What Is the Isometric Mid-Thigh Pull (IMTP)? How to Run It, and How to Read the Numbers
I get asked some version of the same question constantly: "What's your opinion on isometrics?" My answer hasn't really changed since I sat down with Dr. Guy Hornsby on the Hawkin Dynamics podcast. Isometrics have a role and a purpose, but those roles are often inflated, and sometimes flat out exaggerated. If you coach athletes, run a force plate, or you're a player trying to make sense of your own numbers, that nuance matters a lot.
What the IMTP actually is
The isometric mid-thigh pull is a maximal effort test where an athlete stands on a force plate, grips an immovable bar set at roughly mid-thigh, and pulls as hard and as fast as possible for a few seconds. Because the bar doesn't move, you're measuring force production against a fixed resistance rather than against a load you can actually lift.
The test isn't new. It was developed in the early 1990s by Michael Stone, Harold O'Bryant, and Greg Haff at Appalachian State, and first presented to the field in 1995. The bar height isn't arbitrary either. The mid-thigh position was chosen to mimic the power position, the start of the second pull in the clean. That detail is the whole ballgame, and I'll come back to it.
From a single pull you get two headline numbers: isometric peak force (IPF), which reflects maximum strength, and isometric rate of force development (IRFD), which reflects how quickly you can express force. Read together, across time, they tell a story.
Why force matters, with one giant caveat
The case for the IMTP starts from solid ground. Strength is, at its core, the ability to produce force, and the research consistently shows that athletes who produce more force tend to perform better in grip, in jumping, and across a long list of athletic outputs. So measuring force production is genuinely useful.
Here's what people forget: you are strong within a given range of motion. Force is position specific. The IMTP measures what you can produce in that posture, with hips and knees at roughly the angles of the clean's power position. It is not a universal "strength score" you can paste onto every athletic quality. The number is real. The extrapolation is where people get sloppy.
Understand the physics: "there's no weight to it" is a myth
This is the part you really have to get right, and it comes down to physics. I hear coaches say they run the mid-thigh pull for strength testing because it's safer than the squat. I've even had one tell me, "I do the mid-thigh pull because there's no weight to it, versus a squat where you have to load them up." That tells me a lot about how the test is understood.
Just because someone isn't moving doesn't mean there aren't tremendous forces being applied across the entire skeletal system. A maximal IMTP drives thousands of newtons through the hips, spine, and connective tissue. The bar is immovable, but the loading is very real. Calling it "weightless" because nothing moves misunderstands what is actually happening to the body. The test does have a strong safety record, but that comes from how it is set up and administered, not from the forces being small.
Why it was built for weightlifting
The mid-thigh pull comes from weightlifting, and in that context it makes complete sense. The second pull is one of the weakest points in the lift. It is the limiting factor in that kinetic sequence. If you're strong at the very position that bottlenecks the movement, you've addressed the constraint that matters most. The relationship between IMTP force-time characteristics and weightlifting performance is strong, particularly for RFD.
That's a clean, logical, defensible use case. Trying to stretch the same logic onto baseball, or most field and court sports, is weak at best. A pitcher or player attempting to steal second isn't bottlenecked by force production in the clean's power position. I've built force plate profiling tools for MLB players and run performance programs for collegiate baseball, and the IMTP can absolutely be one useful data point in a battery. Treating it as the readout for a rotational or sprint based athlete is a category error.
MLB COUNTERMOVEMENT PROFILER _ CLICK HERE
Efficacy testing vs. daily readiness, and how to read it
This is the distinction Guy explains better than almost anyone, and it changes how you interpret your numbers. Monitoring really splits into two jobs: program efficacy (did the training block actually work?) and fatigue management, or readiness (is the athlete recovered enough to push?).
The trick is that your two main variables behave differently. IPF is stubborn. Maximum strength isn't very sensitive to fatigue and only drops when accumulated fatigue is severe, typically rebounding within about 24 hours in well trained athletes. RFD is the canary. It is highly sensitive to fatigue and can take up to roughly 96 hours of neuromuscular recovery to return to baseline after hard work. So if you're using the IMTP for daily readiness, RFD is your signal, not peak force. If you're judging whether a block delivered, give the athlete adequate recovery before you test, or you'll mistake fatigue for a failed program.
If you're going to run it, run it right
A few essentials from the protocol Guy helped write: sample at a minimum of 1000 Hz so you don't miss the fast RFD signal; standardize knee and hip angles (roughly 125 to 145 degrees and 140 to 150 degrees) and keep them consistent session to session; strap and tape the hands so grip never becomes the limiting factor; and use a short, easy warm up with submaximal pulls. Take at least two maximal trials, and when you compare athletes of different sizes, scale the output with allometric scaling. Otherwise the bigger athlete always "wins" even when the smaller one is relatively stronger.
Then ask the real question: what will you do with the data?
Like any tool in the toolbox, the IMTP is only as good as your understanding of it and your application of it. Once you have the data, what are you actually going to do about it? Running a test just to find out whether someone is weak, without ever looking at their training logs, misses the mark. So does believing you need a test to prove what the training history already tells you. The number is the start of a decision, not the end of one.
Why I point people back to Guy
When someone asks my take, I usually just send them to this conversation. Guy Hornsby (West Virginia University) is the rare combination of a practitioner who understands what it means to coach and a scientist with the backing to make sure it is done correctly. He walks through the history, the ethos behind testing, and the practical setup, drawing on the paper he wrote with his mentor of more than 25 years, Michael Stone: Using the Isometric Mid-Thigh Pull in the Monitoring of Weightlifters: 25+ Years of Experience.
It's a tremendous resource, and I encourage every coach with questions about the IMTP to do two things: go read the paper, then go listen to the podcast with Guy.
Hawkin Podcast Guy Hornsby Episode N20 _ CLICK HERE
Thomas Newman, CSCS, has spent 20+ years in human performance across elite athletics, tactical populations, and executive performance. He founded Newman Performance Systems, helped write the textbook Developing the Athlete: An Applied Sport Science Roadmap for Optimizing Performance Success (Human Kinetics, with Kraemer and Ratamess), and is a published researcher in strength and conditioning.
