The Fat Burning Effect of Compound Exercises

Compound exercises activate multiple muscle groups and are very effective at combining fat burning, and the goal of building cardio, muscle development and functional strength at the same time. Compound movement exercises not only help with strengthening real life movements, (by teaching muscles to work together, while under duress), it also amps up the fat burn state during the workout. Whether it’s bodyweight or added resistance exercises, if you have multiple joints moving it’s a compound exercise. 

The reason compound exercises can be great cardio: muscle needs blood and oxygen, and working muscles needs a lot of it. The reason our heart rate speeds up, and we start breathing faster, is simply to supply blood and oxygen to our working body parts and to carry away the carbon dioxide and other waste products. When we hit our sets back-to-back by doing alternate exercises for different muscle groups, it keeps this cardio activity peaked.

The reason compound exercises help burn fat: when we keep our heart rate up for an extended time period, (usually for around 20 minutes), it helps trigger the release of body fat for energy…this is what many of us refer to as our 2nd wind.

The reason compound exercises boost the metabolism: our metabolism is largely dependent on how active we are and the amount of toned muscle we have. Toned muscle has a lot more energy consumption and when you have billions of activated muscle cells consuming more calories, your metabolism is going to be higher! When we do resistance (weight bearing, especially free weight) exercises, it builds muscle, thus helping build, maintain and even restore a seemingly old and tired metabolism. A decline in metabolism is not so much aging as it is a loss of muscle.

Going from a pulling to a pushing exercise, lets one muscle group rest while you’re doing the next, however your heart and lungs are not getting to rest, and this is why it can turn a muscle building routine into a cardio and fat burning routine as well!

Example: (bench pressing and seated row) or (pushups and bent rows with dumbbells).

Leg exercises such as squats, leg presses, and lunges are great compound exercises for lower body. You can mix a leg exercise in with upper body by doing a pulling exercise, pushing exercise and then a leg exercise, but since legs have so much muscle mass, you can do quite well by working legs by themselves and not resting much between sets.

Try this: get down on the floor and do as many pushups as you can, when you’re finished, stand up and do a set of squats. Did you see how your heart rate went up? If this is too hard, lean against a table or into a door opening to do your pushups and hold onto a set of doorknobs (or anything that you can steady yourself with) to do your squats. 

List of compound exercises: squats, pushups, lunges, rows, shoulder presses, bench presses, deadlifts, power cleans. An intense one is squatting with a set of dumbbells and raising them overhead when coming to a standing position, (cans of food can be used in place of dumbbells). 

 The neat thing about compound exercises is that they can be done almost anywhere, anytime and are not restricted to when you’re in the gym and you do not have to have exercise equipment to benefit from its metabolism boosting effects. 

If you want to increase the cardio and fat burning potential of your workout; do a lot of compound movements in the beginning of your routine and keep any of your individual muscle exercises at the end of your routine.
Individual muscle exercises: include things such as biceps curl, triceps push downs, calf exercises, leg extensions. In an exercise routine, compound movements with free weights beats machines hands down due to its activation of stabilizer muscles.

The exercises that facilitate the most muscle during execution, not only helps to burn more fat, but it can also help increase an athlete’s performance, and can help make a senior more mobile!