Compound exercises for muscle mass and strength
Compound exercises are intended to increase muscle mass and strength. Their effectiveness lies in their effect on the hormonal system. They are called compound due to their influence on several muscles at once and this subjects the body to greater exertion – boosting your hormonal responses. Namely, they boost testosterone and human growth hormone secretion which are one of the most important hormones in building muscle mass and burning fat.
If you for example wish to achieve ripped abs, this is not done by their direct training without also doing these exercises.
So if you in your training regime have devoted several exercises to abs, without having a good balance with compound exercises, you’re achieving nothing.
The body and its hormones comprise a whole system. They function as one. It is needed to activate the body into a regime of building muscles and burning fat. Compound exercises directly contribute to this.
All compound exercises are not equal
There is an explicit difference between free-weight exercises and machine-assisted exercises. Compound exercises done with free weights are superior in comparison to the exercises performed on machines. (Free weights means that the direction of lifting weights is completely regulated by your hands or legs and not from the rails of a machine.) Strength comes from the whole body as an interconnected system, not from some lonely muscle.
Performing these free-weight exercises increases stability and endurance, because it puts stress not only to bigger muscles, but to the ability to maintain balance, which means activation of other muscles in the role of stabilizers. If you train on machines, machines fixate your movements and keep balance instead of your muscles doing this.
Isolation exercises
Muscles grow faster when you do compound exercises. Then the isolation exercises have a much greater effect because of the strengthened hormonal response as a result of the compound exercises. Otherwise, isolation exercises without compound exercises have insignificant effect as they don’t cause great hormonal response, without which there will be no increase of muscle mass. And no increase of strength.
Isolation exercises are intended to target specific muscles. Examples of such exercises would be bicep barbell curls, dumbbell flies, cable exercises.
Strength comes from the whole body as an interconnected system.
When you push or pull, you don’t do it with an isolated muscle, but you use more muscles – back, abs, legs… If strength comes from the whole body as a system, then normally follows that strength is built that way too – training the body as a system and not as a compound of lonely muscles.
Training regimes that use a large number of isolation exercises, do not grasp this principle. Additionally, you can’t have someone who is overweight or having too low muscle mass specializing in doing isolation exercises. He must not! If he cares to succeed, if he cares about his time, energy and money, he mustn’t! Those are superficial training regimes. Besides the main principles we talk about here, every person has his own specifics. Request a training program from Muskultura.
Isolation exercises are not bad by themselves, quite on the contrary. But neglecting compound exercises wholly devalues isolation exercises (and machine exercises too). And this causes proneness to injuries, joint pain, easily hurt shoulders, etc.
What do you think heals and strengthens joints? The hormonal response caused by the effort being enforced on the body (together with proper nutrition and sleep). If that effort comes only from isolation exercises, then there is no enough hormonal response, but there is enough targeted stress again and again exactly on the joints, cartilage and tendons. But there won’t be hormones in enough quantities to heal!
If we compare muscle building to driving a car, then compound exercises (due to the hormonal response) are your pressure on the gas pedal, and the isolation exercises are the steering of the wheel. How easy it is to steer the wheel while staying in place?
Compound exercises build the material in which the isolation exercises will carve the figure in more detail.
Include these in every workout and always do them before isolation exercises.
The most powerful compound exercises: