The clock is ticking. You have, what, 45 minutes to work out? It’s not a lot, but you have to play the hand you’re dealt. On the treadmill (can’t skip your warm-up, no matter what), you consider how to best utilize your time as beads of sweat coalesce around your brow.
On this particular day, you’re there to work out your posterior chain; a laundry list of large muscles spanning from the base of your skull down to your shins. Dread bubbles in your gut. That means shrugs for traps, band pull-aparts for the upper back, pullovers for the lats…and, and, and.
Or, you could slam a couple sets of barbell rows and get twice as much done in half the time. Compound exercises — movements that involve motion at more than one joint — are good for a whole lot more than saving time.
In fact, they should be the very foundation upon which your routine is built. Here are 10 of the best compound exercises you can do, plus how to use them properly.
10 Best Compound Exercises
- Conventional Deadlift
- Barbell Bench Press
- Back Squat
- Pull-Up
- Dip
- Power Clean
- Overhead Squat
- Lunge
- Push Press
- Barbell Row
Editor’s Note: The content on BarBend is meant to be informative in nature, but it should not be taken as medical advice. When starting a new training regimen and/or diet, it is always a good idea to consult with a trusted medical professional. We are not a medical resource. The opinions and articles on this site are not intended for use as diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of health problems. They are not substitutes for consulting a qualified medical professional.
Conventional Deadlift
The deadlift has (almost) everything you could ask for from a single exercise. Athletes use it to develop robust strength and endurance for their sport, while powerlifters make it an entire third of their training.
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Deadlifts will help you build full-body strength while also teaching you sound movement mechanics that transfer into a wide variety of real-world scenarios. From an efficiency standpoint, deadlifts also rank quite high since they stimulate nearly every muscle in your body.
How to Do It
- Stand close to a loaded barbell with your feet under your hips and your toes pointing mostly forward. The shaft of the bar should be directly above your midfoot, or in light contact with your shins.
- Hinge at the hips and tip over, reaching down to the bar. Bend your knees if needed until you can grasp it with your hands just outside your shins.
- Flatten your back, brace your core, and fix your gaze at a point on the ground a few feet in front of you.
- Initiate the deadlift by pushing into the floor with your legs, keeping your arms relaxed.
- As the bar clears your knees, thrust your hips forward and stand fully upright.
- Lower the weight back down to the floor quickly, but keep your hands on the bar.
Coach’s Tip: Your deadlift setup is unique and depends on your body type. As long as your back is flat, your entire foot is on the ground, and your hips are higher than your knees, you’re good to go.
Sets and Reps: Do 3 to 4 sets of 3 to 5 repetitions with a heavy weight.
Barbell Bench Press
Plenty of exercises activate your upper body musculature, but few do so as well as the standard barbell bench press. Motion at both the shoulder and elbow means muscle activation in the pecs, front delts, triceps, serratus anterior, and more.
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By performing the barbell bench press, you can all but guarantee a top-tier push workout. It’ll stimulate your pecs, shoulders, and triceps, while developing general upper-body pressing strength.
How to Do It
- Lie on the bench with your feet flat on the floor and your eyes directly under the bar.
- Retract your shoulder blades by lifting your torso off the bench and pinching your scaps together.
- Grab the bar with a shoulder-width grip or slightly wider and pull it out of the rack, stabilizing it directly atop your shoulder joints.
- Bend at the elbows and lower the bar down as far as you’re able, ideally until it gently touches your sternum.
- Reverse the motion, pressing the bar up and backward to the starting position.
Coach’s Tip: The bar path of the bench press isn’t a straight line. Lower the weight downward and make contact in the middle of your chest, between your nipples and sternum, and then press up and back.
Sets and Reps: Try 3 to 4 sets of 5 to 8 repetitions.
Back Squat
You have a lot of different muscles in your legs, and no exercise hits them all. However, the back squat sure comes close. Motion at the hip, knee, and ankle (to some degree) means that the squat — no matter what type you perform — engages every muscle in your lower body with the exception of the hamstrings and calves.
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In terms of value-per-repetition, you can’t really beat the back squat. It improves bodily coordination, enhances muscular strength, and carries over to both real-world scenarios and every other lower-body exercise you perform.
How to Do It
- Unrack the barbell from a squat rack by placing it on the meat of your upper back, holding it gently in your hands.
- Step backward and place your feet in a comfortable stance, generally around hip width. Turn your toes out to an angle that feels natural.
- Inhale, brace your core, and fix your gaze forward.
- Descend by breaking at the hips and knees simultaneously, sitting downward slowly as low as you’re able.
- Once you reach your bottom position, reverse the motion by pushing hard into the floor and standing back up.
Coach’s Tip: It’s perfectly safe for your knees to go past your toes when you squat, as long as your entire foot remains in contact with the floor.
Sets and Reps: Try 3 to 5 sets of anywhere from 3 to 10 repetitions in the squat.
Pull-Up
The pull-up is more than a lat-building exercise (though it certainly crushes in that department); it’s a demonstration of muscular endurance, bodily control, and a degree of acrobatic skill as well. The main benefit of pull-ups, though, is that they work almost every muscle in your upper back. Oh, and your core.
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Not only will the pull-up target your entire back, but you’ll also develop general kinesthetic awareness, which is tremendously important if you’re a beginner. You can also load the pull-up with extra weights to drive long-term progressive overload as an intermediate or advanced gymgoer.
How to Do It
- Grab ahold of a pull-up bar with a shoulder-width, overhand grip and lower yourself down.
- Brace your core and try to still yourself so you aren’t swaying. Let your shoulders extend all the way.
- Initiate the pull-up by pulling your shoulders down away from your ears.
- Follow through by bending your arms, thinking about pulling your elbows down into your pockets.
- Pull up until your head fully clears the bar you’re hanging from.
Coach’s Tip: If you can’t do a pull-up yet, start by doing negative reps, focusing only on the lowering portion.
Sets and Reps: Go for 2 to 4 sets of 8 to 12 repetitions.
Dip
Think of dips as, basically, push-ups for the front side of your body. Not only do you get some free abdominal work from stabilizing your torso and legs, but your chest, triceps, and shoulders work double-time to lower and lift your entire body in space.
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Dips benefit you by providing a calisthenics-focused alternative to free-weight pressing movements like the bench press. If the stations are taken or you can’t find the right pair of dumbbells, hit up the dip bars instead. You’ll work all of the same muscles in the process.
How to Do It
- Suspend yourself from a pair of dip bars, holding yourself up with straight arms. Keep your shoulders down and away from your ears.
- Initiate the dip by bending at the elbow, lowering your body down slowly.
- Lower down until your upper arm is parallel to the floor, then push back up.
Coach’s Tip: Try to keep your shoulders packed down, away from your ears, for the entire movement.
Sets and Reps: You can do 2 to 4 sets of 8 to 15 repetitions here.
Power Clean
Power cleans bridge the gap between standard weight training and explosive, sport-focused power development. The first half of the movement is deadlift-esque and works all of the associated muscles, but the latter portion is essentially a high-speed upright row.
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Power cleans teach you to move dynamically and explosively. They also build fantastic postural strength, since your muscles need to be strong and stable to move a heavy barbell quickly.
How to Do It
- Set up on a lightly loaded barbell with the bar over your midfoot.
- Squat down to grab the bar with a narrow grip. Allow your knees to track forward in front of the bar.
- With a flat pack and your chest pulled up, initiate the power clean by pushing down into the floor with your legs.
- As your knees track back out of the way of the bar, continue pushing until the bar approaches your mid-thigh.
- From there, transition into extension by driving hard into the floor and straightening your hips and knees simultaneously.
- Allow the bar to elevate upward freely.
- As it moves up, drop down into a high partial squat and receive the bar in the front rack position.
Coach’s Tip: The power clean is not a deadlift. Think more about using your legs and “jumping” at the top, rather than standing up with your hips.
Sets and Reps: Do 3 to 6 sets of 2 to 5 repetitions of power cleans.
Overhead Squat
Compound exercises are defined by how many joints bear load at one time — if that were the only metric when ranking their usefulness, the overhead squat would soar to the top of the list. This squat variation works your quads, glutes, lower back, core, upper back, and even your triceps to some degree.
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Benefits of the overhead squat include comprehensive full-body stimulation, serious overhead stability, and general leg strength. They’re also a good diagnostic tool to evaluate whether you have mobility issues in your hips, shoulder, or thoracic spine.
How to Do It
- Unrack a barbell from a squat rack as though you were going to perform a standard back squat.
- Press the bar overhead from behind your neck and keep your arms locked tight.
- From here, brace your core and very slowly sink downward as low as you’re able.
- Once you reach your bottom position, stand back up.
Coach’s Tip: Don’t let the bar sway forward or backward overhead as you squat. Fight hard to keep it motionless and your arms locked.
Sets and Reps: Do 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 6 repetitions here.
Lunge
Every well-designed workout routine should have at least one unilateral lower-body movement. The lunge certainly counts as a compound exercise, since it involves your hip, knee, and ankle. That said, you also get access to many of the benefits of unilateral training. Some of which are diagnostic, others are rehabilitative … but they’re all valuable.
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If you don’t feel like squatting on a given day, lunges provide similar benefits. They also give you one heck of a leg workout, even with light weights, and will amp up your cardio game to boot.
How to Do It
- Begin the lunge by taking a step forward with your working foot, planting it about two feet in front of you.
- As you step, sink forward with your hips and bend your front knee until it’s at least 90 degrees.
- Then, push off the ground with your back foot and plant it forward. Alternate your feet.
Coach’s Tip: Try to keep 80 to 90 percent of your body weight on your front leg. Think of your back leg as a kickstand that you use to balance yourself only.
Sets and Reps: Go for 2 to 3 sets of 10 to 15 steps per leg.
Push Press
The standard overhead press is great, but most folks find themselves limited in the amount of weight they can work with fairly quickly. You can continue to drive your overhead strength forward and involve more muscles at one time by performing the push press instead.
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The push press is great for overloading your pressing muscles and developing serious overhead stability as well. Push presses also teach you to apply force to a barbell with your legs, since the weight will generally be too heavy for you to press using only your arms.
How to Do It
- Unrack a bar by holding it in the front rack position and stand with your feet in a slightly wider-than-hip-width stance.
- Brace your core and dip down into a very high partial squat position, as if you were about to perform a vertical jump.
- Push hard into the floor by contracting your quads and glutes, using the momentum to thrust the bar off your shoulders.
- Tilt your head out of the way and allow the bar to fly upward past your forehead.
- Once the bar clears your head, engage your arms and manually press the bar out.
Coach’s Tip: Keep your arms relaxed until the bar passes your head.
Sets and Reps: Do 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 5 repetitions here.
Barbell Row
Your back isn’t a picky eater when it comes to exercise selection; it’ll devour whatever pulling movement you give it, as long as you perform it well. That said, the barbell row checks basically every box when it comes to evaluating a compound pulling exercise.
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The barbell row is a two-for-one time-saver. It trains your upper back musculature and reinforces proper hip hinge technique. This means that you can work your lats, traps, and rhomboids while stimulating your glutes, lumbar spine, and hamstrings isometrically.
How to Do It
- Stand upright with your feet under your hips, holding the barbell with a narrow and overhand grip.
- Hinge at the hips, leaning forward and allowing the bar to hang freely under your shoulders.
- Brace your core and row the bar up to your lower stomach by pulling your elbows up and back.
Coach’s Tip: You only need to row until your upper arm comes in line with your torso, or until the bar touches your stomach, whichever happens first.
Sets and Reps: Do 4 sets of 6 to 8 repetitions on the barbell row.
How To Warm Up for Compound Exercises
You can stroll right into your gym and hop on an exercise machine without much of a fuss. Free-weight, compound-exercise lifting is a different story. Compound exercises generally require a bit of “ramp-up,” since they involve so much muscle and often require intricate setups and a precise technique.
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Here’s a general overview of how you’ll need to warm up if you’re beginning your workout with a compound exercise. This sequence contains a general cardiovascular warm-up, one applicable “activation” drill, and some light technique work before your working sets:
- 5 to 10 minutes of low-intensity cardio on a treadmill, elliptical, or stair-stepper (if possible).
- 1 to 3 sets of pre-activation or dynamic stretching, such as box jumps before squats or band pull-aparts prior to benching.
- 2 to 5 sets of technique practice for the movement in question, beginning with very light weights and gradually ramping up in intensity.
Note that this sequence doesn’t necessarily apply to every compound exercise out there. Push-ups, for instance, are a compound movement — to practice the technique with some ramp-up sets, you’d have to dial down the difficulty by performing a variation like the incline push-up.
How to Train With Compound Exercises
Utilizing compound exercises to their full potential is both simpler than you might think and deceptively intricate — it all depends on context. Here’s some general programming advice that should help you get the most out of your compound movements.
Sets and Reps
The number of sets and reps you perform, generally synonymous with training volume, isn’t the same for compound exercises as it would be for single-joint isolation movements. Generally speaking, the more muscles or joints there are working during an exercise, the fewer repetitions you’ll be able to perform.
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Compound exercises call upon large amounts of muscle. They enable you to lift heavy weights, but so much simultaneous work also induces a lot of fatigue at once. So, your best bet is to keep your rep count relatively low for most compound movements and work with as many sets as you can recover from. Research has shown that as few as one or two hard, heavy compound sets is more than adequate to build muscle and strength. (1)
How to Progress
Progressive overload is the principle that drives your results in the gym, and it applies to all forms of exercise you do. The exact methodology of overload you utilize, though, is contextual.
For the most part, compound exercises respond well to increases in intensity, followed by volume, followed by frequency. In plain terms, this means adding weight when possible, performing more sets or reps if you can’t add weight, and “practicing” the movements more often if you can’t do either of the first two.
Exercise Selection and Order
Your performance potential is highest when you first set foot in the weight room. The last thing you’ll want to do is undertake a complex, high-intensity exercise after an hour of working out. Compound exercises — the “meat and potatoes” of your training plate — should be tackled before moving on to accessory training, cardio, or stretching.
You can perform compound movements back-to-back, but you may want to steer clear of hitting two compound lifts that serve similar purposes. Squats and the leg press machine work the same muscles, for the most part, in the same fashion.
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On the other hand, squatting and then moving onto a Romanian deadlift will usually serve you better, since the “RDL” emphasizes your posterior chain and grip strength rather than your quads.
Research has also shown that mixing up your movements of choice, especially over the course of your weekly routine, is more effective than only performing one exercise over and over for a given muscle group. (2)
Benefits of Compound Exercises
Compound exercises are beneficial to your workout program in the way that a foundation benefits a house: They should be your literal base of support around which the rest of your workout program is built. Why? In a word, value.
They’re Time-Efficient
The right compound exercise can (mostly) accomplish the same things as two or three isolation movements. Granted, a multi-joint exercise like the squat won’t specifically stimulate your quads as well as an isolation exercise like the leg extension, but if you’re pressed for time you’ll have to give a bit of ground on the optimization front anyway.
Scholarly data back this assertion as well. (3) If you’re on the clock in the weight room, skip the exercise machines and opt for compound, free-weight exercises instead. A few sets of squats followed by some deadlifts will guarantee a productive, timely leg day.
Great for Strength
Muscular strength is specific; you’ll become stronger at any movement you practice for long enough and apply sufficient intensity to. That said, your body “prefers” to work as a synchronous unit, calling upon multiple joints and different muscles at once.
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This makes compound exercises your go-to for developing general strength. Not only do compound movements teach you how to perform real-world tasks like hinging and squatting safely, they’ll build tremendous amounts of “functional” strength that you’ll notice outside of the gym.
Better Health
If you care about optimizing your general health, resistance training belongs on your schedule; doctor’s orders. (4) Research has shown that weight lifting (and bodyweight training, if performed intensely) confers a wide array of general health benefits, including better joint stability, bone density, lowering your resting heart rate, and much more.
Of course, these perks aren’t exclusive to compound exercises. However, compound movements require more effort and typically provide more bang for your buck in the gym, guaranteeing that you’re bolstering your general health in the process.
More Training Content
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- Do Different Row Grips Matter?
- The Best Home Gym Back Workouts for Bodybuilding
References
- Androulakis-Korakakis, P., Fisher, J. P., & Steele, J. (2020). The Minimum Effective Training Dose Required to Increase 1RM Strength in Resistance-Trained Men: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 50(4), 751–765.
- Fonseca, R. M., Roschel, H., Tricoli, V., de Souza, E. O., Wilson, J. M., Laurentino, G. C., Aihara, A. Y., de Souza Leão, A. R., & Ugrinowitsch, C. (2014). Changes in exercises are more effective than in loading schemes to improve muscle strength. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 28(11), 3085–3092.
- Iversen, V. M., Norum, M., Schoenfeld, B. J., & Fimland, M. S. (2021). No Time to Lift? Designing Time-Efficient Training Programs for Strength and Hypertrophy: A Narrative Review. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 51(10), 2079–2095.
- Westcott W. L. (2012). Resistance training is medicine: effects of strength training on health. Current sports medicine reports, 11(4), 209–216.
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