Creating a list of compound exercises these days is a smart idea experienced bodybuilders realize.
For many bodybuilders and fitness advocates, who have limited and slight time to spend a little time performing their daily schedule routine, promoting their fitness and body flexibility, either to maintain their health or achieve their dream muscle growth.
In any of these reasons, construction body masters design a list of compound exercises, to reduce exercise time as a shortcut to combine the muscles involved during routine exercises.
What is The Compound Exercises?
A compound exercise is workouts that engage a multi-joint muscle or use multiple muscle groups at the same time, while performing a routine, allowing for effective training with less time.
However, isolation exercises are the opposite term for compound workouts, which focus only on one single muscle during training, such as Arm Lateral Raises, Calf Raises and Leg Extension.
Even Both compound and isolation exercises agreed to work on strengthening the muscles of the body, but the mechanism and concept of isolation workouts is different, which aims to tone one particular muscle at a time during that workout.
A very simple and common example of a compound exercise is the squat, which uses multiple muscles to complete the entire group, including the lower body, such as the hamstrings, quadriceps, and calf muscles as well as engaging the lower back.
Types of Compound Exercises
Before starting the list of compound exercises, I want from you to get more awareness of the different functions of compound exercises. The workouts split into two main types, which you should be aware of:
1. Single Moves Compound Exercises
It’s a Single or One exercise that engages multiple muscle groups or multiple joint exercises, such as Squats, Glute Lunges and Deadlifts.
2. Two Moves Compound Exercises
Combine or Multiple exercises that have been combined together to produce one exercise, such as the Bicep Curl combine to a Shoulder Press exercise.
List of Compound Exercises
1. Pulling Compound Exercises
These groups of exercises engage the pulling motion, which includes the trapezius, lats, and parts of pectoralis minor of chest muscles, all of which work together to take advantage of the pulling motion and contribute to the stability of your shoulder and the strength of your arms muscles.
- Rowing
- Lat Pull Downs
- Pull-Ups
- Compound Bicep Exercises. Biceps Curl with Deadlift delivers a great workout results, that targeting biceps, forearms, lats, back and part of legs and shoulders in one routine.
2. Pressing Compound Exercises
Most exercises in this category involve pressing or push-ups motions that focus primarily on building an extra thick chest with both massive triceps and deltoid muscles.
In addition to improving the strength and size of the shoulders, to achieve core stability and reduce spinal pressure.
- Overhead Press
- Bench Dips
- Chest Press
3. Legs Compound Exercises
This category of compound workouts is important, as it covers all the major lower body muscles to varying degrees including the hamstrings, glutes, abductors, calves, core and the quadriceps.
It Engage 3 joints at the same time your knees, ankles and hips. That focuses on building your strength, speed, and explosiveness.
List of Compound Exercises using Dumbbells
Since dumbbells are a common weight used by all body builders, I thought it would be helpful to mention a list of compound exercises specifically with dumbbells.
- Standard Seat Press
- Inclined Seat Press
- Dumbbell Pull-ups
- Overhead Press while Seated
- Arnold Schwarzenegger Pressing Shoulder
- Hammer Curl using Bench
- Side Lifting
Moreover, there are other reasons why using dumbbells is beneficial:
- Dumbbells are cheaper to own than other fitness equipment when you set them up in your home.
- Adjustable dumbbells are a great option, because you can constantly improve your strength, through your fitness journey, as you can add more challenges over time.
- Organizing dumbbells can be quick and easy with a dumbbell rack, which won’t take up much space in your room. Where the preparation for exercise at any time will become mush faster and easier to reach the required weights.
- Dumbbells can boost your balance faster. Since you can control the exact amount of weight you need to exercise each muscle, then start your routine.
- Dumbbells are appropriate and can be used to fit exercises of most muscles of the body.
Benefits of Compound Exercises
If your goal is to improve your overall fitness level, effectively increase the level of calorie burning during exercise, given the short time available for busy people who plan to exercise!
Compound exercises provide these advantages by focusing on multi-joint motions that involve sync more than one muscle group.
The benefits are enormous and can be summed up in these fitness categories: Strength, Flexibility and Cardiovascular Exercises.
Compound Exercises Maximize Burning Calories
As we know, breathing is essential for effective exercise, since the body consumes 2 liters of oxygen to burn 10 calories of energy, exercises that engage more muscles require more oxygen, which naturally forces our bodies to increase the level of energy expenditure, which leads to burn more calories.
Compound Exercises Improve Internal Muscle Coordination
Improving the functionality and timing chain of the multi-level muscles located around the joint.
For example, if we take into account the anatomy of the gluteal structure (maximus, medius, minimus), then what happens during the exercise of the Glute Bridges exercise, it controls the movement of harmony between these layers that are responsible for the stability of the hip.
Various compound exercises such as squats or gluteal lunges that move the hips in all layers will improve coordination and how all these muscles must work together to produce the strength and stability needed.
Compound Exercises Boost and Regulate the Heart Rate
Many athletes and healthy people use activities such as running and cycling as cardiovascular exercises to improve heart function and the ability to increase blood circulation.
It can also be achieved through exercises that involve a group amount of muscle tissue.
Squats to shoulder, dumbbell presses and medicine ball chops (including shoulder, oblique and abdominal muscles) are examples of compound exercises that involve multiple muscle tissues, which stimulate the heart to pump more blood to keep the muscles working actively and efficiently.
Compound Exercises that Improve and Build a Dynamic Flexibility.
Static stretching does not lead to the flexibility of the whole body, while keeping the muscles in an lengthened position can be mush
an effective exercise to reduce muscle fatigue and provide the required flexibility.
If the exercise involves a wide range of movements, it will be considered as part of dynamic stretching, which involves moving the joint through a range of movements that will stretch the surrounding muscle tissue, resulting in flexibility in the body.
Compound Exercises Improve Movement skills and Balance Efficiency
You can notice that inexperienced gym builders are moving strictly just like robots!
That’s because they usually only train one muscle at a time, which other muscle groups don’t learn to coordinate and manage their role in the timing of contractions, which is actually a mechanism for how the muscles actually should contract.
Here’s the significant of demonstrating compound exercises, which teach large groups of muscles how to coordinate when triggering contraction is brought about and are responsible for the correct timing, to improve motion skills and overall quality body balance.
Compound Exercises for Fat Loss
Yes, you can definitely lose weight with compound exercises. As mentioned, the mechanics of compound exercises usually work by engaging multiple muscle groups simultaneously, so these movements require more energy and strength during exercise, and this will force the body to burn more body fat and calories while performing the routine.
By now you should realize that the more muscle groups you work out in a workout, the more energy your body will consume, resulting in more calories and fat that you’ll start burning.
Final Thoughts
If you are a beginner and your workout goal is to maintain a healthy body and participate in the Mr./Miss Body universe, I recommend starting the isolation exercises, once you start feeling like getting muscle strength you can gradually start doing a full body compound workout from time to time.
But if your goal is to build huge muscles, you need to keep working on the isolation exercise, as it specializes in targeting and coordinating every single specific muscle with a precise schedule.