How many of these do you do?
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🔹 When it comes to exercise selection, regardless of if in a fat loss phase & a bulking phase, compound lifts (although not essential) should still be prioritised when possible. For example, a common misconception is that when seeking to lose fat you have to switch your exercise selection to favour more “isolation” style movements within a higher rep range whereas that is simply NOT the case
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🔹 Your sessions should still revolve mostly around compound lifts as they produce a greater metabolic & hormonal stimulus along with burning the most calories per unit time (Ballor et al 1987, Kraemer & Ratamess 2003). Therefore by performing compounds you can burn more calories per session which is highly beneficial for creating a calorie deficit (Hill et al 2011). Along with this you can stimulate a more anabolic response from training which can aid muscle preservation when in a negative energy balance (Donnelly et al 1993)
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🔹 Don’t get me wrong, you can still perform “isolation” movements following your compound movements for the day in order to increase daily/weekly volume per muscle (Schoenfeld 2015) however, one thing that you may need to consider is how MANY perform. As compound lifts have shown to increase recovery demands over isolations (Korak et al 2015), you need to be slightly more careful with how MANY adjunct exercises you chose perform thereafter as, when in a deficit, overall recovery has shown to be reduced (Nattiv et al 2007, Koutedakis et al 1994)
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🔹 Conclusion: When bulking, hit your compounds & ramp up daily/weekly volume close to MRV with added supplementary “isolations”. When cutting, do the same however, consider scaling back total volume (mainly via the amount of isolations performed) if you find that you’re not recovering between sessions, developing overuse injuries and/or get sick more often aka three major signs of overtraining syndrome (Lowery & Forsythe 2006)
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