As someone who goes to the gym, you’ve likely heard of the term isolation exercises.
Even if you’re not someone who goes to the gym, you still might’ve heard of the term. But, regardless, you still might not know exactly what this means or what isolation movements even are.
Since no one ever seems to describe the term in a sentence, it’s probably more common than you think to not know exactly what this term means.
You might often find yourself feeling pretty confused when it comes to all the fancy gym terms. I know I was too, when I first started in the gym.
Don’t worry though, I’m here to teach you everything I’ve learned about isolation exercises over my past couple years of working out.
Let’s get into it.
What are isolation movements?
Isolation movements are movements that isolate a specific muscle group. That is to say, they might only use one muscle or greatly bias the muscle you’re targeting.
This is the opposite of compound movements. If you’re looking to dive deeper into exactly what are compound movements, then you can check out my previous post.
But, to keep it short and sweet compound movements are basically movements that use multiple muscle groups at once. Or just the opposite of isolation movements.
Whereas compound movements require many parts of the body to work together, isolation movements will commonly involve the movement of only one single joint and one single muscle.
So, what are some examples of compound movements to help you visualize this better?
Examples of isolation movements are
1. Calf raises
2. Leg extensions
3. Hamstring curls
4. Bicep curls
5. Tricep extensions
6. Pec flies
These are just a few examples of isolation exercises to give you a feel for what they’re like.
You probably already incorporate a lot of isolation movements into your workouts, you just might not have been familiar with what they were before.
However, now that you’re becoming more familiar, you can better incorporate them into your workouts for much better results.
The benefits of adding isolation movements
Isolation movements are my favorite part of any workout for one reason; the burn. The burn you’ll feel when performing isolation movements is like no other, and what does this burn mean? Growth!
I love performing an exercise when I can actually feel the way it is challenging my muscle and making them grow.
That’s why I love isolation movements so much, they don’t require much work from the rest of my body so I can really feel the muscle doing the work.
Therefore, one of the benefits of isolation movements is that you can really single out and target one specific muscle.
This can be extremely beneficial for a few reasons:
1. Since you’re only targeting one muscle, all of your energy is going towards growing that muscle during an exercise
2. You can exercise a specific muscle without stressing surrounding regions. This can be beneficial if you’re recovering from a nearby injury.
3. You can even out muscle distribution if you feel you have muscle imbalances
I think that the biggest benefit of being able to target one muscle during an isolation movement is the growth that comes along with it, but these are just to list a few to give you a better idea of what else you can do.
When should you do isolation movements
Now let’s get into when you should perform your isolation movements.
Again, just like compound movements, the order you do your exercises in does matter. Isolation movements should always be performed after compound movements. This will likely be towards the end of your workout. But, why?
Well, this is mainly because you want the most energy for your compound movements. That’s why you should do those at the beginning.
Isolation exercises will fatigued your muscle and drain your energy, so if you do them first you won’t be able to perform your compound movements as well.
Additionally, you don’t want to be fatigued for your compound movements, however you do want to be slightly fatigued for you isolation movements.
Although you never really want to be fully fatigued going into an exercise, you always want to have at least some energy.
However, when you’re going into isolation movements it’s good to have your muscles a little tired.
After having already workout your muscles during the isolation movements, this means your muscles will be activated.
This will allow for better mind-muscle connection and better ability to truly push your muscle to it’s limits during the isolation movements.
This will allow for the greatest amount of growth.
Start Incorporating!
The final thing you should take away from this post is to add isolation movements to your workout!
I cannot recommend enough that you start implementing isolation movements into your workout if you don’t already. Once you do, the muscle growth you will begin to see will be huge.