Mention the word shredded, and you will likely conjure up thoughts of being ripped, muscular, vascular and with tremendous muscle definition. While your level of body fat and ultimately your leanness will be significantly impacted by your diet and the foods that you eat, you can influence the way your muscles look just by adjusting some of the techniques you use in your workouts.
In the following video, Jeff from Athlean-X YouTube channel show you how to get that shredded look fast by incorporating overcoming isometrics into your workouts. The four that I show you are great for either dedicated back a day or chest day (or more functionally on upper body push or pull day). Before starting them, however, you want to know the difference between an overcoming and a yielding isometric.
Most people that use isometrics for training are familiar with the yielding type. This is where you have a heavier weight in your hands that you are attempting to resist its fall or the force of gravity acting upon it. Think of holding a heavy barbell in a mid-position of a curl and not letting it drop down towards your thighs. This would be tough to do and it would result in an intense contraction of your biceps.
On the other hand, you could position your hands at ninety degrees in relation to your sides (as in the same mid position of a curl) and instead push up on a fixed or nonmoving bar. As you push as hard as you can you increasingly recruit more motor units to participate in the activity and ultimately increase the strength of the contraction. This is an overcoming isometric, and this is where you can do the most beneficial things for your strength in that given range of motion as well as maintain the safety of your joints in the process.
Here I show you how to apply this technique in the contracted or more shortened position of your upper body pushing muscles and then in the more elongated state. The same is then done for the muscles of the posterior chain as well. The key to the effectiveness of using overcoming iso’s for getting ripped and more muscular looking is to aim to increase muscle tone by gradually increasing the resting state of the muscle and getting it used to producing more overall tension.
Aim to hold each rep for 6 seconds for maximum benefits. You should look to build the strength of the contraction from the first second to the last. Throw in a few of these to each session, and in no time you will see a quick difference in the appearance of the muscles and their hardness without doing anything else different in your workouts. Keep in mind, the most effective combination is to make sure that you are dialing in your nutrition at the same time to drop your levels of body fat and reveal more of that muscle definition that you are developing.
