Static Contraction Training, lifting a Toyota Corolla, and why most people train too often
Pete Sisco is not a professional athlete. He was never an athlete in school or college. He has an office job and visits the gym perhaps three times a month. He once lifted a 1987 Toyota Corolla.
This interview covers how he got there, what he learned along the way, and why the conventional wisdom heard in every gym is almost entirely wrong.
Publisher, author, and developer of Static Contraction Training.
Hi Pete. It is estimated over 200,000 trainees have used your training methods — how did your Static Contraction story start?
It started in a commercial gym in LA's San Fernando Valley in 1992. My friend and I started training together. He was a lifetime fitness advocate and I was a busy guy who didn't like being in the gym and wanted every minute I was in there to give me maximum bang for the buck.
I wrote down every exercise, weight, rep and set that I did and I timed all of it on my wristwatch. After every workout I transferred all the information onto my laptop while we ate hamburgers and talked about life at a nearby restaurant.
We both knew Mike Mentzer and respected his emphasis on high intensity training. I studied mathematics and physics — and when the talk turned to intensity I wanted to know how it was measured and quantified. Nobody knew. There literally was no measurement being used. Almost twenty years later, except for my training, there still isn't one.
I used a simple measurement of the total weight lifted divided by the time it took to lift it. I called that measurement the Power Factor. Having meaningful numbers led to finding ways to increase the intensity of every exercise — and that eventually led to Static Contraction. When you lift under ideal circumstances the absolute maximum weight you can hold for five seconds but no longer, it represents the highest intensity any muscle can generate. Do that on a progressive basis and great things happen.
Who has been your biggest training influence, and how did they help you?
My biggest training influences have been Mike Mentzer — for pointing out the role of high intensity — and Isaac Newton and James Watt. I am serious about those influences.
Newton created a new world where people look to science and mathematics for answers to mysteries. Watt pioneered the study and measurement of power. Newton has probably done more to improve my life — and everyone else's — than any single person I can name. Once science and experiment established that lifting heavy things builds muscles in humans, the rest is just the laws of mechanics. For me, that cuts right through 99% of the nonsense heard in gyms. If someone claims exercise A is better than exercise B for biceps development, I want to see measurements that prove it.
If you were to select the number one training mistake, what would it be?
People train too often. You cannot grow new muscle until you fully recover from your last workout. Then you wait for new muscle to grow while you are asleep. When you go back to the gym you are stronger and you should be able to lift more weight. When you lift more, you stimulate new muscle growth again.
But people undermine this by going back to the gym too soon. They are not any stronger, so they perform a workout that has no possibility of building new muscle. It is busywork. This is what happens to people who follow the Monday, Wednesday, Friday approach. Who can genuinely get stronger every 48 hours for months at a time? Nobody natural. But those are always the busiest days at the gym.
Sisco's number one training mistake — returning to the gym before recovery is complete — is the same overtraining principle addressed throughout this site and at the centre of the Minimum Effective Strength System. The session that interrupts recovery produces no growth.
In the same way you might choose an ideal dinner guest, who would be your ideal training partner and why?
My ideal training partner would be any person who has seriously studied engineering. An engineer has the right training and mindset. They know you have to have a defined goal and objective, actionable data points on the path to that goal.
Engineers understand objective measurement. They know that when you deviate from your goal you have to make adjustments to your approach. When people train with Static Contraction or Power Factor, they are writing down their performance. Power Factor uses spreadsheets to create graphs so you can see success and failure. Engineers understand that instinctively.
If you could travel back in time, what training advice would you give your teenage self?
I heard every piece of gym folklore we all hear. "Heavy weights for mass, light weights for definition." "Today's my light day, tomorrow's my heavy day." I am embarrassed to say I used to repeat these things to friends, trying to be helpful.
I did not get smart until my early thirties. Like most people, my visits to the gym did not transform me. It was only after 1992 — when I started measuring everything — that I got genuinely strong. I was amazed at what I could lift. I once lifted a total of one million pounds in just over two hours. That worked out to approximately three and a half tons per minute for over two hours. And I was a man with an office job who visited the gym perhaps three times a month.
In your book Train Smart, you say the day is coming when people achieve their optimum muscularity doing 30 seconds of exercise per month. How do you see Static Contraction Training developing in the future?
That is already happening for many people who post on my blog. They train approximately once a month — five exercises, intensity that is off the charts compared to most people. Men in their sixties and seventies benching over 500 pounds and leg pressing close to a ton. Five seconds of effort. But when they return the following month they are stronger and can lift more.
The big future for Static Contraction will arrive when a proper home machine is available — something that uses no weight plates or stacks yet offers literally tons of resistance, and records digital measurements of ten or twenty strength parameters. That will revolutionise strength training.
Almost every gym today uses machines that could have been built with 1850s technology. Look at the next machine you use and ask yourself what component of it was not available at the time of the steam engine. It is remarkable how primitive strength training equipment remains — and how many people benefit financially from keeping it that way.
Thanks for interviewing me, Lee. Train Smart.
Static Contraction is one expression of high-intensity abbreviated training — maximum stimulus, minimal volume, adequate recovery. The Minimum Effective Strength System applies the same underlying principles within a barbell-based framework accessible to any serious trainee.