I’ll start with a confession: I don’t do enough isometric exercise, and I don’t program enough of it either. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t make it into most exercise programs and probably should.
Isometric just means not moving – that’s what the iso is doing in the word. Planks, wall sits, that sort of thing. But you can do any exercise isometrically if you simply hold it. Dynamic is the moving stuff, which is what most people picture when they picture exercise.
Why they’re worth having. An isometric works your nervous system hard. You’re cueing yourself into a good contraction and a good position and generating a lot of force, and it puts real pressure on your bones. But it’s easy on your joints, because nothing is moving. It’s hard to pull a muscle or irritate a joint when there’s no motion happening.
They’re also easy to recover from. Less movement means less micro damage and less inflammation, so you’re not as sore and beat up afterward. That’s exactly why strength and conditioning coaches lean on them in season – when there’s a game on Friday, athletes can’t be limping around. There is a trade-off in that: things that beat you up more are usually asking more of you and driving more adaptation. But as a way to put a lot of tension through yourself without much wear and tear, isometrics are a very useful tool.
The blood pressure effect. This is the part I’d most like you to try. When you hold a hard isometric – and I mean an intense one, not casually holding a light weight – all those contracting muscles squeeze your blood vessels in a static fashion, and that drives your blood pressure up acutely. Your body responds by dilating blood vessels and bringing it back down, and that response outlasts the exercise. A couple of sets of 30 seconds in a wall squat (or the air bench, as I call it) may leave you with hours of lower blood pressure.
This one has good evidence behind it. A large 2023 review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pooled 270 randomized trials and nearly 16,000 participants, and isometric training came out as the most effective mode for lowering resting blood pressure – around 8 points systolic on average, ahead of aerobic training, dynamic resistance training and HIIT. Wall squats specifically ranked at the top for systolic pressure.
The caveat, which is not optional. While your blood pressure goes down chronically, it goes up acutely while you’re actually doing the exercise. That’s true of hard strength training in general. So for anyone whose heart has taken damage – heart attack survivors, heart disease – big swings in blood pressure are exactly what you want to avoid. If I had someone come in who’d had a heart attack six months ago, we keep the load light, we reverse the breathing pattern I described in the bracing clip so there’s less pressure (it makes them weaker and less supported, but it’s safer for their heart), and we avoid things like pressing overhead that spike it particularly. If your heart is at risk, talk to your doctor before you add hard isometrics.
Two different wall exercises. Worth separating, because we did both at the vegan Summerfest class and they are not the same thing. A wall sit is just a hold – not maximal, uncomfortable, and you can keep it up for a long time. People who get good at them can go five minutes, God help them.
The other one, pushing as hard as you possibly can into a wall that isn’t going anywhere, is an overcoming isometric, and it’s supposed to be absolutely maximum neurological output. If you can do it for more than 10 or 20 seconds you aren’t going hard enough. It’s the difference between a weight you could lift 30 times and a weight you can lift once.
Overcoming isometrics get you enormous neurological engagement. If you know about potentiation – your nerves ramping up muscle recruitment – that’s about the biggest you can get, because you’re pushing as hard as you can and it still isn’t moving, so your body keeps throwing more at it. The whole team gets pulled off the bench. You end up recruiting muscle you normally don’t.
How to use them. Mix them in rather than building a workout out of them. They’re short but so intense that a session of nothing but those would be like doing one-rep maxes on eight exercises – one or two is fine, and after that it’s more mental willpower than most people want to spend. I’ll put one in a workout, maybe two. Sprinkled, not stacked.
From our monthly community Q&A inside Stronger. Faster. Younger.
