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Muscles themselves burn calories, and strenuous exercise has a great effect on burning calories in the body, but do isometrics burn calories? Is isometric training strenuous enough to burn body fat?
An isometric exercise case study conducted 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 14lbs of body fat in 7 days, with video updates and archiving every aspect of his training. That’s a deficit of about 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 burns jet fuel.
Isometric exercises are a fundamental key to lean functional muscles, as they have been in martial arts for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Even without addressing the art behind isometry, the science is irrefutable; In 1954, two German scientists, Muller and Hettinger, conclusively demonstrated in more than 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 later 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 training, their strength was still 42% higher than before the start of 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Oh well, that research must be outdated by now, much as exercise science changes over the years. I guess I’ll have to refer to this study by John Little (et. al. 2006) that showed a single 5-minute workout made up 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 strength training method; 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 engage large muscle groups for central nervous system fatigue. As long as your training doesn’t neglect internal strength principles (such as bodybuilding training that focuses solely on muscles without long-term development of tendons), it can be part of what gives you stability and fat-burning ability.
But a true fat-burning fitness program can’t just be about intensity. In fact, when you look at cardio machines at the gym, the core of their effectiveness is interval training. Having a metabolic calorie boost from intense interval training coupled with a massive calorie demand from intense muscular training will do wonders for burning calories in the body, and isometric exercises will do both.
Naturally, nutrition will play an important role in your body’s ability to burn fat; Isometric exercises will still burn calories, but it would be more of a tug of war between your fitness and your diet, when it should be a team relay to the lean muscle finish line. It’s not as simple as eating fewer calories than you burn, and isometric exercises can burn a LOT of calories.
It also means things like eating protein that promotes muscle growth, eating saturated fat that actually promotes your metabolism, and slowing down with meals (it takes about 20 minutes for your brain to notice that food is filling your stomach to trigger a quit response – – slowing down your meals can mean feeling full and avoiding overeating).