foot around like crazy. Yeah. And so, but when a lot of coaches were hearing, oh, there's, there's, or if you don't have, you know, maybe enough flexibility in the Achilles, they would do things like give them the socks that they have this little lip that comes over and you can kind of pull your, pull your ankle when you sleep. And that actually increases the rate to some. And so what we know about stiffness is an injury is it's a U-shaped curve. If you're really immobile and you can't produce your range of motion, you have a higher

injury rate. Most of the range is going to be down. If we're hypermobile, we have a huge increase in injury rate as well. And I talked to the guy who he just left being the strength coach in Las Vegas for Cirque de Soleil. And he's a great person to talk to because he's got acrobats and he's got. contortionists those are the most amazing people to watch it's unbelievable absolutely so the acrobats are incredibly ballistic they're incredibly powerful and the and the and the acroats the

contortionists they are incredibly um hyperlax but he has this little thing and he says if there's a if everybody has to run to get on the bus the contortionists are injured for like three weeks just because they cannot do anything fast and it's It's just unbelievable. And what he literally says is most of the contortionists comes from a very small part of far eastern Europe. And they're all from this little region. And so what basically happens is that they, if they get these injuries, then they have to go and get another individual from these areas to come in because they're so, they've messed themselves up that much. So that U-shaped curve for injury and flexibility is really an important component.

because if we don't have the flexibility to maintain the joint structure because we're going to get injuries, so we can't do our range of motion. But if we have too much of the mobility, now what we're going to do is every time we go to move, things aren't lining up where they should be. There's too much lack of. So this shouldn't be our morning routine right here, what this guy's doing. That should not be the morning routine. Oh.

Oh, it gets more wild, Keith. Oh, yeah. That's pretty crazy. You know, that's obviously not something he started doing. He built to that. And that's the important component of it is just like, is... It's amazing what the difference between human bodies can be. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. And so this type of movement is amazing. But I'm really impressed that he can do the dynamic stuff that he did at the beginning. Let's go back maybe a little bit just about stretching for a moment. And by the way, Mark, when you mentioned stretching, like what I was mentioning earlier, was like being able to handle these passive positions, right? So like sitting on top of your knees, sitting cross-legged, sitting in half-says with your knee underneath. That, it could be seen as stretching. But I also think that those positions, for me personally, I would just want to be

able to handle those positions, being someone who's a grappler. So that's kind of, that's the context of what I was mentioning there. Yeah, maybe we can, maybe we can get a definition for stretching. I don't know what it is. So basically, the difference that I would see there is you're having to hold yourself in that position. And that's a really important thing because you can see if you go to you know Asian countries you'll see oh bus stop everybody's in a crouch everybody squat it and down and that kind of mobility in the West we don't have it very much. And so no a lot of people can't get into a squat and hold that squat. When you're in that squat it's not a stretch because I have to hold that position. If I relax I will collapse out of that position. Same thing is going to be true when

you're sitting in these positions where you're actually the reason that there's resistance isn't because we're passively sitting there. It's because we're actually having to hold that position. So if you relax your quadricep muscles, you cannot hold a squad. If you relax your quadricep muscles, you cannot sit in those positions because that is something that we have to do. So what I define as kind of a passive stretch is when we're trying to relax the muscle at a long length. And as we do that, what happens in the tendon is that the kind of tension in the tendon goes down. And that's okay, but what that does is that gives us the signal from the Golgi that, oh, there's not a lot of tension here. And our muscle spindle is, oh, we're at a really long length.

And then it's really hard for our body to understand a position where the two proprioceptors that are supposed to be in alignment to tell us, ooh, we're at a long position and there's a lot of tension, that we understand. We have to contract the muscle to protect the muscle. or we have to let off the muscle if we can't protect, if we think that the load is too much. But when we're in that kind of counter position, that's where we get into problems. The other way that we get into problems is a lot of people wake up, oh, my muscles are really sore today.

I'm really, really sore. And if I come in and I poke your muscle, you're like, well, that doesn't hurt. It's not that my muscle is sore. It's that when I go to stand up, it's really, really sore. A lot of times what that is, is that's inflammation in the tend. When we get inflammation in the tendon, it causes that goldie tendon organ, which is basically a little device that goes through the collagen. And it senses, what it senses is compression. When there's more fluid in there, now it's being compressed even at rest at low levels.

So that's, again, muscle spindle is telling us we're at low, we're shortish. Our tendon, our golden tendon is saying, whoa, there's a lot of pressure here. There's a lot of tension. And so we interpret that as pain or soreness. And that's really a lot of what we get when we get muscle soreness. You can have that muscle soreness and I can come in and it doesn't feel any different if I just poke you. There's sometimes where it feels worse, but most of the time your muscle feels okay under that push. So it's not really a problem in our muscle and we have no pain sensors in our muscle.

So what we're interpreting is pain a lot of times is that swelling in the Golgi. And again, because we've got this disconnect between our proprioceptors, probably plays a role in that. So maybe stretching could be a little akin to lifting and a little bit akin to like running and stuff. And maybe if you are going to stretch, maybe it should be just kind of modestly. Yeah.

Maybe not stretching real hard. I don't know what your thoughts are there. So the way that we look at stretching is it's a great way, it's a great mind-body thing, as much more than it is going to help my musculoskeletal. So if we look at injury rate, there's nice meta-analysis that looks at a bunch of studies, as many studies they could find to look at musculoskelet injury,

and then what are the things that mitigate them? And so stretching was the number one thing that people test, and it has no effect on injury rate. Lift a heavy weight, you decrease injury rate, muscle, muscular injury rate by about two-thirds. When you do some proprioception, you get maybe a third. So really the best thing we can do to decrease injury is lift a heavy weight. Again, we think that because we think about muscle pulls

as something that happens when the tenant is steady. different than the muscle is strong. So now we go to move the muscle tendon unit to a certain length. The tendon is stiffer, the muscle isn't as strong. And now what happens is the tendon doesn't stretch and protect the muscle, and the muscle has to stretch while it's doing that eccentric move. And now the muscle is gonna get more likely to be injured.

That's why in the 200-400 men's 200-400 World Championships, Olympics, you'll always see a couple of guys pulling up with hamstring pulls. Because all they've been doing is trying to increase their performance. And when they do that, they're doing a lot of things that are increasing the stiffness of the tendon. But they don't wanna lift heavy weights anymore

because the heavy weight is gonna maybe add weight to them or cause them to be a little bit slower, give them a little bit of muscle so what they do is they haven't lifted weights in a while. So the muscle has gotten no stimulus to get stronger. The tendon's gotten big stimulus to get stiffer. And now you get into the Olympics and bang, the tendon is stiffer than the muscle is strong

and you pull the muscle. Okay, I wanna come back to that because from what we talked about in the gym, I feel like there's probably a good solution to that. But I wanna quickly, before we move on from the stretching idea, you know, I think a lot about being able to have capacities, but not over, not over indexing on doing that. So like when it comes to stretching, right?

Like you talked about proprioception. So you've heard of like PNF, propioceptive, your muscovism. So when one goes into, let's say that one is trying to, to bring more mobility to their hips. And they wanna do some level, not that they wanna get to the full splits, but they wanna work that range.

Instead of doing it passively, what for example I do is I'll go to that range, but then I'll squeeze the floor together in that range to get things firing and then I'll relax a little bit, then I'll squeeze the floor again for a period of time. Or if I go into like a long range lunge, where like one leg is in front of the other, I'll have my back leg,

pushing forward and my front leg pushing back, even though I'm in that long range, rather than being there passively. Does that, does that, because that can build level of mobility there, but does that help make it better for one's body? Yeah, absolutely. So, so what we're, again, what you're doing is you're bringing tension while you're at a long length. Yeah. And so those are the two things we want to have. So if we're trying to increase range of motion, you want to have both a long, length of the muscle as well as tension on the tendon. Got it. The problem happens when we are doing it and the passiveness means that there's no

tension on the, there's less tension on the tendon. We're still in that long length. Yeah. And so I actually did a podcast with these circus performers and they were like, yeah, so I got this injury and he's like, okay. And he's like, yeah, I was doing the splits in a couple of ropes and I was doing this and I had trained to this. And then one of my friends just came and she said she wanted to do a hand.

stand into me. And so she then did a handstand and he hugged her and held her up and he's like, oh yeah, he pulled a muscle. And I'm like, okay, this is not something that most people would tell me. But they were really big in the idea of the worst thing you can do is what they do in kind of some of the gymnastics. Gymnastics is getting better at this. But it used to be that you would go into the splits and you would try and hold it and then people come and push you down. And bounce and stuff. Yeah. And you'd passively hold the splits. Yeah, you're trying to pull passively hold the splits and then people are pushing you or they're trying to actually give you that force you into that position instead what you do is you apply load to the in that case the groin or

depending how you're doing the split but yeah we're going to say it's the groin we're going to put tension there and what that does is that gives us again tension and length and then what we're going to do is we're going to do the p and f component which is pull yourself back yeah use the opposite use the antagonistic muscles to try and pull yourself further, and then you're going to squeeze again. And what you're doing there is you're giving, that's much more of an isometric load. So when we're doing like any, even any lunge, you don't even have to consciously say I'm going to push these things. In order to keep the lunge, you have to hold it there. And I always do these demonstrations, have everybody get up, well, let's do a lunge. And it's very easy because, you know,

everybody's kind of collapsed or holding themselves up about 10 seconds into it because very few people actually can hold the lunge for any substantial amount of time. And so when you do those types of things, you are using length and tension together. And when we have length and tension together, now we've got the right stimulus for our musculosculal cell system to get the range of motion that we need in order to do full range of motion exercise, their activities. So I can maintain my range and I can maintain my elasticity a little bit better when I do those things with range and tension. I love these kinds of conversations and when you think about it, it just makes your head explode that you've been studying and teaching for nearly 20 years on people not moving.

What is an isometric? Yeah. So an isometric is, and there's lots of different definitions and there's lots of different ways coaches use isometrics. Technically what it means is that you're contracting your muscles and you're not changing the joint angle. So that means that right now I'm doing an asymmetric because I'm standing up. I'm not changing the joint angle of my ankles. Your hip, my knees, my hips.

I'm using, for most of that, I'm using just, I'm stacking my skeleton. So my knees and hips, if I'm good, I'm stacking them by putting my rib cage in the right spot, can get gravity to basically put all the load through my skeleton. But then at a certain point, my feet have to then use a little bit of balance. And that means I'm using my soleus muscle, which is the small muscle underneath my calf muscle, to maintain my position. All right. So what we talked about it before, when we talked about muscle has these different roles. The three major roles are as a muscle, as a break, and as a strut. And so everybody knows the muscle and the, and the, and the brake muscle is overcoming inertia and shortening.

So I'm shortening my muscle. So I'm doing a concentric contraction. So that means I'm shortening my muscle to overcome inertia of a weight. So I'm lifting, say, a bicep curl. The brake is when somebody throws you that same barbell and you catch it here and you have to decrease the momentum of the object using the muscle. And that's an eccentric contraction. So a lengthening contraction. The strut is the one that.

people have a harder time with and I don't know if you want a simple demonstration it if you just take and everybody does this and they put pressure on their forearm and their arm is completely relaxed it bends at the elbow so now if I just contract my tricep and then I do the same thing now what I do is I move at the shoulder so what we use struts for is we use our struts is symmetric contractions intrinsically in our body, what we use them for is to change the joint of movement. So when I do a bicep curl, the reason I don't fold forward as I do a bicep curl is you use my multifitus, my back muscles, is symmetrically to hold my core to keep me up. So that the only joint that moves is my elbow.

And so we use our isometric contractions or struts all the time within our body. And then when we do an isometric exercise, what we do is we accentuate that. So what we're going to do is we're going to use the muscle to contract like actively, but it doesn't actually shorten. And that's where this isometric contraction seems like, you know, an oxymoron because it's like a jumbo shrimp. It's, I'm contracting, but I'm not changing length. That's not really what it means. It means I'm not changing joint angle. So when I do an isometric, I could do a very short isometric, less than a second, where I say, push up on a bar and the bar is held in place so I hit the bar with a lot of energy but my knees my

hips and my ankles they don't change length that's technically an isometric and I say technically because as I'm doing that every time I do an isometric contraction what happens is is the muscle actually shortens and the tendon actually lengthens but because the joint isn't moving. It is an isometric so it doesn't move. Iso meaning one metric meaning location or distance. So it's one distance. So it's one angle. So I didn't change the joint angle in my ankle, but I contracted my muscle really, really hard. And what that means is as I contract my muscle, it's actually going to shorten over time and my tenant is going to get longer. And that's why when we do say an isometric lunge, people have a really hard time doing it. It's not because

I'm doing something like step-ups and I'm doing it and I'm getting fatigued by doing the step-up again and again and again. I'm using my muscle as a motor. Here I'm using my muscle, again, as a strut, isometrically contracting, but as I'm holding that position, my tenta gets longer. And in order for me to hold myself in that position, I have to keep shortening and shortening and shortening the muscle. And so your isometric exercises could be anything where you don't move the joint over one second all the way up to, the two minutes. And so that's where a lot of the differences come in in programming. So the longer hold isometrics, we do that for kind of health. The shorter isometrics, we do that for performance, just like we would do normal plyometric or dynamic work. So by the way, when you're mentioning

those longer duration isometrics, I know some people who they love doing, they love doing wall sits. And when you say for health, it's health of what? Because, you know, when someone feels their muscles, they're like, oh, my muscles are doing a lot of work right now. So the isometrics, what are they hitting? So they're hitting, they're really, really good for tendon. Okay. They're good for muscles that don't necessarily always get the load. Uh-huh.

So when we move quickly, our muscle, the load goes through the strongest part of our body. That's going to be true for our bones, our muscles, and our tendons. So when we do any kind of quick movement, what happened is we've got this line that is really strong within, strong within, say we're sticking our foot in the ground and changing direction. We've got this really strong line of muscle, tendon, and bone that allows that force to transmit as fast as possible and allows us to change direction really quickly. When we do an isometric hold on that same thing, that fast bit starts immediately, but then it's going to tire for the muscle.

It's going to get tired, so you're going to have to either bring in different muscles or different parts of the same muscle. And within the tendon, you're going to have to actually get more of the tendon to actually be working. Okay. Go on a good challenge, you know, just try one minute on each leg of a lunge. Oh yeah. Just go on the left side, go on the right side, set your phone, do a, do a minute on each side and you'll be just cooking. Yeah, absolutely. And it's basically, that's kind of the way that we try and maintain kind of the elasticity and the health of the musculoskelet

system. Really important for runners, because the runners are always doing the same motion over and over again. So if you go in and you do that low, that low long duration isometric hold in your lunges, that's going to be good as a way to kind of get healthy load through those structures, especially if you do it after you've already done your run because all the strong bits have gotten loaded for 30 minutes an hour, however long you've run for. And now when we go to hold that isometric, now we're going to use the muscles that are remaining in that space and we're going to get load through the tendons. And that's a really good way to maintain mobility and to keep that elasticity while you continue to do your training.

Now there's a wide variety of isometrics, right? Yeah. So people talk about overcoming or yielding. And so those are the two main kinds. So and so the idea behind the overcoming and the yielding is that what you're going to do is your yielding means that say you lift the weight with two hands and you're going to hold it with one. and you're just holding it in that position and resisting the movement down. And then an overcoming isometric is you're basically pushing against something that doesn't move.

So you can go and you can push and you can have that as a yielding ice metric. You try to go, but you can't overcome the weight. And so that's why it's called an overcoming isometric. Because most of what we do is what we call 3 LD isometrics, which are low load, long duration isometrics, what we actually do is if we're going to do an overcoming isometric, we actually load the bar or whatever our device is with something that's about 50% of what we could do.

Because what I want you to do is I want you to do that overcoming isometric, but I want to make sure that you're not using too much force. So if I'm going to do a leg extension, I'm going to put on a relatively lightweight for you for your one-legged leg extension, and you're going to go at that 90 degree knee extension, you're going to start to push, but if you push too hard, it'll start to lift.

And so that's the way I limit. So the nice thing about yielding is that you can kind of have a good sense as to what you're starting with. A lot of people like to do the overcoming ones, but then they don't know how hard they're pushing. So if you have a piece of equipment and you want to do an overcoming isometric, you just put a lightweight on it,

and you go and you push, and if you move, that means you're pushing too hard. And so that's the way. that we can then program these overcoming, yielding, or 3LD isometrics. So, you know, I wanted to ask you about elasticity, but I think right now, since you just explained that 50% load, if we go back to the sprinter example that you mentioned, the sprinters who, you know, they stop training heavy so they don't stimulate the muscle as much and they're getting a lot of tendon strength through some of the things that they're doing with, they end up

pulling. What could be the solution for that? Would it be what you just mentioned right now? Yeah, so that's exactly the type of thing that we're looking for. The idea is that, and this is because, again, as we go towards something where we're trying to maximize our power, we do max power training. Max power training by definition is a very low weight as fast as you can. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to give that stimulus to the muscle the muscle tendon unit. What a muscle needs in order to get stronger is it needs a heavy load. What it needs to get bigger is it needs to go to failure. So what we are doing when we're doing our max power is not giving either the heavy load or the close to failure.

We're just giving those few repetitions as fast as we can. So it's not getting a stimulus to get bigger or stronger. We're giving a stimulus for the tendon to get to not break any of the little cross links that make it stiff. and then we activate the enzyme that actually makes more of them. And the reason that it's really important that I said that on those hamstring poles, in the world championships, those are all men, because men, testosterone increases the activity of lysoloxidase, which is the cross-linking enzyme, estrogen decreases that activity.

And so one of the reasons that males have more power than females is because they actually have more cross-linking than the connective tissues. One of the big advantages of people taking testosterone isn't about, oh, you're going to make your muscle bigger. That only happens at gobs of testosterone, like just insane amounts. What happens very quickly is you increase the stiffness, the connective tissue.

We also know that historically because of what happens to blood pressure, because men have higher blood pressure and more heart disease than women, largely because they have more cross-linking in the aorta. Because just like our tendons, our aortas, are made up of elastin and collagen. And so if we have more testosterone, what happens is it increased lysosidase, increases cross-linking,

makes the oarters differ. It doesn't open and allow blood flow to go through as much. Blood pressure rises. And so one of the things that we get physiologically for individuals to take testosterone is they increase their blood pressure. One of the reasons why men and have much more heart disease and higher blood pressure than women until menopause is because they have that higher testosterone levels. higher cross-linking. Women are protected because of, normally cycling women are protected

because of the rise of estrogen at the Luteal phase. Now, if I have that muscle tendon unit, and I'm cross-linking the hell out of the tendon, and as a male, I've got testosterone, and everybody's telling me how great I am. I just made the U.S. Olympic team, so that means my testosterone has risen even higher. Now the likelihood of me getting even stiff

or tendon is going up. And so all of those things are the reason my max power together with all of my other things, I'm going into the world championships, and I'm doing all of my stuff that I'm doing my power poses and all of this to get my testosterone and my aggression high. All of those things are increasing the stiffness of the tendon.

I'm never giving the stimulus to my muscle to get bigger and stronger. That's when I get that kind of imbalance. And I take that step when I get a little bit tired, I take that little bit longer step and bang, there goes the hamstring. Yeah, you know, real quick, sorry, Mark, but as you're talking about,

testosterone, I know that there are people who are like, well, my TRT, that means that's great for my tendons. Now, are they correct or is there something, is there something to think about there? So testosterone, the easiest way to understand what testosterone does to the tendon is to look at 1990s baseball. Okay. So what happened was people who were juicing all over the shop and they would get this and statisticians can now go back without knowing anything you can give them the statistics and they can say this player was juicy because what happens the statistics the statistics is they got better for a short period of time and then went to zero because what would happen is it would get stronger they would get it wasn't actually the stronger part that was the important part

they got more aggressive because what testosterone does is it makes you more aggressive so if you remember if you're old enough to remember 1988 olympics ben johnson again Again, the whites of his eyes were yellow because he had been juicing to the point where he had liver failure, or starting to get liver failure. But what he was incredible at is he would have the fastest reaction time out of all the runners by it.

He would be a half step ahead of everybody at the start. That's what was beneficial, the most beneficial component of performance enhancing drugs for baseball players. Because you have a fraction of a second to make a decision as to whether you're swinging or not at a pitch. if you are much more aggressive, you are going to make that decision faster and you are going to then be able to connect with that.

It wasn't about hitting the ball farther. Mark McGuire, when he was in college and weighed like 145 pounds, was hitting home runs like just huge distance. It was about helping him make that decision super fast. It's about making that decision quicker and more aggressively and more assuredly. So that's the performance effect. the drop-off was because the tendons were rupturing. And if you look at kind of what happens to tendons, is that tendons actually get more what we call brittle with testosterone.

The testosterone decreases the size effect of your exercise, so it blocks the ability of your tendon to increase in size. So it decreases the collagen, but it increases cross-linking. And that's what we call a brittle tendon. So you have a small tendon, but it's really cross-linked. that breaks really quite easily. And is that also because, you know, if an athlete is taking testosterone,

they can create more tension within the muscle, but the tendon itself isn't strong enough to handle the tension being created? Does that make sense? Or does that make sense? Yeah, so we have big muscles, and we have small brittle tendons. So that's a bad combination.

Got it. And that's why most people who are competitive at it were using a combination of testosterone and growth hormone. Because what the growth hormone was doing is it's affecting IGF1, which has an effect on collagen. The growth hormone has almost no effect on the muscle itself. It's just within the tendon,

you convert the growth hormone to IGF1, and that's necessary for growth. That's why the tallest people in the world are always, by definition, almost acromegalics, which are people who have growth hormone secreting tumors. You just got a bunch of guys who are listening to start taking growth hormone. Sorry about that.

But again, there's, again, the only thing testosterone is doing in a physiological male is it's changing the aggression component it's making you more assured so there are beautiful studies done in a number of different situations the most telling is they put people who have prostate cancer onto these drugs which are antinegrines they're chemical castration essentially if you put them on a weight training program they both increase muscle mass and strength identically so you don't need testosterone to increase muscle mass and strength. We know that because also women increase muscle mass and strength as much, if not more than men. And so the components there that are kind of beneficial are only really beneficial to a performance

in a performance state unless you're at such high levels of testosterone that it's much more physiologically damaging to the body as well. Yeah. And sometimes when somebody's taking testosterone, they might take something to block the estrogen. Now you're making things even worse. Yeah. Because you're going to dry out your tendons and ligaments probably even further without having the kind of lubrication of estrogen. Yeah.

So the aromatase inhibitors are going to, which again, testosterone estrogen is one reaction away from each other. So you put in those aromatase inhibitors. You prevent the production of estrogen specifically that people are worried about it in the breast tissue or any kind of fat tissue. where aromatase activity is high. And so what you're doing there is you're decreasing the estrogen.

The estrogen is actually important for kind of holding the collagen and making sure that there's enough collagen there. Are you seeing any of these peptides have any sort of positive impact on any of the stuff that you're learning with ligaments and tendons and collagen and so forth? So we are starting studies now in vivo. We've looked at them in vitro. So we can actually make ligaments in a dish where we make human ligaments.

They're bone to bone and they have a ligament in the middle of them. We treat them with, we've treated them with BPC 157 and we don't see any effect. We are redoing those experiments now simply because like most people who have access to peptides, whether you actually got the peptide or not, nobody really knows. So what we've done is we've gone to a reputable source of the peptides that have been third party purity measured to see okay now if we have optimally pure peptides, what do we see?

So those studies we're starting now. But most of what the peptides do like BPC and TB4 and say Tessmoreland, the Tismoreland is supposed to increase IGF1, the TB4 is supposed to increase, kind of proliferation and maybe some angiogenesis. The BPC 157 is supposed to increase angiogenesis. Those things aren't necessarily good for tendon.

Because if we have a tendon injury, one of the things that you do is you look for blood vessels. Because blood vessels are actually the thing that tell you that that's an injured tendon. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man.

It's called Good Life, Pratt. Okay. Tell me about that. I've been doing some good life protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of good life proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes of mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat and that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80-20 grass-fed grass-finish ground

beef. I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why like neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal and I can surf and turf, you know. I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard

for me to lock one down. But I really love the bovette steaks. Yeah. And then I, I always also love the rib eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rib eyes. So guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, pause, you can have to Good Life Proteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website.

Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. So if the drug is supposed to increase blood vessels, maybe not gonna be great for what we're looking to do. But it doesn't mean that it's not going to work. And so that's why we're testing it.

And we're going in and directly analyzing this using, you know, again, high quality, high purity drug and we'll see if there's any effect. Have you seen any impact on any supplements? You know, collagen has become really popular. And you think like, oh, you know, you got collagen in the body and you got collagen outside the body. And some people say take collagen with vitamin C and these various things. Have you ever seen any of those things in all your years of studying?

Like really make any sort of positive impact? or not really. Yeah, definitely. So part of that was actually built on our research. So we were the first ones to show that when you took vitamin C and rich collagen, you saw an increase in collagen synthesis in people. So we gave it to a bunch of athletes, a collaborator mine in Australia, did the feeding component where we gave them gelatin and some vitamin C.

And then they did jump rope. We did that for three days. We then took the same people, gave them a placebo or five grams instead of the 15 grams. the ones we gave 15 grams of collagen together with the vitamin C, we saw an increase. We then did a bunch of studies here at UC Davis, my postdoc Dana Liz, who's now the nutritionist for the Golden State Warriors. So what she and I did was we basically tested a whole bunch of different amounts and a whole bunch of different things.

And sure enough, you can see, like with our football team, if we gave them hydrolyzed collagen and vitamin C, or we gave them a placebo during their heavy strength training periods in their off season didn't affect their strength per se but what it did was it increased their leg spring stiffness so as they went their rate of force development was higher and for a lot of performance measures rate of force development is probably one of the best measures of performance rate of force development power to weight ratio are the two things that we look for for high performance athletes and so what you can see in the literature is actually that there's a better kind of relationship between performance and the collagen and vitamin C,

then necessarily maybe collagen synthesis. But we did some work, I did some work on a sabbatical a couple of years ago now with Lou Phanlun in the Netherlands, where we look to see, okay, how much, so if we just give you, say, whey protein after you've done your lift, and we look to see what happens to amino acids in the blood,

well, glycine goes down after that. Because weight protein or dairy proteins tend to be low in glycine and proline. and glacing is every third amino acid within collagen. So we just gave five grams of collagen together with, say, 25 grams away. And what we found is that you could increase both muscle protein synthesis and connective tissue protein synthesis. When you combine it too, huh?

Yeah, so it's a blended protein, and then we know that we need the vitamin C. That's some of the stuff that we've done here. We've done everything from intentionally leaving out the vitamin C to accidentally leaving it on the countertops, where it was in the sun and the vitamin C got ruined. And then we did a whole experiment and saw no increases in collagen synthesis in people. And then we realized that we had left the vitamin C out.

Or we did a study where I made gummies that instead of just combining them and then giving them vitamin C, I boiled the juice that we were using. And when you boil vitamin C, it becomes denatured and it's no longer useful. So basically we killed the vitamin C and we saw no effect on collagen synthesis, but we saw it in the ones where we gave it as a supplement

that had the either gelatin or collagen and vitamin C. That's pretty promising, that's pretty cool. Yeah, so, and you do see that in athletic populations that there's good data that shows it like knee pain, for example, in NCAA athletes, if you give them a placebo-controlled collagen, you see that there's a decrease in knee pain. Question about, is there specific,

because there are a lot of different, different types of like collagen. So is there a specific type of collagen that's more effective than another? No, so they all work. We've used gelatin, we've used hydrolyzed collagen, we've used specialized collagen peptides. There doesn't seem to be any difference.

And the reality is that we've done a study where there's actually a vegetarian vegan one, what it's made recomminately in bacteria. And it doesn't even make the hydroxylated amino acids because it doesn't have the enzymes to do that, but it has the glycine and the proline So when we gave that to people, it increased collagen synthesis in people, the same as hydrolyzed collagen and better than whey protein or a placebo. So we're pretty comfortable with the fact that any of the collagen's work, the one thing that we look for, and I tell people that if you're going to take collagen, you look for something that's from a skin-based source if you're looking at mammalian collagen.

So if you're getting it from pigs or cows or other things, other kind of livestock, basically what you want is it should say, from the pelt or from, you don't want the bone broth component a little bit. It's because mammals store our heavy metals in our bones. So the one question, the one I use is like a bovine hide that would. Bovine hide is perfect, yeah. Okay. And so the other way to do it is to go from fish because you go fish is going to be fish in skin and bones. And fish unlike mammals, they, they concentrate their heavy metals in their in their actual muscle.

And that's why like pescatarians have to be a little bit careful if they're eating lots of tuna and swordfish, another big fish that concentrate mercury from eating the smaller fish, is that that actually gets put into the muscle. So you can actually, because you're eating the steak, you can find that you get more kind of heavy metal exposure from fish by eating the steak, whereas the skin and the bones don't have the metals. But in our livestock, mammalian livestock, yeah, that's the only reason I would not necessarily go to a product that's going to have coming from.

from bone. As it pertains to an isometric, can you get like an isometric effect when you take out the eccentric component? So when you're doing something more concentrically, let's say like a deadlift or like I used to do chain suspended bench presses, chain suspended good mornings and the intent wasn't really to do an isometric. But I'm just thinking like, As those weights got heavier, there was an ISO in there of one, two, three, sometimes almost four seconds before the weight would come off the chain. Yeah. Yeah, you could, you'd see that.

When I, again, when I was a strength coach at Michigan, we always had this idea that we wanted to limit leverage and limit momentum. And one of the ways that we did that is we paused at the top of the movement. So you would do a lateral raise, you'd pause at the top. And again, that's the hard part. And that's really getting the muscle to work more. We're taking the series elastic component out because we're also limiting that bounce because that's what we're trying to do or make sure that you come back and we lift from not from the size, but we lift from an outreaching position where there's still tension on the muscle. But when we go and we do that or we do a hamstring curl, we hold it at the top for that half second or we do a lap pull and we hold it at the bottom for that second, we're getting a short isometric in there.

And that is giving us a really good stimulus for strong muscle and a little bit less stiffness at the muscle end of the tendon. And so that's going to be really good for health and making sure that as I'm doing my rapid movements, I'm not going to get a non-contact muscle pull. So in the last 10 years of his time at the University of Michigan as the strength coach, Mike Gittleson, who was the strength coach there, who had been a muscle physiologist, what he found is he had one non-contact muscle pull. in the whole time in his whole 10 last 10 years. Same. Wow. At that level, it's pretty spectacular. And what was it that he applied there that helped with that? So it's the heavy component because, again, we get muscle pulls when the tendon is different, the muscle is strong.

When I lift heavy, that's a good stimulus for the muscle gets strong. When I lift heavy, it's also, I'm going to be slower. And when I pause at the top of the movement, what I'm getting is I'm getting that isometric-ish load. it's a short isometric. When I get that, there's more sheer at the muscle end of the tendon between the muscle, kind of the interface between the muscle and the tendon

so that myotentine's junction. And what that does is that decreases some of the cross links at the muscle end of the tendon, makes that muscle end a little bit less stiff. And if I'm only doing the short, fast max power type thing, that's what I'm stiffening. So when I do the heavy and the slow, I'm going to decrease that stiffness a little bit.

If that's all I do, that part becomes more, risk for injury, but if I combine that type of heavy lift with now on-field training, now I'm in good shape. The problem we get into is when people just go into the off-season and they only train that one way. And then they come back after three months of not having the fast movements and they try and go in immediately into the fast movements. And so we need to have both of those types of things in order to have our body working well at a very high intensity. About some of the Morenovich type stuff where they would do, you know, like a little mini squats and then they would jump

and then they would land into like a lunge, I guess you'd say, and they'd hold an ISO. So it's like seemed like they were kind of fluctuating back and forth between like a dynamic movement and an isometric movement. Yeah. So the way of any training is that if you progressively go into it, you're going to be able to do it. Where we get into problems is, you know, you go in and, you know, you go in and, you know, You see him doing that and you're like, oh, I'm going to do that because I'm strong too. And you go and do it and you forget that he's been doing that for a year, two years, five years, 10 years.

Great point. And so if you go through the same progression that he went through, you can do that work. And if you can do that work, you can develop that strength in multiple positions. You can develop that strength for the whole range. And that's great. The problem that we get into is people join a gym and that gym has, okay, this is the program we're doing today. And you've got people who've been there for three years. and they're like, okay, let's do it.

And they just go right beside the person who's been there three years and they've never done it before. Their response to that is going to be much, much different than the person who's been there three years. So there's no exercise that's going to be intrinsically dangerous or bad. There's no exercise that can be intrinsically good and healthy. It's how we progress into where we are. And so if we want to do high performance,

we need to do high performance moves, but we can't start with high performance moves. we're going to have to progressively go into them. I want to ask you a question, and it's kind of along these lines of doing these things like safely with a level of caution, but also how lower force can actually increase strength because you're explaining to me in the gym

how using 50% force, right, for a longer period of time on an isometric, can actually help increase strength. And I think that was very interesting because I think a lot of people, when they're introduced to isometrics, it's typically high initial force, short duration, and that's what a lot of people see when it comes to isometrics, and that's what they apply.

But can you kind of explain what you were mentioning in the gym for longer duration, lower force isometrics and how they could be beneficial? Yeah, so we've talked about that there are these different types of isometrics as far as whether they're overcoming their, they're what we call the 3LD or they're a yielding isometric. But there's also different isometrics based on the amount, of time we're going to be isometric for.

Yeah. And so if we're going in those one to two second isometrics or those short isometrics, what those are relatively, they're essentially a non-moving plyometric is what I think of them as. Because I'm moving rally quickly. It's a high jerk isometric. So I'm moving really quickly, but then the joint can't actually move. So what I'm doing is I'm doing, say, like a counter movement or I'm doing some sort of

preload of the tissue and I'm accelerating really fast in one direction. there's going to be something that doesn't move in the other direction. Now I'm going to get the isometric component. And is that jerk? That's going to be jerk. Yeah. So I'm accelerating one direction. Something else is accelerating the other direction.

That's the jerk component. Got it. So now what we're going to do is we go into the longer hold asymmetrics, the moderate hold isometrics, like the five to ten second hold isometrics. Now what we've got is we're going to be at a situation where we're trying to target something different, somewhat different. And so we're obviously not going to be able to do as much. force over that time. And so the way that we got into this is we, again, studying our little

engineered ligaments, we did a bunch of different things with them. And so we can put them into a machine and we can load them. And when we load them, it didn't matter whether we loaded them 2.5% strain, 5% or 10% strain. We got the exact same anabolic signal. We just had to get a little bit of strain there. Didn't matter whether we did 50 loads or 500 loads or 5 loads. It just seemed to matter that within about five to ten minutes, the anabolic signal are peaked, and then we're turning the anabolic signal off. There's no greater anabolic signal. So if I go and I run for 10 minutes, I get a 10 minutes stimulus on my heart, 30 minutes, 30 minutes stimulus on my heart to get better, hour, three hours, no matter how long I go, as long as I go, my heart gets a great stimulus to

adapt. More blood flow coming back, bigger volume, and it has to pump more blood. My tendons, my bones, my ligaments, all of these other connective tissues, they got the same stimulus that was positive from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, an hour, three hours. They didn't get any benefit from going three hours over the fact that they went 10 minutes. They got lots of more wear and tear over three hours. They got lots more wear and tear over an hour.

So what we're trying to do with all of these things is balance kind of the anabolic signal and the wear and tear. And so when we do a 10-second isometric hold, we're going to go down in our force, the things that we've done are half maximal basically or even lower because what we've done in humans is with rock climbers where they'll go onto a hangboard and they'll put load and we just tell them to feel tension through the flexors and it should be if you've got a scale we want about 40% of your body weight so if for me I'm 200 so I go and I'm going to go and I'm okay here we go it's 40% of

my body weight now that's going to be okay I've got 80 pounds on there Now I can feel tension through that. What happens is over 30 days, if I do that every day or if I do that three times a week, I've increased my grip strength. And we've done a now a study in rats where we can actually electrically stimulate the calf muscle to load the Achilles. We maximally electrically stimulate the calf muscle. These animals produce about 100 Newton meters of torque. Then what we did is we adjusted our input, our electrical input, and we decreased that.

So we got 50 newt meters of torque. And what we found is that when we held the 10 seconds at max, we actually saw a decrease in the tendon function from the right leg, which we stimulated to the left leg that we didn't stimulate. So the left leg was actually stronger than the right leg, the tendon. When we looked at the muscle force, the muscle force hadn't really changed too dramatically. It went up from control.

But when we did, now instead of doing max force for 10 seconds, we did 50% of max force for 10 seconds. And we looked at force. Force was significantly higher in the muscles that had done the 10 seconds at 50% relative to the 10 seconds for maximum force. And that was, again, something that we weren't expecting at all, except for the fact that our rock climbers had shown that, yeah, when they did that 40% of their body weight, they actually got an increase in grip string.

And so, okay, this really correlates well. The tendons in the 10 seconds at half maximal force were, they weren't any different. So they were the same on the right and left. What we then did is we went for 30 seconds at 50% of force. And there we saw that the muscle produced was the same as when you did 10 seconds at max. We didn't have any less force of a less of a force improvement. But what we saw is the tendons all got better. The tendons were stronger on the right leg than the left leg in every single animal.

And so what that led us to is this idea of what we call the 3LD isometrics. So low load, long duration. And so the low load long duration isometrics seem to be really good for tendon. And then the nice thing that happened in our rock climber study is we had two other intervention groups. One was max hangs again like our max force ones. And just like our max force ones there,

they actually had the same increase in force between the 10 seconds between our, sorry, our Abrahams, which were our low load isometrics and the max load isometrics. So you train with those two and they increase the same, but when you train with the two of them together, we had a group that did both types of training, they actually saw an additive improvement

in their grip strength. So now what that tells us is, tells us that the tendon is getting a good stimulus from the low load is symmetrics. The muscle is getting a good stimulus from doing really heavy work. That's gonna come from increasing muscle mass, but also increasing the brain's ability to activate that muscle.

When we combine those two things, those are the things that go into strength. neural activation, muscle mass, and then force transfer. So when we do those two combined things, the low-loaded isometrics with the heavy load, now what we've got is we've got this maximum adaptation. I know that these are done in a lot of different ways, but what comes in my mind,

and maybe it's just a powerlifter in me, but it's just a low repetition, you know, like four to six repetitions, perhaps, on most things that you're talking about. Yeah, so here we're doing four-thirty-second isometrics, or we're doing 12 10 second isymmetrics. The reason we did the different numbers is because they're matched for the time under tension.

So the time under tension in all three groups is exactly the same. The load, the kind of time under load for the two 50% groups, the 10 second and 30, were exactly the same. Is the time under tension similar to what you would see with hypertrophy or is it a lot longer? So there what we're doing is two minutes of activity. So there are four times 30 seconds or 12 times 10 seconds. Each one of those is going to be two minutes of activity.

We do that three times a week for three weeks and that was enough to increase muscle strength. It was enough to increase tendon strength. So again, it doesn't take much. So we're not talking about hours and hours of loading. We're not talking about it. It was two minutes of functional load. And we've seen that across all the studies that we do. So in our little engineered ligaments, we can load them 24 hours a day and we'll see an increase in some things like

collagen content. But if I do the same type of load where I'm stretching the same, I'm putting the same strain on the tissue, but I do it as four 30 second holds. So it's two minutes of active loading over an eight minute period. Then they get six hours of rest and I do another one. Now what I've got is I've got two minutes of load, six hours of rest, two minutes to load, six hours of rest. Or I've got 24 hours a day of load. The one that does the eight minutes of load over the 24 hour period actually improves the size of the tendon and the mechanics of the tendon better than if I did 24 hours of work. It kind of blows my mind that the numbers are kind of similar, you know, like the amount of time it would take you to do a 5 by 5 versus the amount of time it would take you to do four sets of 10 versus the amount of time it would take you to do what you're mentioning. Like the time under tension is all fairly similar. Yeah. And it's, again, what it tells us is it doesn't take huge volume to have these effects.

if we understand what the stimulus is. So for muscle, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the load signal across every muscle fiber in the muscle. And when I'm lifting a weight, the first time I do it, I'm only using certain motor units because I can perform that weight with, say, 80% of my motor units. So that means I'm going the first couple of repetitions using 80% of my motor units.

And that just means my brain is activating just enough muscle to produce the movement. As I get towards failure and now what I'm doing is I'm recruiting more and more of my motor units. So at failure, when I'm trying to do that last repetition and is barely moving, I'm getting as close to all of the muscle fibers in that muscle to contract. All of those muscle fibers feel, quote unquote, feel the load. They sense the load. And now we can turn on the molecular signals in every single muscle fiber.

The reason going to failure is important for muscle building is because what it's done is the same thing as the long hold isometrics does for the tendon. Is it instead of me just getting that load signal through a few of the muscle fibers, now as I get to failure, I'm getting it through all the muscle fibers. So each muscle fiber is a stimulus to get bigger. Each muscle fiber has that load stimulus that is going to need, it needs to transduce

the increase in kind of mechanics, the load that it's under into a biochemical signal to cause the muscle to get bigger. When I hold an isometric for a long time, we get creep from the strong parts of the tendon. And so those are the best parts of the tendon. But because they're holding the load for a long period of time, they go through this biochemical process of creep.

They get longer. And as they get longer, now the next strongest part is actually in a better position to take on the load than the long parts because the long parts are too long. And so now the next strongest part has to hold it. And then as those get longer through creep, now the weakest part of the tissue has to hold the tissue because it's in a position where everything else is too long to hold the tension, so now it has to go on to the weak part. So at the end of the long hold isometrics,

these low load long hold isometrics, if you look at the cross section of the tendon, and I stain it for a gene that's only made after the cell has felt or sensed tension, when we do the low load long duration isometrics, almost all the cells in that tendon throughout the whole cross-section are expressing those genes. When I do short fast movements, really heavy movements, I get a couple of strips of the tendon that express that gene at a very high level.

So what we get when we do fast movements is we get a high signal and a small amount of the tissue. What we get when we're doing these heavy movements or in muscle going to failure is we get a smaller signal probably, but it's in more of the cells. And so that's the key to making the whole tissue better instead of just those strips in parts.

And then can you, because I think, you know, someone that's listening might think, okay, well then if I just do longer, if I'm working dynamic movements and I do them for longer tempos, well then I can probably get the best of both worlds and there's no reason for me to do isometric work. But can you also kind of talk to us about,

like the recovery cost of dynamic training and then the recovery cost of isometrics. Sure. Yeah, so anytime we use our muscle as a motor, again, shortening to overcome the inertia, we're going to, that's the highest metabolic cost because that needs our little motors to cycle more and that costs more ATP.

That's why the runners don't wanna use our muscle as a motor. Does it cost more ATP? But it also means that we're cycling more of the those motors and so there's more chance that those motors are going to, you know, not not work as well for a little bit. When we're using our muscles as a break, now we're getting the stimulus that has got the highest amount of shear on the muscle fibers. And so we get problems and soreness comes when the muscle fibers don't hold together well and they slide a little bit past each other. And when that happens, there's all kinds of proteins that go between the different muscle fibers. And when I'm

sliding them, usually because I'm unaccustomed to the exercise, so the fibers slide past each other, little holes in the membrane. And each of our cells, they have a membrane that keeps all of the elect, sorry, the, the, the salts at the appropriate level. So what I put a hole in that membrane, what happens is positively charged salts come in, specifically in our case, that means sodium and calcium, and that causes a little bit of contraction. And that causes really significant damage to the muscle that we now have to regenerate. And so the reason that we feel really sore two days after our first lift is because we've gotten a lot of shear. That's caused little holes.

We've gotten influx of those positively charged ions. We get these little contractures. And then we have to spend the next couple of days fixing that. And so we're repairing that muscle fiber. Now, that happens to the greatest degree when we do eccentric clothing. So when we're lowering a weight, when we're doing all of our dynamic work.

So when we do an isometric work, when we're doing an isometric contraction, we have very little of that shear force. The muscle actually uses very little ITP. So metabolically, as well as mechanically, we have very little fatigue. And the result is that I can do these every day. I can actually do them twice a day.

And there's no heavy legs if you're doing leg-based work and say, if I was gonna do, oh, I've got an Achilles-Ten classical thing to do would be Alfredson Protocol, where you take a very heavy weight and you lower it eccentrically. And so if I do that, my calves the next day are going to be burning. And I'm not going to be able to run.

I'm not going to be able to do my activities. If I instead do a long hold isometric, I've gotten a great stimulus for my Achilles to get rid of the pain associated with my tenetopathy, but I haven't damaged the muscle. And so now I can actually continue to train normally. And so even when we look at our elite athletes, when we're taking, say,

you know, Olympic-based athletes or we're taking professional athletes, I can't do anything to their training. Like if I'm working with the Chinese table, tennis team, they're going to train eight hours a day. They're going to be doing small jumps for eight hours a day. I can't change that because they're going to, as a result, win a whole lot of Olympic medals. What I have to do is I have to give them supplemental training on top of their eight hours a day that is going to actually make it so that that eight hours a day wasn't as damaging

to these tissues. I can't change a great shooter's desire to go in and shoot an extra thousand shots a day. But when they do that, that's an extra thousand jumps of wear and tear on that tissue. So now what I have to do is I have to give them something separate that goes on top of that extra training that makes them good at their skill That is going to actually make it so that they're more robust and so that's where we're trying to come up with the minimal effective dose of load for these tissues so that we can give them a little dose of load Antabolic signal all of the catabolic signal stays almost exactly the same because I didn't take change your training I didn't really add too much of a catabolic signal so I didn't add too much wear and tear because I didn't I did four holds.

And that four holds was enough to give me the anabolic signal, but very little catabolic signal. All of this stuff gave me a tiny bit of anabolic signal and a huge amount of wear and tear. And so now when I add that extra bit, now I can make that athlete more robust. Some holds and some movements, you just use gravity.

You know, like you just got like a lunge, you have like a push-up I can think of. But there's other activities where it might be harder for the person to gauge how hard they're pushing into something. I know you gave the example earlier of the leg extension and kind of setting the weight up for a single leg leg extension. How does a coach or an athlete figure out like how much they should push into these things

and maybe probably part of your answer is probably, you know, get used to these things. Right. First. But yeah, what are your thoughts there? Yeah. So it's a, it is a great question. It's to the point where in, you know, full disclosure, we've started a company that's designed to actually be able to tell you how.

how much load you're putting through. And it's designed to basically improve your performance, but also improve return to play. And so the idea is we have these load sensors that we basically can put into whatever movement we have. Can you purchase these yet? Not yet. So they should be, so it's called sinuous.

You can look it up. And there's a, that website will have like, let us know when you've got products so that you can be the first to know. And so what we do is we've got these loads. sensors that we've just gotten really good prototypes on and so we're just trying to make them look and and be more robust but what we do is we put them in we can then do it

for like an Achilles 10 in load so I can put a strap on I can put the load sensor in I've got an app that it works with and now I can do a set of tests that says here's my maximum this is how much how hard I can push through this and I've done all my test now I can go back and I can say program me to you know improve my Achilles tendon function or strength or whatever. And it'll take you through a program that's gamified. So it's basically you're a little blue bubble. There's a line and you can go and you can kind of,

the force you produce is how high that bubble goes. And so all you have to do is trace the line. Each time your character gets a little bigger. Exactly. By the fact, it's called sinuous. S-I-N-E-U. That's really cool and that's exciting. And especially, you know, I think of the coaches

because like, you know, coach might tell a high school player, hey, you know, go in there and pull that bar as hard as you can. And a couple guys, you know, just because they're tired or whatever, it might be kind of slacken. And now you can actually see it. And then they can also gamify it against each other, right? Yeah.

And it's, again, the big thing that we are looking at is the question as to whether, do we, like with muscle where I'm trying to increase the load I put through there every day, do we want that for a tenant? Or do we just want to keep going at that nice, easy load? That's the idea of this 3LD isometric. that the load is seemingly just there so that we get that feeling of tension. To interrupt for a second,

I would guess that to a certain degree is probably the same. Yeah. Because you just don't improve on stuff the way that people would like to think that you improve on stuff. Your seated row, your lap pull down, some of these movements,

they could stay the same forever. And you could be bigger and you could be better off for it in some ways. But a lot of times, a lot of these weights that we lift in the gym, a lot of times they stay a little similar. So it wouldn't surprise me if once you got used to it, that you would just have a maintenance level.

Yeah. And basically what you then can do is you can say, look, I'm healthy, I'm trying to improve performance, it's going to give you a program. Or I have an injury, I have a tendonopathy, or I have a recent, say, Achilles tendon repair. Now what you can do is you can do your physical therapy at home. Because only about 10% of people who need physical therapy, use physical therapy. because it's hard to get in. It's hard to know what to do.

It's, you know, it's all of these big pieces of equipment. And there's no way that you can necessarily do that at home. So people rarely do their homework. And so if you just have a little thing that sends you a reminder once today, time to do your stuff. And if you want to be at high level, maybe it's sending you that reminder twice a day. Because what we know is when do the low load isometrics

between three and seven times a day or a week, I should say, what you do is you increase in our rock climbers, our grip strength. If we go between seven and 14 sessions a week, we actually have another step up. So when we do it in the morning and in the evening, we actually get two beneficial things. That's why when we do our professional basketball players who have to do their skill work, we're going to try and go about six to eight hours before when we're doing our new connective tissue loads. Because what we want to do is the connective tissue cells are a lot like a teenager. They'll listen to you for a few minutes and then they'll turn off for a few hours. Or you can think of it as like

flushing the toilet. You can flush the toilet. Yeah, everything works great, but if you try and flush it again, it's not going to flush until the bowl fills up. So how long is it take to fill up the bowl so that when we do that next bout of exercise, we actually get the same amount of benefit. It's about six to eight hours. And so that's why we do this inner, these repeats. And so when the rock climbers first started doing this, they were doing it as a twice a day program where they would do partial body weight in the morning, 10 minutes worth of load. They would do it in the evening and the guys who invented it were these Swedish rock climbing brothers basically using some of our research papers as a as the basis for it and their performance improvements were incredible and the one

brother who started he was always injured and now he's never injured and he can rock climbing he can do all that and that basically we're giving the two anabolic signals minimal effective dose of load least amount of wear and tear so now he's got really positive effect on his on his tenens and and pulleys. So I do have a question about grip, but before you can get to that, it's cool how the three LDL protocol that you have inherently, it mitigates intensity to a point where someone, it's structured so you don't injure yourself. Because the question I wanted to ask was, you know, a lot of people are doing isometrics

and unlike muscles where like you know when you fail, you don't necessarily want to go to tendon failure. Not the greatest, right? So what sensations should we be paying attention to? Because there will be people that are going to push certain things past what you're talking about, right? So what is the sensation that like, oh, this is getting kind of iffy. Yeah. So what we always say is we say the cues that we use, you should feel tension through the system.

You should feel tension through the muscle and the tendon. You should feel no pain. And so once you start feeling like, oh, that's starting to hurt. And then you're like, okay, that's good. And even what we know is that the process of creep within the tendons, we get about two-thirds to three-quarters of the creep within the first 30 seconds. You can go out to two minutes, you're maybe going to get that extra little 10 to 15%. But for most people, it's enough to do the 30 seconds.

And so if we're doing standard things, especially on healthy individuals, we're going to go to 30 seconds. And that's really enough. And so if you go at a partial and you just feel tension through the system, you hold it for 30 seconds. Usually most people aren't going to be like, oh, that really, there's not really going to be anything. The problems that we get into are when people have, say, chronic pain or they have what we call

reactive tendons, where they have low-grade inflammation. You do things, and that increases the inflammation within the tissue. And there, what we want to do is we want to do your first session always at night. And we want to do it at a very low load. And we want to just do the hold. And then what we are looking for is we don't care what happens that night. Because a lot of times, isometrics are, have an analgesic component. They make it so that your tendons don't hurt as much.

So if you have chronic patel or tenopathy, chronic tennis elbow or golfer's elbow, you'll do the isometrics. And for like two or three hours, you actually, oh, wow, that feels really good. And so a lot of people will do them before they, before they train, and then they'll maybe overdo it a little bit in their training, and then they'll get reactive. So we do the first session at night. We're looking to see what happens tomorrow. If you don't get a reaction, that's great.

We're going to keep it at that load. And really what we're looking for is for a lot of people when they push through these tenenopathies, they'll push and they'll be like, ah, pain. And so I have a nephew, he's the son of my first lab assistant. And he's a big dude. He played at UNR as a defensive tackle. Yeah, he's like 6.6.250. And he can produce like maybe 6 newtons worth of force with his rotator cuff because he's just destroyed his shoulders.

Because if you're a defensive tackle and you're grabbing all these, he's running back, going past you, that's not great for the shoulder. So he puts any load through that. That's like almost, you could blow almost six, seven newtons. So he's big dude, he can barely push it. That's where we want to be. And that's hard for an athlete because you're like, oh, you got to, you know, you know, it's just they have all of these things to be high performance athlete. You know, pain is weakness leaving the body. All of those types of things. He's, oh yeah, so you want me to go through pain. No, I don't want you to go through pain. I don't want you to feel pain. I want you to just get tension. When he's able to do that, he can now load and then he can build that up really,

really quickly. Because within weeks, he's producing a lot more force without any pain. So at that point, when we have such a big individual who's strong in so many ways, but can't produce force in those ways, then what we can do is we do progress. But it's mostly because he was in such pathology before that by the time we get it up to where he should actually be. well, we're just bringing it back into the normal age. What about something like ultra-high repetitions? Do you feel that that hits any of the tendon ligament stuff? We kind of used to hear that, you know,

the heavier weight was more for the muscle. And what are your thoughts there? Yeah, so the idea was that the heavy weights are for the muscle and the tendons take so much longer to adapt that the lightweight is for the tendon. We have to decrease, we have to delode for the tendon. The reality is that tenant actually adapts just about as fast,

if not faster than muscle. So we've done a number of different experiments where you can do things like we put a load across a muscle tendon unit and a rat where we'll remove all these other muscles. There's a huge load on the last muscle that's there. When we look at the muscle, it's actually got more connective tissue in it afterwards and it's stronger because of it.

And so when we do those training things, we're deloading, but it's not necessarily to delode for the tendon. When we go at the higher repetitions, what we know is that if we deliver, the four isometrics or we do it as a bunch of dynamics for the same time under tension, that extra load, unload, you get more jerk component. So you get, all you're doing as you do more repetitions is we're getting more of the dynamic, that plyometric, that jerk component, the wear and tear.

So for the same anabolic signal, I have more wear and tear. And the result is we shift the balance away from getting bigger and stronger towards just maintaining. And so we've done those experiments in our little engineered ligament. and sure enough, when we see them, they both types of load increase collagen. But we look at the mechanics, one of them made it stronger, the isometric, and the other one didn't have the same effect on strength.

There might be a little benefit to a higher rep, maybe just in terms of blood flow, or am I wrong on that? So the higher reps, what we're trying to do is, yeah, blood flow fine. A lot of times we can use them as a way to get that muscle closer to failure. Because if you're a good lifter and you can keep tension on the muscle

and you can maintain that for higher repetitions. Now we're at a low weight. Now there's less wear and tear on the structures because the weight is lower, but I can now get the muscle closer to failure. Because when I'm going at a heavy weight and I'm moving, a lot of times I feel like, well, I feel like I do another one.

But if I'm going a lighter weight, but I go all the way to failure, now if I went and did another set, I could lift almost nothing through that muscle. And so a lot of times what we're doing, doing when we do the higher reps is we're actually targeting the muscle as a, you know, hypertrophy stimulus instead of a strength stimulus. When I go heavy, what I'm doing is I'm trying to increase strength. When I go to failure, I'm trying to increase size. And so kind of that's the

rule of thumb type of idea. And so when I do the multiple repetitions or I do a strip set or I do all these things, what I'm doing is I'm giving my muscle a greater stimulus, getting closer to failure. And that's a greater stimulus to get that load into each of the muscle fibers so that I get a better stimulus for growth. I like what you're talking about there. It just sounds like it. It's very targeted.

You know, I can target hypertrophy if I want to and I can do this or I can target the tendon ligament if I do things this way. Absolutely. So I was sending Ryan this video because this is an Instagram's DAC performance method and he is built up to doing

these types of movements that have very high jerk. Yeah. He does this on, he also does this with these types of movements too within the shoulder because he works with a lot of baseball players. My question is when you see this, what do you see positives and if someone wants to build up to this, maybe the positives and negatives and things to think about when doing this type of movement? Yeah, so I think about the old, the old Soviet Union training techniques, which were we're going to do super heavy biometric work. and if you can survive the training you're going to be one of the strongest people in the world you've got to build up to it you got to build up to it and many people will never build up to it and so in the former Soviet Union the reason it was really successful is they started with 1.6 million kids

and they needed two they needed a gold and the silver medalist at the Olympics and so they didn't care if they it was an evolutionary process yeah so if you can survive this type of training yeah you're going to be super strong. I do you want to say he's very responsible with how he's like he builds this into the athletes he works with and even himself he's been doing this type of work for years. Yeah. So. Yeah. And so you can get there if you go slowly. If you progressively get into it. Because what you're doing is you're building the resilience within the structures. And that's again what you do to some degree, what that former Soviet technique was. It was shock method. It was that we're going to do these really heavy, really plyometric things and again if you can survive them because you are basically what you're

doing is you're selecting for a few you're genetically selecting because in order to survive them you have to have certain polymorphisms which are small changes in the genes that make you less likely to get injured and that's going to allow you to continue and survive in here so what you what they were doing was they were doing a genetic selection on their 1.6 million kids to get those two people at the top who are the strongest in the world. Totally understandable. If you happen to have, you know, there's polymorphism in tenacin C,

which is a gene that we have in connective tissues, if you have this tandem repeat, if you have, I think it's 1712, you're much more likely to have tendonopathies. If you have like 14 or whatever, you have much more less likely. And so all you're doing really to some degree is if you can survive the training

at a high level so you can progressively get up to a certain level but then you're going to find a lot of people are going to start injuring out of that and if you can get past those levels and you can get up to the higher level what you're doing is you're just showing that you have this special genetics that allow you to essentially survive and thrive and so it is again for high performance it's going to be it's going to be you know those are the types of things that you can do and those are the types of things that if you, again, if you can build up to this, if you can progress up to this,

that you're going to be a really high quality dynamic athlete. Got it. But not everybody is going to be able to get there. Yeah, because I do apply some of his stuff into what I do. I just progress it slowly. And I pay attention to how my body feels. So my second question, I know that I don't know actually if you do any of this stuff,

the people you work with. But if one does want to slowly, progress these types of capacities. Sensation-wise, what are the things that they should pay attention to? Because I notice, like, when I do this type of work, my tend, like, if I do that here on this tendon here, I feel that. And I've built it where I can do that pretty well with more weight and more resilience. Right.

Right. But it was when I first did it, I was like, ooh, this is, my tendons hot. Yeah. Right. So what should one be trying to be careful with if they, they regress and progress and progress sense of some of this. Yeah, the biggest thing is this is very similar to what happens every year. The first sunny day of the year, everybody goes out and plays tennis or pickleball or goes in, and they go and they go, okay, I'm going to do it. Oh, this is great. It's beautiful day.

They go too long. Everybody kind of knows, yeah, I probably do half hour. And then they do like an hour and a half. Next day, they're like, oh, my elbows really are. Or they are going to go and they're going to play a round of golf. And instead of doing nine holes the first day, they go and do full 18. or maybe they do it a little extra, they do a little hitting off the T, and then they go, oh, my elbow is really hurting the next day. So all we're trying to do is we're trying to stop well before we feel anything. So our first few sessions is we're going to do something that's prescribed.

I'm going to do five of these. And it's going to be a number that seems like it's almost nothing. And then I'm going to do 10, and then I'm going to do 20. That progression where you're limiting yourself well below what you feel like you could do. So it's always, you know, we talk about leaving reps in the tank. Leaving reps in the tank for this type of work the first few times is really, really important. So you leave, you know, if you're talking about your tank, you want to leave 90% of your tank empty. You want to hit the maybe 5% to 10% of your tank for the first few times you do these dynamic work.

And then you're going to go a little bit closer, a little bit closer. And you're going to just build up that progression. And so that's true. all the teams that we work with, they have to get their athletes back to the point where they can do high dynamic moves where they can change direction faster than anybody else than they can get going.

And they can get up to a full sprint and then they can stop and change direction. If you don't do some sort of the dynamic work that they're doing, but they never put them out on the field the first day and say, okay, we're going to do huge volume. We're going to keep you into this little space. We're going to have you do this little bit

it and then we're going to bring you off and then we're going to put you back on the next day a little bit more and then you progress up pretty quickly because you can progress relatively quickly but if you start too fast that's when we're going to get all of those jerk-based injuries within the tendons that are going to set us backwards on our progression got it it's good to build a lot of resilience but maybe you know not to the point where it's completely crazy right like to be able to jump down from a chair is that's a decent depth drop right yeah and maybe to potentially work your way up to you know standing on this table and jumping down but for some people maybe that level resilience is a little on the on the higher end and maybe not even necessary exactly and it all depends on what you're training

for so i'm training for life that means that i i want to be able to do the things that i'm going to do through life i'm not training for high performance i'm not training for jiu-situ or other kind of high performance work. So I don't have to have those kind of capacities because there's not going to be a point in time where I have to really quickly do a movement. So training for life for me means that I'm training to hit the things that I know, you know, are in my family history. So I know that I have a family history of heart disease. So that means I train with aerobic system, not because always going to help me keep my weight down or anything like that. I have to load my heart. I have to do these other things that I build into it. I'm going to be cycling everywhere I go, so that means I train my

neck because we know that neck strength and neck size is going to be inversely proportional to concussion so I can control my head position if something bad happens. All of those types of things go into what you're training for. So if I'm training to be a relatively decent performance athlete, yeah, I'm going to get up to maybe being able to jump down from a good height because that's going to allow me to co-contract my quads and hamstrings so that if I am going to be on the field and I need to stop and turn and go in the other direction, I'm able to protect my ACL and I'm able to get that co-contraction of the quad hamstring and calf that are going to stabilize my knee. And so that's really well modeled when you jump down off of something, especially if you

jump down and then you go in one direction, jump down and go in the other direction. Those types of things, yeah, that's going to be intrinsic in the sport that you want to play. But if you're going to be, you know, if you're going to be a golfer, that doesn't mean that you have to be able to jump down off stuff. You might have to do rotational work. You might have to do other things that you wouldn't do as a soccer player or somebody else. So again, as you look at those different sports that you're trying to do, you're going to have to do movements that allow you to do those sports and perform at the level you want to perform at and maybe build up beyond that level. Have you, I mean, you must have noticed, there must be some big benefits.

fits to the isometric work carrying over into people being able to change direction and a lot of these other things. And we hear that pretty often about athletes is that they have great ability eccentrically, which is something you don't really think about because in the gym, there is eccentric component to it, but you're kind of mainly focused on the concentric. Right. Yeah, and I always tell my athletes that the concentric phase is for counting, is for noting it down in your log. The eccentric phase is when you get stronger. So we explode up to get our number and then we control down. And then we're controlling down because that's the stimulus that actually gets our muscle a little bit stronger.

We can get a little bit more power. And because we're using, we're getting more load across fewer muscle fibers, essentially. And so absolutely athletes are really, really good at kind of the eccentric rate of force development, eccentric component of load. So, you know, in your basketball athletes, they're going to be able to go down. and explode up because not because they're jumping in the way they're jumping because they can stand and do a volleyball jump. So if you have a volleyball player and a basketball player and they go down and up, the volleyball player's going to go way higher because they're used to that. When Bignana the other day missed a shot and then he rebounded his own shot and just dunked it.

Like, I mean, it was so easy. I mean, it did in less than half a second. Yeah. Well, it helps to be like 14 feet. Oh, he's enormous. But is he quick? Absolutely. But the difference between the volleyball player and the basketball player is if you have them do an approach.

And the basketball player is jumping off one foot. They'll stick their foot in the ground. The foot doesn't even really compress too much. But they can translate that horizontal force into vertical force. And as a result, they can get way higher on the moving jump than a volleyball player. The volleyball player will come in and do a two-footed takeoff and they'll do that. But they're mostly these up-down jumpers. whereas a basketball player is more of what we call a sinew athlete.

A volleyball player is a muscle-based athlete. Because in order to do a jump where we're going to stop and explode, we're using our muscles as motors. We need to have more muscle. Yeah, they go down and then they throw their arms up. They hold and they wait and then they go to do the block. When we're talking about a basketball player, they tend to be skinnier.

They tend to not be as muscular and they tend to have what we, and that's what we call them a sinew-based athlete. Is there more connective tissue? They're more, if you put your hands on them as a masseuse, they're kind of crunchy and hard, whereas the muscle-based athlete is like, ooh, that feels like a steak or something really nice. And so the difference is that they're taking all of that series elastic component, the elastic component of the muscle tendon unit, and the basketball player can put the foot in the ground, store all the energy within the elastic component and then just explode up.

And so you see those differences. And what that means is like in one sport, like if you have European football or soccer, you'll see these muscle-based athletes, they're really good in small spaces. They accelerate, decelerate really well. Because muscle overcomes inertia. Accelerate, that's inertia. I'm stopped. I need to get fast.

That's when I use my muscle. I'm going fast. I need to stop. That's when I use my muscles as breaks. Start, stop. They're really good. Small spaces, incredible. But they're kind of slow.

If we just put the ball over the top, they go. go, people are passing them. But they're the fastest ones in the small space. That's your muscle-based athlete. Your sinew-based athlete, it takes them a while to get up to speed. But once they get up to speed, there's nobody who's touching them because they can just fly. Because again, muscle is not something that's good for speed. We talked about that with the Paralympics athletes. Once you get up to speed, if you have more muscle, it makes you slower because you have to carry all that muscle. If I have less muscle, I can store and return in energy with my connective tissue, I can go faster, easier. And so you see that a lot of times in those types of things.

You'll see it in the World Cup this summer. You'll see that, oh, look, you know, ball goes here in this small space. This person accelerates, deceleries, and they can come out of a space better than anybody else. Leon Lemaise is amazing at that. He's a muscle-based athlete. But if you put the ball over the top, he'll get going, but he's going to get passed by like six people. Because as great as of a player as he is, it's not because he's the fastest in straight line speed. I have a question for you.

Funnily enough, when I was a soccer player, I was a muscle-based athlete. Very, very fast straight-line speed. But you tend to have these people that, like, are a great amount of both. Because you mentioned Leo Messi. And he was when you were talking about like small spaces, yes. But then someone like Achilleen Bappe or back in Messi's era, a Christiana Ronaldo, was the guy who had great straight line speed. But also within close quarters, Ronaldo was also extremely efficient. And so the difference there is he would have started as a sinew-based athlete.

He would have started as somebody who's stretchy and then what he would do is he would lift lots of weights. Yeah. Because maybe because he was a little bit into his body and he wanted to look a certain way. But it was probably performance-based thing as well. There's two things that come with that. As he's lifting weights, the sinew-based athletes are the ones who get injured the most, most muscle pulls.

Because as we talk about, muscle pulls happen when the tendon is stiff and the muscle is strong. When I'm a sinew-based athlete, my tendons are really stiff. That allows me to store and return energy. That allows me, once I get up to speed, to go really fast. If I then lift heavy weights,

now what I'm doing is I'm building the muscle. That means that my muscle is not going to be weaker than the tendon is stiff. And so what that means is my muscle now is not going to get injured as much, but it's also going to help me in the small spaces. Now, sorry, if you're going to keep on, I don't want to answer. Now I have a question for you because this is what I've been thinking about the whole time. Like I inherently came from being a muscle-based athlete.

And as I've been doing a lot of the stuff that I've been doing movement-wise, I've noticed that I am much more, I am much more elastic with some of the things I do when I jump rope, when I run, when I sprint. Like, these things take me muscle-like energy than they used to. Like I feel poppy, even though obviously I still have muscle. Right. So when an athlete is looking at their specific capacities, because you mentioned sinew-based athlete,

muscle-based athlete, if they know they are one or the other, they have a tendency towards being one or the other, of course, their sport is what matters and they need to look at what they're doing for their sport, but then would it potentially be in their interest to work the opposite capacity to fill in those gaps? Absolutely. And so that's what we look for, right?

it's that the best example is American football because I don't train the wide players the same way as I trade the inside players because you're not going to get a lot of muscle pulls on the offensive tackles. They're not running out there. They don't have a lot of like, oh, it's not that those guys are sinew-based at all.

And they don't have a big injury history as far as they're kind of, their tendon-based in their muscle pulls. What they have is they have a lot of contact things. But if I'm going to make them better, what I want them to do is I want to do a lot of ballistic plio stuff because all they do all day is push and push and push they don't need a lot of heavy lifting i'll do some heavy lifting with them just to make sure that they're good and they can

still do that component of their work but i'm going to have them do more dynamic work the people on the outside they're they just go straight they'll cut they'll do all these things but they're trying to go as fast they possibly can and for them to be good they need to be able to go as fast as possible But as they do that, they're the guys who get lots of muscle pulls. The fastest players on your favorite team are the ones who pull muscles all the time are out. So it used to be like you'd have these guys, and Christian McCafferty is a good example over here, the Niners.

And so what you've got is you've got people who are super fast, but then they seem to be only in the game like four games a year. And so what we do with the sinew-based athletes who have that sheer speed component is we want them to add strength work because that. that heavy strength work is going to again make the muscle stronger so that the tenant isn't stiffer than the muscle is strong and it's going to allow them to have better robustness. A lot of times they don't necessarily like to do it

because if that's what they do say in the off-season they come back a half steps lower. And so when we did our study of the UC Davis football players where we had them in their off-season training program, they increased their in three weeks, they increased their strength on certain lifts by about nine percent. Their isometric squat strength was up

about 9% because they've been doing heavy squats. They've been doing all this stuff. If we looked at the rate of force development, without the intervention, it's down about 17%. So they got bigger, but they got a little bit slower. And the reason was that the muscle end of the tenant got a little less stiff.

And that's good for their health, but it means that their performance is coming down a little. And so a lot of players who are only training, because that's their off-season, so they're only lifting. And so they're not getting their on-field performance. And so that's why they go out in the off-season, they do the heavy lifts,

they come back there a little slower and they like, all that didn't work. And then they go away from that. If you incorporate both of the movements where you're doing the high speed stuff that you're doing on field and you're doing the heavy lifting stuff in the gym, now you're combining that to have that high performance with more robustness, less fewer injuries. And so that's the component that we were trying to look for. And then we can add, you know, in that study, what we did is we added the hydrolyzed collagen and vitamin C and we prevented the drop in rate of force development. And so that's where some of the nutrition can come in to complement the training. If you don't want to have, if you want to just be lifting heavy in the off season,

if you have that supplement, what that seemed to do is that seem to prevent some of the kind of decrease in force, or rate of force development we were getting. And so that was, that's the kind of what we're doing with this when we have an athlete who is, you know, so typical one athlete. So, you know, there's lots of different people you can think of in your head is, okay, that's a person who goes straight line. they are a lot skinnier than everybody else, but they also are a lot faster.

Those are the people we're gonna go with heavy strength to try and decrease those muscular. The people who are maybe more muscular, they have the, you'll see them again in the World Cup, the guys who barely fit in their shorts because their legs are huge, those are the players who are gonna just, all right, let's do a little bit more dynamic work.

Got it. Ryan, can you bring up the video I sent you of the synapse? Just want you to take a look at this device. This guy came through. He was a tennis coach. And I just thought he had a cool gadget and device. And maybe you can recommend some different gadgets to us.

Because I think it's kind of fun sometimes to have machines or different things. And this thing, you know, it's not cheap. I want to say it's around $600 or $700. But it is nice because it is something you can just throw in your bag. And I found it to be extremely challenging when he was showing it to me. So kind of neat. Yeah. So again. And you can see he's holding the other side of it.

Yeah. And he, because he has the leverage on that side, I can kind of like, we can ISO it and I can hold it and try to pull as hard as I possibly can. Or we can go through various ranges of motion. Yeah. No, these are good because anytime you get load through a system in a way that you, it's kind of specific to what you're trying to do and how you want to be able to move. that's good. We can, we used to do this. Again, as a strength coach, we used to do this just manually. So we'd have a towel and I'd be pulling on the towel. These guys were maybe twice my

size. So, so the first repetition, they were always way stronger. And that's where the coaching comes in. I just tell them, all right, let me take the first one, just have it go down and I would count it down. And then they would pull it back. The first one, they're always stronger. The last one, I'm always stronger because basically we're doing something that's designed to load one specific area. I'm using all of my body, all of my leverage to then allow me to do to put that load onto the individual. And so this is just a really nice manual resistance component. So and in Michigan we used to train manual resistance for a lot of the moves that we did. And basically it what it allowed us to do has allowed us to really specifically get a muscle isolated or get load through exactly as we wanted to go.

So we could do a manual lateral raise, we could do a manual row, we could do all of these things without really actually using weight. The reason that we used weight was so that we could track it. I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health. All they want to do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White. Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tan. A lot of us just want to look good, feel good. And a lot of the the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have, high cholesterol or these various things, it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete,

somebody that knows what they're doing, they can look at your cholesterol, they can look at the various markers that you have, and they can kind of see where you're at, and they can help guide you through that. And there's a few aspects, too, where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shades of doctors, but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication. A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient care coronators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust

that, boom, you could be at the right levels, including working with your testosterone. And there's so many people that I know that are looking for, they're like, hey, should I do that? They're very curious. And they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the Hulk. But that's not really what happens. It can be something that can be really great for your health because you can just basically live your life a little stronger just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s. And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys. When you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels.

At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms per deciliter of test, you're good, bro. even though you're probably feeling like shit. At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work.

It's not like if you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. sometimes it's supplementation, sometimes it's TRT, and sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels, heads to Merichhealth.com and use code power project for 10% off

any panel of your choice. So we could see the progression. That's why we had the weight. The manuals are going to be really effective for actually getting load through the system. And so any type of thing that allows you to get load through the system like that, that allows you to get it in a position where you're in a natural athletic position is going to be great. And then just any machines, period.

Sounds like you're kind of a fan of machines, like even just like a bodybuilding type machines, like a particular row or a press of some kind. Yeah. So I have, you know, I'm lucky enough to have a gym that has like nine pieces of machinery. And the reason that I like it is because, again, we talked about the stimulus for muscle to grow, which is to get to failure. Well, if I'm going to be

doing a press, if I can have full support and I can press and also that the weight is on a strength arc, that's going to be really good for me. Because the reason a lot of people get a lot more sore from their lifts than I do from mine is because when we're lifting, say, a normal barbell, if I'm doing a bench press on a barbell, the strength curve is non-existent because basically the weight is the same, no matter what my range of motion is. And as my muscle goes through the length tension curve, as it gets shorter, it gets stronger to some degree. And then as it gets too short, it gets less strong. And so the Nautilus dealt that, so Gary Jones did this by basically producing the Nautilus. So as the load would go through that kind of weird shape on that little Nautilus

machine, it would increase the load when you're your strongest in the mid, in the mid range. It would decrease it towards the ends, and that allows you to have the strength curve. What that allows you to do is it allows you get closer to failure, and it allows you to make sure that here in the mid range, when I'm strongest, if I have a really good machine, what it's going to do is it's going to make me work harder here and less hard here. So I'm not going to feel as sore, but I'm going to get really good strength curve related to where my muscle is strongest, the weakest. And so if you have a high quality machine, it works great.

It doesn't mean that you only use machines. It just means that that's a great way to do it. If you're worried about something like if you have somebody who has potentially back issues and we want to load the legs, I can do that in my leg in my hip press machine really, really effectively. And I can get that without any fear of any kind of low back. issues or other problems. And, you know, I have too many friends who were great lifters who have fused have fused vertebrae because, you know, they were such good lifters and they were trying to be the

world's strongest man. And they were like, okay, that I destroyed my back because, again, that's just the difficulty of that. It doesn't mean that you can't lift safely using those lifts. It just means that as we try and do our progression, as we try and do these things, there is that greater likelihood of having these small movements that are a little bit out of line with what we want. Whereas if I'm in a controlled environment, I can load my muscles in a way that's safe my, for my joints.

Do bands or chains and or wearing a slingshot? Are you familiar with the slingshot? Do bands or chains or wearing a slingshot? Does that change the strength curve of the exercise? It will because it's applying external load. It's the same thing that happens with the lifting shirts. the power lifters know them well. It takes you, what, four or five guys to get you into your lifting shirt.

Get all wedged in there. Yeah. The idea is that as you increase the angle at the shoulder, it's going to give you more pushback. And that's changing your strength curve because that's your weakest spot. And so it's giving you that little extra bit. And those are the types of things that you're looking at. And so those are the ideas is that it will change the strength curve, especially like the things like chains as you lift in it.

And the chain gets progressively heavier. now that's changing your strength curve. The problem is that as I get it to the top when I'm actually in a small muscle length, that that's actually the heaviest point when it should actually be one of the lightest points. So it's not as perfect as it can be. And that's why some machines you're like,

oh, this doesn't feel right. And everybody gets in them and like, oh, there's something weird about and usually it's the strength. Everyone's gotten into that machine where they're like, I'm never using that one ever again. Like, I don't know why, but I hate that one. Yeah, absolutely.

And usually it's because the strength curve just really is off. And it's not applying load when it should. And like there's leg extension machines where you go and the first part is super easy. And then you get towards the end and it's super hard. And you're just like, well, that's a bit weird because my strength curve is that I'm actually strongest kind of in mids. And then as I get towards the end, I'm really kind of weak. So it should actually get a little bit easier and it seems like it's getting much, much hard. Question about grip strength.

Sure. And actually, how much time do you have? Probably about 10 or 15 minutes. 10 or 15 minutes. Okay, so. You know, we were talking about grip hangs, grip strength with the Iber hangs, hanging passively, not maximally, although you can add those in. And I showed you some of the things that I do for my grip when it comes to Jitsu using that Ghee grip. And I was talking how, like, within my sport of Gigi Jiu-Jitsu, hands, people's hands, a lot of guys just stop because they're like, my hands can't take it anymore, right?

I used to be at that point a few years back. And when I started doing this, it's like my hands are fresh and stronger all the time. And it doesn't take me doing crazy loads. It's just that input from isometrics. So I'm curious, do isometrics in general have a unique effect on the whole strength of gripping versus doing a lot of like, what would there, what would advantages be when doing asymmetric work for grip versus doing a lot of dynamic work for grip? Right. So, so again, it's really important to understand what the grip is. and most people don't know that there are no muscles in the fingers.

So the fingers are only tendons and pulleys. And so one of the things in the rock climbing world, they call it tweaky. So my fingers feel tweaky. And so you hear all of these people talking about this. And it's like, okay, you look at them and rock climbers are a weird group because we do a bunch of things where we're trying to test blood. And so you poke somebody's finger, you squeeze, and you can never get blood out of a freaking rock climber's fingers

because there's so much callous there that you get it's like unbelievable but then they talk all about these tweaky fingers and you're like okay when that's what um that's what felix abraham um emil's brother who came up with the original program was talking about because his fingers were always tweaky so then he used the low load isometrics and what that does is that again the idea behind any kind of injury to a tendon is that the injured tendon doesn't actually get load And so when you do any type of move, it doesn't go through there. So we have to use creep or stress relaxation. So the healthy part gets longer.

So then the injured part actually gets the load. And that's where we came up initially with the low load isometrics. And so what that allows us to do is it gets that tendon, that signal all across the tendon. It fixes any problems with the pulleys, with the tendons. And what that does is that means that as I go to do my movements, everything slides normally. And I do this now with surgeons with all kinds of different people whose life depends on their hands. And so all of those individuals, they all, oh, I've got this, I've got this thumb. And they all end up using these support systems where you put a little brace.

And all you do is you increase the stress shielding. And so that's not good. It's never going to fix it. It's just going to make it progressively worse. So as you get the load through there, what we're doing is, again, the long-hold isometric, getting the whole tissue to feel the load, the whole tissue to have that anabolic signal to get better. As we go to use that strength,

now what we have to do is we have to be able to produce that heavy force through the flexor that's going to allow us to actually transmit that. And so we need the combination of things. So again, when you're doing any type of thing, if you have a really good grip strength component, or if you're doing dynamic moves, like you're doing your jihitsu and you're having to grab and then people are pulling.

Jerk, right? And you're jerking around and all of that stuff you've built to and now you've got a strong grip. You've increased the muscle strength. You've increased your brain's ability to activate it. All we're doing with the low, the 3LD is we're getting that force transfer to be effective. We're getting your tendons back to the point where they function at a high level again. And, you know, an interesting thing from you mentioning that is one thing you see with a lot of guys who've done Gidujitsu for a long time is it around their join. of their fingers, it almost looks like there's nodules.

And it's typically a very painful thing for the, it's very uncomfortable. So it's like rounder and rounder and rounder around all these points. And I'm curious, because in the jiu-jitsu, when you're doing, there's a lot of movement when you have these holes at the grip. Would that jerk component be one of the reasons

along with not having anything that, like doing a grip for a long time, a 3LD that, like, I guess, ref- like, not reforms, but makes it consistent, insistence. Do you see I'm getting out? I know exactly what you're getting at. So basically, I did a podcast for hand surgeons the other day. It's a very unique at one, but they were doing it because they're a unique population because they get to see the flexor tendons all the time. And so you talk to the hand surgeons and you're like, okay, well, there's the free tendon. There's the part that goes under the pulley.

The part that goes under the pulley is different colors, different structure because it's getting compressed. At all of these joints that we have, there's pulleys, at all of the, of these, there's free tendons and pulleys. The reason that they're getting a little bit bigger is probably because the joints aren't working the way they should. And so we're getting the cartilage and inflammation in there. And so you're getting a little bits of arthritis. If we have stronger connective tissues that increase the stiffness or decrease the laxity of the joint, what's going to happen now is those joints are going to move more true. And as a result, we're going to get out the inflammatory signals from the joints and we're going to get less inflammatory.

signal and that's going to decrease the osteoarthritis components. That's the hope of what we're doing when we're loading these structures is that the joints move better. There's less joint laxity as a result. And so as a result, we're going to decrease the inflammation within there. Also, by doing the low load long duration isometrics, what we're doing is we're loading the tendons and the cartilage. And then when we do that, we're squeezing out the fluid. And then we're relaxing. We're squeezing out the fluid relaxing. And so it's the greatest form of anti-inflammatory. So people take anti-inflammatories, they do other things.

If I twist my ankle, the best anti-inflammatory I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do mobility. I'm certainly not gonna put it, I'm not gonna rest it, I'm not gonna compress it or I'm not gonna put it into a boot because as soon as I decrease movement, what's gonna happen is all the fluid is just gonna stick there. Because the only time that the fluid comes out of my ankle

is when I'm pumping it. And so all I'm doing is I'm doing slow, easy movements, doing alphabets where you just make the capital letters of each of each of the capital letters and I just do that because that gives me good mobility in there and as I'm doing that I'm loading and unloading the tendons loading and unloading tissues pumping fluid back out of the feet and back into the cardiovascular system what I do with I by doing that is the next day when I wake up I don't have the swollen ankle I still have the injury I don't have the swollen ankle I don't have all of the inflammatory components, and I haven't taken anti-inflammatories. I haven't iced it.

I haven't done those things. I've just used movement as an anti-inflammatory. Got it. Same type of thing is going to happen when we're using the low-loaded asymmetrics through the fingers. We're using it as an anti-inflammatory for all the joints and all the other structures in there. Where can people find out more about the product that you have coming out and where can people find you? Yeah. So the company's called sinuous. It's S-I-N-E-U-S. And then, sorry, S-I-N-E-W-U-S. So sinew US. And so what that is, sinuous.com. And again, you can look at that company.

You can see kind of what we've got. And as soon as we have everything is ready to come out to consumers, it'll be posted there. And then for other things, easiest things, if you search, we don't do a lot of social media. We'll do some kind of, we'll keep up to date with things that come out through either through LinkedIn or through other sites. And then the easiest way to keep up with what we're doing

is just to search my name and tendon because my name is spelled really kind of oddly where it's B-A-A-A-R. And so there's not many bars spelled that way. And so if you put bar tendon in, you'll get a lot of the work that we've been doing, a lot of the videos that we've been doing. So it's an easy way to keep up.

Yeah, thank you so much for your work. It's really made a big difference in my training. I've been following along with what you've been doing for a little while. And I think you made a good case for people to get on it with some ISO work. Very good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Strength is never a week. This week is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.