» Compound lifts should certainly form the backbone of your training regime, as they recruit the most muscle groups. But that doesn’t mean you need to consign all isolation moves to the scrapheap completely.
To remind you, isolation moves are those lifts that cause movement at only one joint, while compound moves are multi-joint exercises that work multiple muscle groups. Consequently, isolation lifts work less well at quickly adding a lot of muscle mass across your body, but they are ideal when you want to target a specific muscle to try and coax extra growth.
One way these single-joint moves can be used successfully is as a ‘finisher’: an exercise performed at the end of a workout to really fatigue the target muscles. Take, for example, an arms workout where the majority of the session is built around compound lifts, such as chin-ups, pull-ups, bent-over rows and close-grip bench presses.
