As a personal trainer people ask me all sorts of questions and one of the most common ones shows that some guys are not understanding the big picture as regards strength training. They ask me what is the best exercise to isolate their biceps, triceps or abs. Now this question about isolating a particular muscle group seems to be a strange one and let me explain why.



Now I have to explain to these guys that the body will not work at its maximum efficiency if we are talking about muscle isolation. All the muscles work together and large parts of the body will help the smaller parts to complete a complex movement. Muscle groups do not just work on their own so really muscle isolation does not exist. Whatever movement you do, there will always be another group of muscles in the vicinity which are working to help you perform that movement. In this article I want to point out that multi-joint complex movements are a far better way than trying to single out certain parts of the body through single-joint exercises.

So, let us say you want to perform a single-joint exercise and you are trying to isolate some muscles. If you do that, you are not allowing the body to perform efficiently and it will be much more likely to suffer from injury. Basically you are building a collection of body parts and not thinking of the whole body as a powerful, wonderfully complex unit working together.



Take a look at some well known athletes ? Maurice Green and Terrell Owens spring to mind. I can tell you for sure that their coaches would never allow them to do isolation muscle training !And the results you can see for yourself ? these guys are totally ripped so the answer must be somewhere else. If you continue with isolation training then your chances of getting an injury are much higher and you are likely to end up with a few bandaged joints, tendonitis or even an extra few pounds around your gut. Your body should be working like a powerful machine where all the parts are working together in a functional way and you should have a leaner body capable of performing complex movements or even a simple every day task. If you can concentrate on that, then you will have the extra benefit of a harder leaner body. So focus on how well your body functions overall and forget the isolation myth.

Another great benefit of moving your mind set from muscle isolation to a complex movement idea, is that you will lose extra body fat much more easily. By concentrating on multi-joint complex movements, you are going to lose a lot more calories and that alone is one great benefit. You are obviously going to increase your metabolism rate and that in turn means that you can produce those muscle building hormones, eg. testosterone and the growth hormone.

Let's look at an example. The machine leg extension is a single joint exercise that works mainly the quadriceps, can potentially cause knee joint instability in the long run, and doesn't even burn that many calories. On the other hand, exercises like squats, lunges, step-ups, and deadlifts are all multi-joint complex movements that work hundreds of muscles in the body (including the quadriceps) as a functional unit, create more stable and strong joints in the long run (when done properly), and also burn massive quantities of calories compared to the single-joint exercises.