What are compound exercises and why are they good for you?

You could consider prioritising compound exercises if you’re time-poor, interested in healthy ageing and looking for an efficient way to train many muscles and joints in one workout. So you’ve got yourself a gym membership or have bought a set of home weights . Now what? With the sheer amount of confusing exercise advice out there, it can be hard to decide what to include in a weights routine.

It can help to know there are broadly two types of movements in resistance training (lifting weights): compound exercises and isolation exercises. So what’s the difference? And what’s all this got to do with strength, speed and healthy ageing? What’s the difference? Compound exercises involve multiple joints and muscle groups working together. In a push-up, for example, your shoulder and elbow joints are moving together.

This targets the muscles in the chest, shoulders and triceps. When you do a squat, you’re using your thigh and butt muscles, your back, and even the muscles in your core. It can help to think about compound movements by grouping them by primary movement patterns.

For example, some lower-body compound exercises follow a “squat pattern”. Examples include body weight squats, weighted squats, lunges and split squats. We also have “hinge patterns”, where you hinge from a point on your body (such as the hips).

Examples include deadlifts, hip thrusts and kettlebell swings. Upper-body compound exercises can be grouped into “push patterns” (such as vertic.