FITNESS CORNER: Compound exercises will build and tone muscles
Ask most folks what body parts they desire to strengthen and I almost guarantee you that the response will be one of the following:
"I want to tone my arms."
"I want to firm my legs and glutes."
The arms and legs are perhaps the most trained body parts among men and women, with women usually showing a preference for lower body training, and men favoring exercises for the arms. This is fine and good. However, what is not good is the fact that it is all too common for individuals to train these body parts alone.
Case in point, many guys start their foray into weightlifting by doing endless sets of barbell curls out of a desire to build big arms, at the expense of the many other muscle groups that the body contains.
Exercises like curls are an example of what are called isolation exercises. They are called so because they isolate smaller muscle groups in the body to train. Other examples of isolation exercises include triceps kickbacks, leg extensions, leg curls and calf raises.
Don't get me wrong: Isolation exercises do strengthen, tone and build muscle. However, they do so ineffectively when compared to what are called compound exercises.
According to a study in the journal Sports Medicine from New Zealand, exercises that involve a large muscle mass tend to evoke a strong anabolic (muscle building) hormone response. If you focus on training small muscle groups with isolation exercises, you experience a much smaller anabolic hormone response, since you are not stimulating a large mass of muscle.
Compound exercises, on the other hand, target several muscle groups at once, which means that they involve a large muscle mass, as referenced in the study. Usually, compound exercises primarily involve a major muscle group, such as the chest in the bench press. They recruit smaller groups of muscle secondarily to do the rest of the work, and in the case of bench press, those secondary muscle groups include the front shoulders and the triceps on the back of the upper arm.
What's more is that, because compound exercises promote a stronger bodily hormonal response, they build muscle much more effectively than isolation exercises. For example, compound moves that use the biceps, like chin-ups and rows, will build biceps more effectively than curls alone will.
How can this be, you ask? Hormonal response is key, my friend.
Below, I have provided a list of what I believe are staple exercises that everyone should be sure to include in their personal workout routines to effectively strengthen all muscle groups:
Squats (barbell, dumbbell, body weight): Primarily strengthens the quadriceps (front of thigh) with the help of the glutes, hamstrings, calves and lower back muscles.
Bench press, dips and push-ups: Primarily strengthens chest muscles with help from the front of the shoulders and the triceps.
Rows (barbell and dumbbell), pull-ups: Effectively strengthens almost all of the back muscles, with help from the back of the shoulders and the biceps, and sometimes even the abdominal muscle groups as well.
Peach County resident Shawn McClendon is an ACE Certified Personal Trainer and owner of the health/fitness blog www.YourHealthAtTheCrossroads.com. Contact him at shawn@yourhealthatthecrossroads.com
This story was originally published January 23, 2016 at 3:49 PM with the headline "FITNESS CORNER: Compound exercises will build and tone muscles ."