Isometrics: The Missing Link in Strength After 50

Why do so many active adults begin experiencing pain, stiffness, and recurring injuries as they get older—even when they're still exercising?

In this episode, Lauren Eirk shares the story of a lifelong tennis player whose back pain threatened to take away the sport she loved. Through that story, Lauren explains why pain is often less about damage and more about a lack of muscular support, coordination, and control.

You'll discover how isometric training can help restore muscle function, improve joint stability, and create a stronger foundation for movement and resistance training.

Topics include:

• Why pain doesn't necessarily mean your body is broken
 • The relationship between muscles, joints, and aging
 • How muscle timing changes over time
 • What isometrics are and why they work
 • The difference between rehab and smart training
 • Lauren's 5-Step Isometric Method for building strength safely

Whether you're recovering from an injury, struggling with chronic aches, or simply want a smarter approach to strength training after 50, this episode will help you understand why sometimes the best way forward is to slow down, rebuild support, and train with intention.

If you’re ready to build strength in a way that supports your joints, reduces pain, and helps you stay active as you age…

You can explore my full training platform, FIS OnDemand, at www.fisondemand.com

WHO IS LAUREN EIRK?
Lauren is a 40-year fitness veteran, MAT-Rx Full-Body Specialist,  specialist,  Certified Yoga Therapist  C-IAYT, and Certified Yoga Instructor E-RYT 500.   She is the founder of FIS OnDemand™, The 5-Step Isometric Method™, and Fitness Integrated Science. She focuses on joint longevity for adults 50+ through science-backed resistance training to help you pinpoint your weak areas, correct strength imbalances, reduce pain and inflammation, and restore mobility.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience. I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work. We are all building muscle memories. One rep, one story, and one day at a time. Welcome to Making Muscle Memories. I'm Lauren Erk and I am so excited about doing this episode because one of my favorite topics that centers around aging and injuries when people start to exercise, and that is isometrics. So I want to start by talking a little bit about what I see a lot with people that I've worked with over the span of 40 plus years that I have been in this industry. And let me just preface this by saying a lot of the things that I'm going to tell you are things that I myself have experienced in my own body, and that's what really propelled me into this career and into this topic. Now, one of the themes that I see when people have come to work with me, and I'm going to say this might even happen above the age of 40, is that they start to notice that things that they used to do in their 20s and 30s that were somewhat easy. They always say I was in the best shape of my life, I did this, I did this, and then all of a sudden it's like screeching halt. I've reached the age of 40, I've reached the age of 50, and my body is attacking me. My body is going against me, I can no longer do the things that I wanted to do. I have all this chronic pain, and I just don't want to deal with it. And there's a there's this whole acceptance thing of, you know, why is this happening to me? A lot of people are angry. I've even seen people break down into tears, and so this usually starts a trajectory of trying to find programs, physical therapists, um, doctors, uh braces, medications, whatever it is that they can continue to participate in what they want to do. Now, what I see from most people is they'll do one of two things when they experience pain. I've done this myself. Number one, we stop moving in general, and I've certainly done this. I have gotten an injury before and decided I'm just gonna rest for the whole week. I'm not gonna move, I'm not gonna do this thing. We can also do it by changing activities. So it hurts when I run, so I'm just gonna race walk. And this was the definition of me in my 20s. That's when I started to break down. I was running so much, my knees started hurting me, I decided I would do a race walking, and I thought that would be okay. Switching activities. Another thing that people do is they just push through pain. And you see this all the time in sports. You know, somebody gets injured, they're on the sidelines, they're hurting their knee, and then pretty soon they're back on the court because they have to play. Or maybe they're just somebody that just loves going to do this in this activity, and they're gonna do those 18 holes of golf come hell or high water, whether my back hurts or not, and I'll just pay for it later. Both of these are not good solutions. FYI, right? So, a lot of what I want to do in this in this podcast going forward is I want to, I definitely want to talk with you about research and about science and about muscles and about exercise, but in a way that's enjoyable. That's why I want to center this around stories. So, in today's episode, I am gonna talk with you about a woman that I work with years ago that I actually met on the road when I used to do a lot of presenting, and she was an avid tennis player. And I really feel like I'm not gonna tell anybody her name, but this is a while back. I really feel like her story exemplifies what I want to talk about today. When I first met her, we'll just call her Susan, and that's not her name, but I'm just gonna call her Susan. So when I first when I first met Susan, she was an avid tennis player and she was having lower back pain. When she would go to hit the tennis ball, whatever she would experience, a jamming in her lower back. It would usually go away as she got warmed up, she was playing the game, and by the time she got home and she was driving home, it started to stiffen up. By that evening, she was having a difficult time getting up and out of chairs, and she was doing things like taking aspirin, a leave, and getting insects, she was using back braces, she was putting a heating pad on her back, she was sitting in the bathtub every night, she was changing her shoes around, she thought it might be her mattress, and I'm sure a lot of you can relate to these things. Well, eventually it got so bad she was so tight she had to go to the doctor. The doctor took an x-ray. They found out that she had a hernated disc at L4L5, which actually is pretty common, especially if you're someone that's athletic and you haven't managed your muscular system well throughout your life, and now here you are in your 40s and 50s, and these things are starting to pop up. Well, for her, this was unacceptable. And so, you know, the doctor told her she was going to do six weeks of physical therapy, they were gonna do dry needling, they were do some laser work, they were gonna do some corrective exercise, some stretching, some massage, and some resting. Six weeks went by, she didn't really feel that much better. And so she was tired of sitting on the sidelines, she wanted to get back out there, she wanted to play tennis, and so she was like, that's screw it, I'm just gonna go out, I'm just gonna play the tennis, forget it. Well, guess what happened? She got worse. And usually, in my business, because I'm in the fitness and health business, I'm a muscle activation techniques therapist, I am a yoga therapist, and I've been a personal trainer for several decades. I usually don't see clients until they're at this point where nothing has worked. And that's exactly when she saw me. And I can remember just the crocodile tears running down her face when she was telling me her story because she didn't know what to do, she didn't know what to try. And I think the the the for me watching that, I mean, I saw a lot of myself in that because I also in my teens had a big exercise addiction. And I know what it feels like when you have something taken away from you. It sucks because you're like, this is gonna be my life. Like, who am I outside of tennis? Who am I outside of whatever it is that I'm doing? So, what I had to do for Susan is I had to frame for her, and I'm gonna do that here, what pain really is. You see, pain is not random. When the body throws pain in the body, I know a lot of times we will think the pain is, you know, I might have lower back pain, I might have hip pain, I might have foot pain. Pain can be from anywhere in the body. Pain is just a symptom that something is actually wrong, something is malfunctioning. Our joints themselves, which is a joint is where two bones come together and they create motion. We're talking about synovial joints, their job is to distribute stress so that multiple joints do their job at the time that they need to do them. And they're reliant upon the ligaments, they're reliant upon tendons, and a lot on the muscular system, which by the way is the largest metabolic organ in the body. Now, muscle weakness is a sort of a simple way of saying, yes, we have pain because we're our muscles are weak. But it's even more than just weakness. It's about muscles not showing up at the right time when they need to show up. Why does this happen? Why does it happen in our 40s and 50s? And I've done other episodes about some of the realities of aging, about the fact that we don't produce the same amount of motor units as we age, our muscles themselves change as we age, our ability to sense what's going on in our environment changes as we age, and our muscles themselves begin to diminish in size as we age. All of this is just from being on the planet, even if you're active. But let's just say that I'm a tennis player and think about it. What are the things that I have to do as a tennis player? I have to run, I have to swing. I usually am swing a lot with one hand. Every tennis player I've ever met says my backhand sucks or my forward hand sucks, so they're really good at swinging on one side, not on the other. So we have an imbalance of activities. So what does that mean in the body? We have certain positions and motions and joint angles that we do a lot. And if you're an athlete, you do those positions a lot. And the reason a lot of times that people go into these activities is because they're good at them. And the more that we practice these, the better we are at them. For someone that plays tennis all the time, you know, for Susan, she didn't have time to practice isometrics, go to yoga, work on her core, take in some Pilates classes, or make it into the gym and do some strength training that was strategic. Her whole life was playing tennis, and she felt that her body was supposed to just follow along. But you see, what happens is when we don't visit certain joint angles, when we don't go to the extremes of trunk rotation, which is a big part of tennis, when we don't visit positions of hip flexion that we need, we don't haven't worked on our foot and ankle, our balance from left to right, all of a sudden we can keep going and keep going and keep going, and then one time the ball goes across the court, boom, we run after it, we twist a certain way, and all we injure our back. And many times I've heard studies that by the age of 30, most people have somewhat of a mild herniated disc that's already happening. We don't know what's happening because that nucleus is just sort of inside of the annulus fibers that surround the nucleus in the disc, and they're not really hitting a nerve root yet. They're just kind of sitting in there baking, waiting for that right moment when that disc is going to shoot out and hit a spinal nerve, and now we're in pain and we're running to the doctor thinking that this just happened, and when in reality it was sitting there for a really long time. So when we think about sports and we think about activities, we're thinking about the word called timing. Timing is a huge portion of what happens when we age. We lose timing. Muscles, and this is something that I have learned as a muscle activation techniques therapist, I test muscles and I've worked with thousands of people on my table evaluating range of motion and testing muscles through a MAT, my teacher Greg Roskoff, who's one of my mentors, taught me so much about how muscles work. And what I found through that is that when I when I'm testing a client and their muscles can't resist on demand, like they they can resist, but a lot of other body parts have to kick in. Like they lift their head up or they'll turn their shoulder up or they'll kind of halfway through the range, they'll kick in, they'll contract, but then their muscle will go out. When I see these things, I know as an MAT therapist, those muscles are weak. And yes, there are certain themes that I see on all people. Trunk rotation is a big one, hip flexion is a big one, and those things are absolutely required for the game of tennis. But because Susan had not been used to going into her extreme ranges of motion, meaning the end ranges of her rotation or the end ranges of hip rotation, when she was playing tennis, she was going there quickly to go after balls, and over time it is it was tearing up her back. So I introduced to Susan the power of an isometric. What is an isometric? Before I finish the story about Susan, I will tell you that on my platform, FIS on demand, isometrics are the center point. Now, isometric is the definition of an isometric is creating a muscle contraction with no change in length. We are not moving, but we're contracting muscles. Why is this important? You see, I always say to my clients, we have to learn how to engage muscles properly and we have to understand our available range of motion before we go and move. Now, this is an element of what's called biomechanics. You want to put progressive forces on joints that that person can tolerate, and every person is different. So for me, when I started putting isometrics on my program, I had no idea what was getting ready to happen because isometrics are without a doubt the most watched videos. Isometric videos are the most watched content on my platform. So getting back to my client was Susan, I knew that if she was going to get better, because all these PT and PT therapies and all these manual treatments, massage, laser, chiropractic, NSAIDs, all the things she was doing. Nothing was hitting the pain because she wasn't targeting the problem. The body was screaming, I need you to be here. I need you to focus on strengthening this, but you're stretching everything that's overworking. You're diminishing pain when I need you to feel pain so that you don't go into positions and ranges that you don't have control over. So for Susan, and this is the way I've seen with a lot of clients, it's almost like, it's almost like a coming-up. It's looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, Oh my gosh, I have mismanaged my body for years. I have a weak core, I have weak hip flexures, I have positions that I should be going into and I don't have. So as we got her on my app, we were working together, and what she found was when she was going and rotating, she was really good at rotating in one direction, but not so much in the other. And then when she would go and exercise in that in those positions, neither the left rotation or the right rotation, none of them were strong. She was amazed when she started working together. And this is a woman that could play, you know, match after match of tennis. I mean, everyone thought of her as a high-level athlete. But when she started doing isometrics, getting into the end range of her joint and holding that against a resistance for five to six seconds, her body had no strength. She had never actually become strong at the range of the available range that her joint had. And therefore, her muscles could not contract efficiently on demand. They were fine as long as she was working in the mid-ranges, and I see this so much with many clients. But when she started moving into the extremes, or when her body started to get tired further out, guess what happened? Her muscles were bailing, her muscles were underperforming, and therefore, what did her body do to combat that? Pain, tightness, and compensated motion. Which, by the way, are not mistakes, but it's something that we have to maintain awareness of and we have to manage. Now, you're asking me, whatever happened to Susan? Did she ever get better? The answer to that question is 100% yes. We went through, Susan and I, almost a year of training. Now, what happened with her is that she was going through the isometrics. I had her on a program in my platform. I started off with what's called the ISO boost program. And this was a 15 workout program where I went through joint by joint specific planes of motion, meaning motions like rotation, flexion, extension, side bending, and in different areas of the body, pushing against immovable objects to create muscle contractions. She learned through going through this program how much weakness she truly had. She noticed that she had more energy when she would do them. She noticed after an isometric session, she had considerably less pain. She noticed that she had more mobility when she went to do things that she otherwise before felt tight in, all of a sudden she had more range of motion. And what I see a lot of times with my clients is that when they start working with the isometrics, they almost get addicted to it because it's like, I haven't felt this good in years. I didn't even know that I could feel this good. The isometrics, however, are the first step. And this is where I call prehab versus smart training, right? So pre rehabilitation, rehabilitation is what we do when we're hurt. We were trying to get out of pain. And so for her, going through the isometrics was her ability to retrain her nervous system to get familiar with certain ranges of motion and not produce pain. She was trying to get out of pain by increasing her neuromuscular integrity. When we have better mechanoreception, or our body our muscles can contract and work better, we're going to have less no susception or pain because her body doesn't have to protect. But then, as they were getting her out of pain, we only were in the first step. She didn't need to abandon these isometrics. Athletes use them, physical therapists use them, and some people in the fitness industry use them. Not a lot, but some do, the smart trainers do. Then we had to get her to progressively move. And so when she was working with her core and working with her shoulders, doing all these isometrics and really squeezing and engaging these muscles. By the time I moved her into my third category, and I call this the five-step cycle or the five-step isometric method, is what I call my method. The third step after I go from isolated to integrated isometrics is to move calisthenic training, bodyweight training. Now she could engage her core when she was in plank. She could engage her core better when she was doing crunches and backward bends and lateral flexion work and hip work. And she was starting to understand where her strength deficits were. And there were times that she would go through bodyweight training and she'd have to go back and do more isometrics. But eventually, after a period of weeks, she asked me to do strength training. I didn't have to tell her. When she was starting to pick up load, her range of motion changed. She had to go back to revisit some of the isometrics. She stressed her system. But as she continued to work through a progression of resistance training, from non-moving to moving, from body weight to weighted, from in from unstable to excuse me, from stable to unstable, this biomechanical progressive step towards adding load to the body, she was able to not only return back to tennis, but she picked up a whole new habit of how many times a week am I gonna play tennis, how many times a week am I gonna perform resistance training, and how many times a week do I sit with myself at home and I work with my body performing isometrics. Now she is one of many clients that I have worked with over the years. And the reason that I even created my platform in the first place, the FIS On Demand Platform, is because I have experienced this in my own body. Right now that I'm doing this in my mid-50s, and I've experienced all kinds of injuries, and I have done isometrics throughout my entire life. But instead of thinking of isometrics, my message to you today from this workout, from this, from this podcast, isometrics does not mean that I'm doing less work. What I'm doing is I'm setting myself up so that I can eventually do more work because I'm putting in the time to make my muscles show up in a way that they have never shown up before. I can actually get more done in an isometric session than I ever could just going hard and skipping all of that. So instead of always thinking I need to go hard to build muscle or to push through pain or to rehabilitate an injury, sometimes it's necessary to go backwards, figure out where we went wrong, apply small amounts of force, and allow our body to reveal itself over time. No two people are alike. And I do believe that as a trainer, I have had to work very hard to listen to the story that this person's muscular system was really telling me. Now, if you'd like to have more information about who how you could figure out why you are in pain and how you can get yourself out of pain, I will put a link below for my platform, FIS On Demand, where I can take you through hundreds of workouts that will guide you through my five step isometric method approach. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.