Compound exercise
A compound exercise moves more than one joint and loads several muscles at once — the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, the row. It lets more total load be moved and it trains the pattern as well as the muscle, at the cost that the first thing to fail is not always the muscle you meant to stimulate.
A compound exercise moves more than one joint and loads several muscles at once — the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, the row. It lets more total load be moved and it trains the pattern as well as the muscle, at the cost that the first thing to fail is not always the muscle you meant to stimulate.
Also written as: multi-joint exercise · compound lift
In practice
They are the spine of a time-poor client's plan: three compounds cover the work twelve isolations spread out, and the client keeps at it because the session fits in an hour.
The common mistake
Assuming they cover everything. In a bench press the triceps genuinely work, but a client whose triceps are the weak link stops stimulating the chest earlier than the plan assumes.
