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.

I want to point out in this article that the body will only work at its peak when all the muscle groups are involved. That is when you perform a single movement, the muscles you are working are not performing in isolation- there are muscle groups in the neighbourhood which are involved and they are vital for you to perform that movement. The bigger guys help the smaller guys, if you like, in performing a complex movement. So, a much better strategy is to try to perform multi-joint complex movements rather that a single-joint exercise.
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.
If you are really convinced that you want to isolate your biceps or whatever, then you can continue that type of training but be warned that you are likely to end up with a few bandaged joints, tendonitis, not to mention unwanted body fat. Now if you want a leaner fitter and muscular body all over, you should be trying to move away from this isolation training and aim for a body as a wholly efficient machine functioning on all cylinders which will have no trouble in performing complex movements- whether it be in athletics or just fairly simple routine jobs. Look at Maurice Green or Terrell Owens and you will note they are totally ripped just like the bodies of wide receivers and a lot of sprinters. I can tell you now that these guys do NOT do training for muscle isolation – they would be crazy to do so. Yet their results are amazing and don’t tell me you wouldn’t like a body like theirs.

It should be fairly obvious that if you are doing isolation training and concentrating on single- joint movements, the whole body is not involved and therefore your metabolism is not at its full peak. Now think of the complex movement situation and here the metabolism rate will be higher, more calories will be burned and also that means that you are going to produce testosterone and growth hormone which is what you are aiming for really. That in turn means you can lose body fat more easily.
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.

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