The 5 Best Isolation Exercises

Isolation movements, as I mentioned in my previous blog about the best compound exercises, are exercises that work a single joint in isolation. Which of course will generate fewer muscles to be used, less central fatigue and muscle breakdown. So on paper, you could say “what’s the point in doing them” if they are not as effective as their compound movement counterparts.

But there are lots of important reasons to include isolation training into your workouts.

1. They are not as fatiguing, so as you start to get tired in training you can add some isolation moves to keep working but not worry about hurting yourself with big complex lifts.
2. If you are new to exercise the bigger compound lifts are physically and mentally taxing so including a good chunk of isolation work as you get fitter and stronger can help make training more enjoyable.
3. To target small areas of the body for rehab, if you are coming back from injury doing big compound lifts could be more harm than good so isolation work is a safer way to train.
4. To target weaker areas, if you have areas of the body that are weak and cause issues with performance, posture or pain, like the rotator cuff, tibialis anterior, deep core stabilisers or glutes then putting focussed workload into these areas is a great way to build up the volume of work on these regions.
5. If you are trying to target a body part that is lagging as part of an aesthetics goal such as biceps or calf muscles then isolation work can help directly target body parts.
6. Compound lifts will naturally miss some of the smaller stabiliser muscles so using isolation work can re-address this imbalance.
7. Isolation work can be pushed to failure easier. It’s hard to push a squat to failure and very dangerous unless you have a good 3+ years of lifting under your belt. Whereas a seated hamstring curl is a much easier exercise to push to the point of failure. Yeah it might make you pretty sore to do it but it’s less likely to hurt you and if your goal requires training to failure for things like muscle building, then isolation work is a good place to learn how to manage failure in an exercise.

Before we get into the lists of exercises I want to say that not all isolation exercises are going to be equal. If I were to do a machine-based bicep curl versus a standing barbell bicep curl there is quite a big difference in total work per set. So when selecting an exercise it’s worth thinking about how complex the total exercise is.  

For the isolation work I’m not going to write it out per body part but instead focus on areas of common weakness in the body. Like I mentioned above, there are lots of reasons to include isolation work so what you choose to add to your workout might and should be different.