How can compound lifts help you build and tone muscle? If you’ve been eating and exercising to fuel muscle growth, you may not be getting the results you feel you deserve. Far too many people rely on isolation exercises to fine-tune, bulk, and sculpt their targeted areas. However, one of the fastest and most efficient ways to build mass is by performing compound lifts. That’s because compound lifts make muscle – how to use them to get the best results is among the most important things to know when designing and implementing your workout plan.
It’s first essential to learn what compound lifts are and how they compare to other types of strength training. Isolation exercises are strength-building activities that focus on a single muscle or muscle group. For instance, when you’re performing leg or bicep curls, you’re performing isolation activities. Compounding exercises involve training two or more groups at once.
Many people prefer to use compound lifts to build muscles because it’s the most efficient.
It’s possible to burn more calories and fat in a shorter time and target multiple trouble zones. It’s also a great way to maximize your endurance. With more of a respiratory load and more movements for getting your temperature and heart rate up, you can rapidly and significantly build your endurance. This works well for people training for shows or competitions or who have ambitious fitness goals that they’d like to meet.
When performing compound lifts, it’s always important to be especially aware of your form. All fitness-related movements are infinitely more effective when they’re executed well. Before trying it, study each aspect of a movement and understand how you should engage your abs, how far apart you should plant your feet, where your shoulders should be, and how to perform breathing best. Take the time to get these activities right, and you’re guaranteed to optimize their benefits.
Muscle growth will occur fastest when you do repetitions and sets until you overload and fatigue your muscles.
You can achieve progressive overload by escalating your weight load or by gradually deepening movements such as squats. For instance, if you’re doing straight lefts, you can increase the amount that you’re lifting, or you can come up into high calf raise or drop increasingly lower into squats or lunge movements.
The volume of weight that you lift is a crucial thing to focus on. Remember that your lifting abilities when performing isolation exercises may be greater than when you perform compounded lifts. Don’t start at your maximum weight when pairing two movements together. Instead, start with a lighter weight and then gradually work your way up via progressive overload.
When establishing weight limits for compounded movements, also remember form.
The more weight that you add, the more challenging it will become to perform specific exercises properly. Always work with the weight you can comfortably lift while still protecting your back, shoulders, neck, knees, ankles, and hips.
When your old workout routine is no longer producing the dynamic results you want to see, it may be time to switch things up and increase the level of challenge. Performing two strength-building activities at once is a great way to take your training to the next level. With compound lifts, you can burn more fat and calories and build far more significant amounts of robust, lean muscle mass.
