What Are Main Lifts And Accessory Lifts Exercises?

Maik Wiedenbach
2 min readDec 9, 2016

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When you are training without a personal trainer, you are expected to make mistakes. You will try to do more. You will try to lift some impressive weight. However, this is an ineffective way of training. We have already explained why you should choose exercise and weight carefully when there is no fitness instructor to guide you. Now, what are the exercises that should be on the list? How much weight is safe and rewarding? You workout and diet plan depends on your goal and training experience. Assuming that your goal is strength and physique, here is how you can choose exercises. We have categorized exercises into Main lifts and accessory lifts categories.

Main Lifts Exercises

These exercises are important for achieving training goal successfully. Main lifts exercises include compound exercises. Deadlift, squat, bench press are the examples of compound exercises. All these exercises involve multiple joints of your body. Compound exercises are pretty effective on muscles and efficiently train the whole body. You can lift heavier weights in main lifts.

Accessory Lift Exercises

Split squat, reverse band, farmer’s walk. Push up, dips, straight arm pulldown and standing single arm dumbbell shoulder press are the examples of accessory lift exercise. These exercises play a key role in increasing training stimulus and adding more volume. These exercises are pretty effective on specific body parts that are lagging in strength and size. Apart from this, accessory lifts also improve the range of motion.

Unlike compound exercises, isolation exercises involve movements of single joints. These exercises target specific body parts without any stress on other body parts. You should lift lighter weights in these exercises.

Do Not Start Categorizing Right Now

Now, you know that there are two types of exercises. However, there are some tricky exercises that are not easy to categorize as isolation or compound. Hip thrust is an exercise that involves movements of hips to train glutes. Therefore, people often see it as an isolation exercise. However, this exercise also involves movements of knees to a degree. Therefore, this does not qualify as an isolation or single-joint exercise. Similarly, Romanian deadlift also involves hips only. Therefore, it is an isolation exercise. However, it targets small muscle groups such as bicep curl. Therefore, do not try to categorize exercises as isolation or compound.

When you are working with a trainer at a Fitness center New York, you can achieve better results in less time. A fitness trainer in New York City makes a personal workout and diet plan for you. Even when you have no access to fitness coach in the city, you can join online fitness training program.

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Maik Wiedenbach

Personal Fitness Trainer, Maik Wiedenbach Personal Training