Compound exercises

Geschatte leestijd: 3 minuten When you want to do strength training, you can basically choose between two types of fitness exercises: Compound exercises, also known as compound exercises, and isolation exercises. With isolation exercises, one muscle group works at a time. Compound exercises are exercises in which multiple muscle groups work together. We’ll delve deeper into compound exercises here.

Compound exercises

Compound exercises, also known as compound exercises or multi-joint exercises, are exercises that engage one or more muscle groups and multiple joints. A good example of a compound exercise is the bench press. When bench pressing, you focus on the muscles in your chest, but the muscles in the arms, shoulders, abdomen, back, and sometimes even legs help to perform the exercise or to stabilize the body. With these exercises, you not only train the muscle the exercise is targeting, but you also involve various actively assisting or stabilizing muscles directly and indirectly.

Advantages of compound exercises

The advantages versus isolation exercises are very diverse. Compound exercises often burn more calories. This is due to their compound nature and the involvement of multiple muscles in executing the exercise. In line with this, strength training is also used to achieve goals such as weight loss. Strength training, including compound exercises, builds more muscle tissue. This in turn leads to higher energy expenditure at rest. Strength training also contributes to the development of EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), also known as the so-called “afterburn.” This means that your resting metabolism remains elevated for about 24 to 48 hours (and some studies even say 72 hours) after the training. This means you burn more calories at rest, not just during training as with prolonged and frequent cardio training. So besides the advantage of training multiple muscles at once, it has its cardiovascular benefits and helps limit your weight.

More training in less time

Another advantage is simply the time needed to do a full-body workout. When you train each muscle separately and in isolation, you spend more time per muscle group. If you don’t have that time and still want good results, go for compound exercises. These allow you to train your entire body with the same intensity in less time.

Strength through coordination

“Physical strength” is nothing more than the size of muscle fibers and their ability to contract. Especially in movements involving multiple muscles at once. The coordination and cooperation between the different muscles play a crucial role in this. Compare it to soccer. You can train the individual players to become top players. However, if they haven’t trained together, they won’t be able to perform optimally as a team during a match. Visually, you may have a top team, but in practice, the performances may lag behind those of teams with ‘inferior’ players. For example, a gymnast may perform exercises from gymnastics that a much more muscular bodybuilder cannot perform. Even when this has nothing to do with flexibility. In many sports, strength depends more on ‘technique’ than on the individual strength of the muscles involved.

Primary and secondary muscles per compound exercise

Chest

Flat, Incline or Decline Bench Press Primary muscle group: Pectoralis Secondary muscle group: Shoulders, Triceps, abdomen

Biceps

Close-Grip Chin-Up Primary muscle group: Biceps Secondary muscle group: Back

Triceps

Dips Primary muscle group: Triceps Secondary muscle group: Shoulders, Chest

Back

Rows Primary muscle group: Back Secondary muscle group: Biceps Pull-Up Primary muscle group: Back Secondary muscle group: Biceps

Legs

Squats Primary muscle group: Quadriceps Secondary muscle group: Gluteus, hamstrings, calves

Shoulders

Shoulders Press Primary muscle group: Shoulders Secondary muscle group: Triceps

When to use compound exercises

Because with isolation exercises you want to achieve specific training goals, we have outlined below when you can use isolation exercises and for which goals, and when it is best to choose compound exercises.

	Isolation or Compound
Increasing muscle strength	Compound
Hypertrophy/Muscle growth	Isolation/compound
Improving muscle coordination	Compound
Sport performance	Compound
Stimulating metabolism after training	Compound
Difficulty level	Isolation exercises are often easier
Recommended order	Perform compound exercises before isolation exercises