Isolating muscle groups or complex movements in your strength training? How to acheive real muscle development.

Working in the fitness industry, You can often see how much people dont understand about the big picture benifits of weight training, when we get the same question all the time. The question usually goes something like:

"what exercise can I do to target my ___________ (insert your favorite muscle here: biceps, pecs, lats, tri's, etc)?

No matter what muscle someone asks about, they will always ask how they can isolate it. They answer to the question is always the same– “Why on earth do you want to isolate it?”

One of the first things I like to teach my clients is that the body works best as a whole using its natural kinetic chain which is a system where parts of the body assist each other to make up a compound exercise. The body simply does not move well in isolation, in fact, there really is no such thing as true muscle isolation. Even when doing an "isolation" exercise there is almost always a neibouring muscle group that will help in some way to complete the exercise. However, in this article we will compare "isolating" body parts with single-joint movements to the much more effective strategy of using multi-joint compound movements.

Whenever you isolate muscles by doing single-joint movements, you are actually training your body to not function as it should and this increases your risk of injury. By using isolation movements you are creating a body made up of individual muscle groups rather than the strong, functional unit it should be.

If you really want to end up with the joint problems, tendonitis, and excess body fat, that single joint training usually leads to, then please, continue to ‘isolate’ body parts. Although, if you would rather have a lean, muscular, injury-free, functional body that works as a complete powerful unit to perform compound movements (in both sports or even everyday tasks), then you need to change your focus away from muscle isolation. Trust me, focusing on how well your body functions will give you a body that looks even better than it would have if you focused on training in isolation. For example, take a look at the physiques of almost any professional athlete. These guys will almost never train with muscle isolation (Their conditioning coaches wouldnt have a job very long if they let them), yet they are absolutely ripped to shreds! Just look at people like Maurice Green or Terrell Owens and tell me who wouldn’t want to look like those guys.

Another advantage of moving away from isolation movements to compound movements is that it is much easier to lose body fat. This is because focusing more on multi-joint compound movements instead of single-joint muscle isolation movements, you not only burn a lot more calories during each workout, but you also increase your metabolic rate, and stimulate production of more fat burning and muscle building hormones like growth hormone and testosterone.

For example, machine leg extension is a single joint movements that works mainly the quadriceps, this exercise can cause knee joint instability long term, and the exercise doesn’t burn many calories for all that effort. Exercises like squats, lunges, step-ups, and deadlifts, on the other hand, are all multi-joint compound movements that work hundreds of muscles in the body (including the quadriceps) as a complete unit, they all create more stable and strong joints in the long run (when you do them properly), and also burn a huge amount of calories compared to the single-joint movements.

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