Dr. Bret Contreras

He passed away too soon, but he wrote the book Super Training.

But all of us strength coaches back in the day, that was our Bible.

And he called it loadless training.

But yeah, you want to flex and squeeze.

But then after a while, you don't need to do that.

You can use that.

You can feel that muscle doing any movement if you want.

Men probably have an advantage when they start out because when we're going through puberty and you're like, oh, wow, my body's changing and no one was looking and you're in the mirror.

I remember.

Every dude flexes his biceps.

His biceps.

And you're like...

You practice flexing.

Well, that's training.

That's resistance training.

You're flexing your muscles.

You're providing the resistance, you know, and there's some evidence that you can gain muscle that way.

There's a classic study by Brittany Counts.

With the biceps where one side used a dumbbell, the other arm just body weight, just like concentrating, using no load, four sets of 20, flexing your arm throughout the range of motion, trying to squeeze your biceps.

And interestingly, this arm grew the triceps because you're using your triceps to provide some of the resistance.