Compound vs. Isolation Exercises: Understanding Your Workout

Unlike a compound exercise that uses multiple joints, an isolation exercise focuses on one major joint at a time. Isolation movements help you focus on the muscles that you want to improve.

Here are some of the most popular isolation exercises and the muscle groups they work:

• Bicep Curls – whether you’re using a dumbbell, barbell, machine, or cable, curls are perfect for isolating your bicep (or leg) muscles. You can change the intensity of your curl exercise using different weights, equipment, or postures.
• Leg extension / Leg curls – Single joint leg work to target very specific regions of the body. Flyes – There are various flye exercises you can do, such as the incline cable flye and seated band chest flye, but all these exercises are designed to target your chest muscles.

Isolation Exercise Pros

1. Target specific muscle groups: The main benefit of adding isolation exercises to your overall workout is to focus on the muscle groups that are weaker than others, which will help balance your overall body strength.
2. Rehabilitation: After surgery or injury, a physical therapist may recommend a workout regimen of isolation exercises to help you slowly develop strength in those muscles.

Isolation Exercise Cons

1. Less efficient than compound exercises: Unfortunately, isolation movements utilise only one joint at a time , so results will take much longer. That’s why it’s important to mix your isolation exercises with compound movements.
2. Burn fewer calories: If you’re weightlifting to shed kilos, your goal weight will take much longer to achieve with isolation exercises alone because you burn fewer calories.
3. Less functionality: Isolation exercises rarely resemble the body movements we are performing each day outside of the gym. We’re more likely to utilise more than one muscle group at a time in our day-to-day lives, making isolation exercises less functional.

Which Exercise is Right for Me?

The benefits of compound movements far outweigh that of isolation exercises; however, isolation exercises can still help you achieve your and training goals. For a complete and balanced workout, it’s best to use isolation exercises to complement your weight-training workout that consists of mainly compound exercises. Often as you get tired towards the end of a session, you can use isolation work to continue to train with good form without a reduction in performance as you fatigue.

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