When designing your weight training program, it's important to consider what you want from your routine. Most weight training exercises can be classified as either compound or isolation exercises and both can play an important role in your progress and your ultimate goals for muscle gain.
Compound exercises are multi-joint movements, which involve the use of more than one major muscle group. Usually it would mean that one large muscle group will be targeted and ends up doing the most work, but also that one or more smaller muscle groups are recruited secondary.
An example would be the squat, which would involve movement of both your hip joint and knees. This is a compound leg exercise which will primarily target your quadriceps but also secondarily engages many other muscles in the body, including the hamstrings, glutes, core, calves and lower back.
Compound exercises have been proven to have many benefits. If your goal is to build muscle mass, then these should be the main part of your workout because overall they stimulate a larger amount of muscle fibers, due to the working of several muscle groups at the same time. This means that more weight can be lifted and you spend less time at the gym, than you would if you simply did isolation exercises as those target only a single muscle group at a time. Working several muscle groups at a time also burns more calories both during and following the workout.
Compound exercises have the additional benefit of causing a greater release of anabolic hormones than isolation exercises. These hormones are muscle building hormones which include growth hormones and testosterone. The more strenuous the exercise the bigger the release and ultimately, the greater the growth. Just remember that proper nutrition and rest is also required to give your muscles what they need to grow. Another benefit of these exercises is that they usually require stabilization of the entire body if proper form is to be maintained, which in turn uses many smaller muscles that might not be stimulated during isolation exercises.
Some of the more popular compound exercises include:
- Squats
- Flat, Incline or Decline bench press
- Dips
- Deadlifts
- Pull-ups, Chin-ups, Lat Pull-downs
- Rows
- Overhead Shoulder Press
- Lunges
An isolation exercise, is a single joint movement that target a single muscle group. An example of an isolation exercise is the leg extension, where movement occurs only at the knee joint and only the quadriceps muscle is worked.
Even though it may seem that compound exercises are better for your workout, isolation exercises still may have its place. They allow you to focus your energy on a single muscle which is helpful if you have hypertrophic imbalance, meaning that you have greater growth in some muscles over others. By targeting the weaker and smaller muscle, you can improve your symmetry and the strength of those individual muscles.
These exercises are also good for allowing the muscle to be trained through its full range of motion to a maximum degree. For example, if you needed to develop your calves, you would need to work these in isolation using calve raises. The reason is that even though the calves are worked in compound exercises like the squat, the primary muscle targeted is the quadriceps with the calves being recruited secondary and there are no compound exercises that primarily target the calves. Isolation exercises are therefore the only way to train smaller muscle groups like the calves, biceps and triceps without overtraining and adding volume to the larger muscle groups.
They can also be used to correct an imbalance that may occur after an injury, which may have caused a muscle to become weak so that other muscles need to compensate for that weakness. Here, isolation exercises can be used to retrain the injured muscle.
Some examples of isolation exercises include:
- Calf raises
- Bicep curls
- Lateral raises or front raises
- Triceps extensions
- Leg extensions
- Leg curls
So it seems that both compound and isolation exercises should be used to build a complete workout. Your training should start with the more difficult of the two, being compound exercises to ensure that you have the necessary energy to get the most intensity out of them, thereby releasing more anabolic hormones to maximize your growth. Follow these with isolation exercises, but only if needed to complement your program and workout goals.
References:
http://relentlessgains.com/compound-vs-isolation-exercises-which-is-best-for-mass/
http://www.aworkoutroutine.com/compound-exercises-vs-isolation-exercises/
http://www.livestrong.com/article/459733-difference-between-isolation-compound-exercises/
http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/strengthtraining/a/compound_ex.htm
http://www.hoffmanfit.com/compound-vs-isolation-exercises-how-to-build-a-powerful-workout-routine/
