Braden
There’s alot of research that suggests that stance training done in isolation, like any isometric, will increase standing blood pressure, decrease innervation, vascularization, and cellular metabolism of the muscule, decrease contraction speed, and will not condition the joints and bones the way proper full-motion weight-bearing exercise will; and to boot, the gains in strength will be extremely range-dependant.
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Not sure I agree with this. First off, I was under the impression Isometics were a tension based exercise. the best descrition was that of standing in a doorway and pressing out on the frame with all your strength. This is NOT what goes on in a holdng posture, in fact holding postures are actually best done with as much relaxation as possible. The practitioner is suposed to relax and “Sink” into the posture.
Also the line about rasing blood pressure, I’m not sure that applys either. My waking heart rate is always on the low end of my scale when I do LOT’s of posture holding routines, sugesting that blood pressure actually DROPS!! If what you said were true, it would move to the upper end of the scale.
I also don’t undestand the whole reaction speed thing. I have alwayse used deep holing routines to boost my kicking abilitys because they loosen and SPEED my kicks signifcantly. If what you say is true, my kicks would slow down, tighten up and lose range of motion, NOT speed up and become easier and more powerful.
On the not condition joint thing, have you ever done stance routines??? If so you would not say this. Holding postures does as much for the jionts as the muscles, both in strength AND range of motion, AND they also build the bone too boot. You can actually FEEL this in a not to short amount of time.
Another plus is you don’t have the high compression through motion effect as you do with a loaded exercise like squats. this prevent the “Grinding” like effect, and thus protects the cartillaige. For you to say that Stances don’t build the jionts and bones shows your total lack of experiance on the subject.
On the range of motion thing, you really don’t have that problem when holding full length routines as each posture works a slightly different aspect of the muscles range. This followed by moving through the routine in a seady motion without pausing covers the entire range of motion.
Wieghted squat like you say are good, but I think Chris’s idea of useing polymetric exercises (Jumping over the staff) is also better because it builds the kind of explosive power a martial artists needs. You can increse the load by jumpng higher, or holding a wieghted medicine ball wile you do your jumps. Plus, you get the calf training and conditioning at the same time. This also has the advantage of not needing a spotter, which was the original question posted at the beginning of the thread.
RD
It doesn’t sound like you really want to be a power squatter, so I don’t see why you’d ever have to shoulder more weight than is safe, to build and maintain a good level of lower body fitness and look with this exercise. Try this twice a week, and if after a few months you want to ‘take it to the next level’ then you can look for more solutions then.