This week, let’s talk about assisting exercises— what they are, and how to fit them into your workout.
Assisting exercises are exercises that strengthen the usually smaller muscles surrounding a joint, thereby creating more stability. Ultimately, this helps to improve the activity of the more dynamic multi-joint movement when training in a gym, or the more dynamic movements when playing a sport.
Let me give you an example: with a squat, three joints are moving—the ankle the knee and the hip. This is a multi-joint movement and so is categorised as a compound exercise. A leg extension or leg curl moves only through the knee joint so it would be an assisting exercise to a squat.
Let’s take a barbell bench press. This is a compound move because the action is at the shoulder and the elbow joint. An assisting exercise may be an external rotation exercise of the shoulder or a lateral raise as these move over one joint.
You would program these exercises at the end of a workout and also you could do some of them as a separate routine every day, or even every other day for the ones that don’t require much equipment. You can add core work into this category as well, such as planks, cobras and crunches etc.
This leaves us the middle section of a program; this is where we do assisting exercises that still move through multiple joints. The reason these still qualify as assisted exercises is that you generally don’t load them as much in order to limit any stress going through the joints. But you are continuing to strengthen the muscles for a squat, for example, by doing a split squat or lunge without having to put a hight amount of stress through the joint as you would do with a barbell squat.
There are loads of variations of these: for example, you could be doing a bar squat and in the middle section you could add in a goblet squat before finishing with a split squat or step-up at the end. All of these are assisted exercises as the load placed on the body decreases as you progress through the program. You could finish with a single joint movement like a leg extension. At home, to develop your lower body routine you could do some single joint hip stability work in the form of hip bridges and hip clams to strengthen the muscles of the hip joint. These are just a few ideas of what you could do for the lower body and you can create the same system when doing upper body exercises.
Just a side note…
Remember, you don’t have to train one muscle group at a time— I was just using this as an example.
That’s it for now, see you next time.