Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body

by Michael Matthews

One of the biggest fitness mistakes people make is underestimating the importance of compound exercises. They deserve a lot of your time and effort for several reasons: They train many muscles at once. The more muscles you can effectively train in a given exercise, the more muscle you can gain as a result. This also makes for more time efficiency. One compound exercise can do the work of several isolation exercises. They allow you to lift heavier weights. The best compound exercises put dozens of muscles and multiple joints through large ranges of motion. Consequently, they enable you to move more weight than isolation exercises and thus better progressively overload your muscles. This means faster muscle growth. They significantly raise testosterone and growth hormone levels. The magnitude of postworkout elevations in anabolic hormones is influenced by the total amount of muscle involved in the workout. This is why research shows that compound exercises produce larger increases in both testosterone and growth hormone than isolation exercises.23 These effects don’t influence muscle gain as much as some people would have you believe, but they do have other benefits as well. I attribute much of my success with my physique to the fact that, after learning about the power of compound exercises, I’ve made them 70 to 80 percent of the work I do in the gym.