New Rule #2: Use more than one muscle at a time

Every weekend over the next few months, I am going to be examining each of the New Rules of Lifting from Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove’s new book. This is rule #2.

Exercises that use lots of muscles in coordinated action are better than those that force muscles to work in isolation.

This is also good advice, and one of the things that I like most about it is that you can really streamline your workouts and finish working the same number of muscles in half the time. Depending upon what program I am currently working, and how much time I have, I will sometimes set up my workouts to isolate the muscles. However, harking back to Rule #1, your muscles are not meant to work in isolation.

After I finish running a marathon, I usually have more time to lift since I am less inclined to run for a few weeks to a few months (depending upon whether is a spring or fall marathon), and that is when I prefer to do longer gym workouts and use more exercises that isolate my muscles. When I am already outside running 40-60 miles per week, I tend to not have as much time to spend in the gym and before reading this book had already been doing workouts that used a plethora of muscles with each exercise. Now I am just more conscious of the fact.