Perhaps you’ve heard people say that you need to “isolate” a muscle in order to derive the maximum benefit from the exercise. The idea is that you should use only that muscle you want to target, without working other muscle groups at the same time. This notion is demonstrated by a barbell curl, which uses only the biceps. This is distinguished from a "compound” movement, in which sets of muscles are worked together. The comparable example for this is a pullup, where you use not only your biceps, but also your back. So is isolation really the best way to build muscle? Where does this idea come from?

Until the late 1970s compound movements ruled the gym. The basic compound movement of pullups, squats, bench press, and bent over rowing.. They require only simple equipment, but there was little choice back then because the available equipment did not allow much more. These movments required real effort to perform. That’s how weight lifting produced its image of meaty men growling mightily.

Then came Nautilus. Nautilus was different because it used a cam to provide steady levels of resistance throughout the muscles’ range of motion during. The inventor of Nautilus, Arthur Jones, claimed that this continuous resistance recruited more muscle fibers in the isolated muscle, and that this leads to greater stimulation of the muscle fibers and greater growth of the muscle. This was a revolutionary concept, resulting in what Jones termed “the thinking man’s barbell.” However, such thinking also required the use of specially-made equipment. Such equipment costs more money that the old stuff, so Nautilus became a big business. Jones hired professional bodybuilders for testimonials and he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

The promise of the Nautilus machine was that it could deliver better results for a given amount of effort. The hitch was that this effort had to be condensed into short, and very intense, workouts. A key way to produce this intensity was by the isolation of muscles. This theory of brief and intense workouts gained wide acceptance and is now often referred to as "high intensity." The practice of isolating muscles also caught on. The idea is that by concentrating your energy on a small area, more work can be done by that muscle. The more work done by a muscle in a given short amount of the more stress placed on that muscle and the more it will grow. The necessity of complicated and expensive machines to enable this isolation made the theory more attractive theory for some people to advocate.

As elegant as the isolation theory is, it fails to consider its disadvantages relative to compound movements. The intense-but-brief theory stems from the realization that the amount of energy, hormones, and concentration that can be efficiently used is limited. It also contends that the amount of such resources is diminished far more rapidly than usually assumed and that the optimal period of exertion is only about half an hour. The conclusion that these limited resources should be used in exercises that will place the most stress on the most muscles makes sense. But that is exactly what compound movements do! The common experience of people who have been weight training for years is that the big three compound movements (squats, bench press, and pull-ups) are so demanding that only the most dedicated trainees will do them on a regular basis. Another reason for the appeal of the isolation movement!

And that’s the reason for the phenomenal level of the success of Nautilus. You don’t need all the pain and effort! Jones did promote extreme effort, but it is far easier to reach momentary muscle failure in isolated muscles than to simultaneously exhaust the muscles during the big movements. So there you have the formula that changed the image of weight lifting – it’s smart, it’s easier, and, it costs more!

The isolation advocates also ignore the tendency for isolated muscles to grow strong out of proportion to those they naturally interact with. For example, strong biceps are of very little practical use without proportionally strong back and grip muscles. Perhaps more importantly for a typical trainee is that what is best way to strengthen an individual muscle is probably not the best way to strengthen an entire body. To do that still requires good, old-fashioned compound exercises and hard work. No expensive equipment needed.



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