Why compound lifts are important for weight loss

Why compound lifts are important for weight loss.

As with all my blogs we will start with explaining with compound lifts are – compound lifts are exercises that require more than one joint movement an example of this is Squats, deadlifts, these require your hip joint and knee joints to move.

The opposite to these are isolation exercises, they require only 1 joint, these are things like bicep curls and leg extensions.

As compound exercises need more joints and thus more muscle you use more energy to do the movement than an isolation exercise, because you use more muscle energy stores you then need more energy to recover and repair the muscle. If you’re in a Calorie deficit then some of that energy will come from your fat stores being broken down.

This means if you’re 200 calories under your maintenance per day, with training compound exercises for an hour you might end up 500-600 calories under maintenance on training day.

Another plus to this is because your using more muscles, the lactic acid build up(burn) shouldn’t be as great and DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) won’t be as great, meaning your day-to-day activity should go unhindered, which then means through NEAT (Non activity exercise thermogenesis- the amount of energy you use go through your day, walking, carrying things etc that isn’t planned exercise) you can still burn the same/slightly less than if you weren’t dieting.

As you can tell there is a quite large snowball effect of these: so to make it as clear as I can;
- Compound movements won’t or very little give muscle soreness
- Day-to-day movement shouldn’t be effected
- Recovery needs more energy as more muscles were used
- Compound movements will put you in a larger deficit than isolation exercise meaning you get more bang for your buck

So if your trying to lose weight – full body sessions with loads of compound movements, stop doing body weight Glute kick backs, they are just making your bum hurt and not helping you achieve your weight goal any quicker. Squat, Glute bridge, deadlift.