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Do isometrics burn calories?

Muscles themselves burn calories, and strenuous exercise has a big effect on calorie burning in the body, but do isometric exercises burn calories? Is isometric training strenuous enough to burn body fat?

An isometric exercise case study by the owner of Isometric-Training showed a reduction of 20.3 pounds of fat in 4 weeks. That was a total loss of 9.4% body fat, not water weight. Furthermore, he demonstrated that by doing isometric exercises, he burned 14 pounds of body fat in 7 days, with video updates and archiving every aspect of his training. That’s a deficit of approximately 49,000 kcal in a week. These numbers don’t appear out of nowhere; Real people have performed isometric exercises of varying intensities to reduce not only their bodies’ water weight, but actual body fat as well. Isometric exercises don’t just burn calories; They turn your body into a furnace that can burn calories like a space shuttle does jet fuel.

Isometric exercises are a fundamental key to leaning functional muscles, as they have been in martial arts for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Even without addressing the art behind isometrics, the science is irrefutable; In 1954, two German scientists, Muller and Hettinger, conclusively demonstrated in over 5,000 independent clinical trials that strength could be increased by 5-15% with a single 7 second stimulation once a week. Subjects in a subsequent study who performed a 7-second daily contraction increased their strength by 72% in 46 weeks. The drop in strength after the end of training is very slow. 70 weeks after the end of the training, their strength was still 42% higher than before the start of the training. After doing nothing for over a year and a half, they were still 42% stronger than when they started.

Oh well, that research must be out of date by now, as much as exercise science changes over the years. I guess I’ll have to refer back to this study by John Little (et. al. 2006) which showed a single 5 minute routine comprised of 10 7 second contractions that produced up to 9.3 pounds of muscle tissue. That’s enough muscle to dramatically increase your body’s resting ability to burn body fat.

There are hordes of thoughts about the best method of strength training; what I will say is that your regimen should include something that builds your body from the inside out. For me, isometric exercises build strength from the tendons, ligaments, and nerves to the muscles. I do workouts that isolate individual muscles for maximum muscle fatigue and workouts that involve large muscle groups for central nervous system fatigue. As long as your training doesn’t neglect the internal principles of strength (such as strength training that focuses solely on muscle without long-term development of tendons), it can be part of what gives you stability and fat-burning power. .

But a true fat-burning fitness program can’t just be intensity. In fact, when you look at cardio machines at the gym, the core of their effectiveness lies in interval training. Having a metabolic calorie boost from intense interval training, coupled with a massive calorie demand from intense muscle training will do wonders for burning calories in the body, and isometric exercises will do both.

Naturally, nutrition will play a large role in your body’s ability to burn fat; Isometrics will still burn calories, but it would be more like a tug of war between your fitness and your diet, when it should be a team relay to the finish line of lean muscle. It’s not as simple as eating fewer calories than you burn, and isometrics can burn a LOT of calories.

It also means things like eating protein that promotes muscle growth, eating saturated fat that actually boosts your metabolism, and slowing down with meals (it takes about 20 minutes for your brain to notice that the food is filling your stomach to trigger a cessation response – – slowing down your meals can mean feeling full and avoiding overeating).

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