kcb,

Why did you do this?
We were having a perfectly fine conversation, but now you've blown up and are borderline abusive.


sondring,

The point isn't how great compound exercises are.
The point isn't whether or not compound exercises are better than isolation.
The point is that isolation exercises are useful too, depending on your situation and what you want out of the exercise, and that claiming one is superior to the other in all situations is entirely incorrect.

Posting success stories of people who do compound lifts is entirely irrelevant.

More useful than sitting on your ass, sure. Maybe a little to harsh

I think isolation exercises might be useful in certian rehab situations.

I think 99% of the people in the gym would see better results in less time if they completely removed isolation excercises from their routine and replaced them with compound movements.

So yeah, the bodybuilder freak might have a need to isolate that one muscle that doesn't bulge quite like the rest but the general polulation doesn't.

I might have missed this post, but in what situations do you think an isolation movement might be useful? And do you think a compound excercise would be more useful in that same situation?

Man, you'd swear we were in the gym having this conversation with all the testosterone flying around.

Mike, well put. I think somewhere about 2 pages and 15 flames by kcb ago I said the same thing - compound = good, isolation = not so good, but compound+isolation = good too.

kcb, I think we all understand that doing strict isolation exercises like preacher curls is not ideal. You can stop beating the horse already. But you can't argue (well, I guess you can, just not convincingly) that a combination of pullups/curls/lats is not beneficial as well. You also seem to think what Mike said about momentary muscle failure is the same as lifting to failure. I don't think that's what he meant.

BTW, there are differences in opinion on working to failure. Muscle & Fitness mentions it, but only with regard to pyramids:
6. Never take a warm-up set to failure. If you're pyramiding up in weight, none of your sets short of your heaviest lift should approach muscle failure. Doing so will ensure that you have greater trouble handling the heavier-weight sets.
Notice they don't say never work to failure, only not to do it on any but the heaviest lift. Makes sense.

http://www.muscle-fitness.com.au/407.html for the complete article - good stuff. In it they say this:
15. Master the basic movements: squats, deadlifts, rows, pull-ups, presses, dips, etc. These - not isolation exercises and machine movements - are the foundation exercises of a great physique.
as well as:
18. Occasionally, start training a bodypart with an isolation movement to pre-exhaust a muscle. You should typically make compound exercises the backbone of your workout, but once in a while, to really stress the target muscle, do a single-joint movement first to provide a whole new training stimulus. For example, do dumbbell flyes or the pec-deck machine before your pressing movement for chest. You'll be able to isolate the chest with a heavier weight on the isolation movements, but don't expect to be able to lift as heavy on the following exercises.

For you folks scoring at home:
STFU and get to the gym

The relatively pathetic size of Xas' wrists should be QED in the isolation vs compound argument.