Can you gain muscle doing only isometric exercises?
Wed Feb 02 2022tags: fitness public exploration draft
Hypothesis
[Oranchuk et al. (2018)](https://files.lieu.gg/docs/Oranchuk et al. (2018). Isometric training and long‐term adaptations - Effects of muscle length, intensity, and intent - A systematic review.pdf) performed a meta-analysis of twenty-six studies and found that "substantial improvements in muscular hypertrophy and maximal force production were reported regardless of training intensity".
maximum voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC)
Unfortunately "most studies (16/26) recruited untrained participants, while the remainder (11/26) utilized "active" or "recreationally trained" participants", so the evidence isn't strong whether isometric training can result in hypertrophy in well-trained individuals.