Isolation exercises develop one muscle instead of several muscle groups as compound exercises. The advantage is to ensure that all your muscles are worked, limiting the muscle imbalance, leading to injury if one muscle overpowers another.
Think about your hamstring versus quadriceps. If one muscle beats the other, it can tighten muscle strain. We do not want that.
Benefits
Isolation exercises should be required in every exercise program. Compound exercises benefit several muscle groups, but isolation exercises focus on one muscle group that leads to increased strength. Think of it as if you are rehabilitating a particular muscle and need to focus on it.
Isolation exercises help you fix muscle imbalances
For example, squats (compound training) build quads, but they also work on hamstrings. However, squats focus much more on quads than hamstrings. Quads will grow much more substantial than hamstrings if you do your compound exercise with squats, which quite often can lead to injury. Adding some isolation exercises for the hamstrings will help balance the muscles. An isolation exercise, such as hamstring curls, will help you focus on building hamstrings. In addition, hoarding curls are a blast.
Isolation exercises help you target specific muscles while resting others
Compound exercises work with several muscle groups, which is usually good. However, if you overwork a particular muscle using a compound exercise, it can also lead to muscle tears and pulls.
Isolation exercises can help you recover
Compound exercises can lead to more muscle pain for an injury. Too many exercises involving hoarding will lead to pain. Do not worry about not exercising. If you injured your hamstrings, try an isolation exercise such as leg extensions to focus on the quads without further damaging your hamstrings – capitalize on the injury instead of being hindered by it. Use some isolation movements, build the muscle on the front of the leg, train another muscle group. Staying away from compound exercises that affect hamstrings will promote faster healing.
Isolation exercises for the chest
Get ready for lots of excellent chest isolation exercises. While the barbell bench press is a favorite for training the chest muscles, many other exercises use this muscle group. Check it out!
- Dumbbell flyes
- Reject dumbbell flyes
- Incline Dumbbell Flyes
- Cable crossovers
- Bodyweight flies
- Butterfly machine
- Cable iron cross
- Flat Bench Cable flyes
- Slanted cable flies
- Reject cable flies
- One-arm cable crossing
- Make cable crossing
- One-arm dumbbell bench press
- Cable chest press
- Inclined cable chest press
- Turn off cable chest press
Isolation exercises for shoulders
Shoulder muscles can be worked with complex movements, but several isolation exercises such as flys and dumbbell shrugs train this group. Take a look at the complete isolation moves below to include in your workout routine.
- Barbell pulls on the shoulders
- Dumbbell shoulder pull
- Reverse Flyes Machine
- Reverse Flyes
- Dumbbell lateral elevation
- Dumbbell Front Raise
- One-arm front cable lift
- One-arm lateral cable lift
- Car drivers
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