How to Utilize Compound Exercises for Weight Loss
Hey Angels and Alphas,
If you’re on a weight loss journey right now, you’ve probably heard that full-body workouts that focus on compound exercises to burn calories are an effective way to skyrocket calorie burn.
But did you know why that happens? Did you know compound exercises are so good at engaging your body that they literally kick-start your body’s metabolism and help you burn more calories than you thought possible?
Let’s take a deep dive inside the world of compound exercises and find out why they’re so great at generating such a great calorie-burn bang-for-your-buck.
#1 LOSE MORE WEIGHT IN LESS TIME.
Compound exercises are usually utilized in strength training regimes because they have the upper hand when it comes to doing more in less time.
As opposed to isolated movements that focus on a single muscle group and don’t give you much calorie consumption in the time you spend doing them, compound exercises are different.
They focus on a variety of muscle groups all at the same time, helping you boost intensity at any given exercise, and therefore, increase calorie consumption. Isolated movements that work a single muscle group don’t burn many calories, but they do have their own set of benefits we’ll explore another time.
#2 COMPOUND MOVEMENTS REQUIRE MUCH MORE ENERGY.
Compound movements beat the muscles together and usually require much more rest between sets and exercises. Compound movements also make muscles pitch and require much more energy to perform than, let’s say, isolated movements or cardio.
And what does requiring more energy mean? It means that they burn more calories by default, because they force the body to expend more energy.
#3 COMPOUND MOVEMENTS CREATE AN AFTERBURN EFFECT.
Ever wondered if you can just sit around at home and burn calories? Well, compound exercises let you do that.
When doing compound exercises, or any heavy strength training exercise, you’ll find that your rate of resting metabolism increases, meaning you’ll be continuously burning calories after training in order to recover better.
Fast or intense workouts with high-intensity exercises such as squats, deadlifts, and bench presses ensure that your body continues to burn calories after a long workout.
These types of exercises offer a lot of benefits when you incorporate them into your weight loss workout, and adding more compound exercises can help you avoid and manage weight loss plateaus by nudging your body in the right direction, pushing it through stubborn plateaus.
Because compound exercises involve more muscle groups, they can be used to move heavy weights that increasingly overload muscles. This means that incorporating compound exercises in your weight loss routine ends up translating to incorporating strength training in your weight loss routine… which happens to be one of the best things you can do to lose weight faster.
To achieve the best muscle growth potential, you need to burn the most calories at the highest possible intensity. Compound lifts activate the muscles that really pump the heart and burn more calories, making them a great choice for an intense workout.
Simply choose compound exercises to increase your heart rate most of the time, which in turn burns the most calories.
If you choose compound exercises instead of isolation exercises, you burn more calories at the highest intensity. The more muscles involved in an exercise, the more calories you burn and the higher the intensity of the exercise.
If you do shorter workouts, you will also be forced to take less rest between exercises which will help you burn more calories in its own right.
If you want to build strength and burn calories as quickly as possible, you need to focus most of your efforts on compound exercises. If your goal is to lose weight and build strength, make sure your strength training involves at least one to two compound workouts per week.
Mixing exercises allow you to focus on multiple muscle groups at the same time, which helps you burn more calories. Large movements that require more of each muscle group, such as lifting heavy loads, are amazing ways to speed up weight loss and burn more calories.
You can optimize your next weight lifting workout to burn more calories by doing a combination of compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, and bench press.
The more muscles you have, the stronger your metabolism gets going, and as a result, you burn more calories during your strength training sessions and after them.
You reshape your body: the more muscular you become and the more metabolic tissue that you have inside your body, the easier it is for you to stay slimmer than someone who only sticks to cardio to achieve weight loss.
To conclude…
Including more compound exercises into your routine can help you strengthen your entire body and burn more calories in less time.
In addition to increasing fat burning, you can also include a larger number of compound exercises in your strength training routine to achieve massive muscle gains and burn even more calories at rest due to the highly metabolic nature of muscle tissue.