 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coykey. So previously we talked about the difference between your primary exercise of a workout and your assistance exercises during that workout. Now, I think sometimes a different way to look at it, a more helpful way to look at it, is to look at it from a multi-joint versus single-joint exercise. So in general, the more technically complex movements involve more joints. We would call those multi-joint movements. Examples are squats, deadlifts, any of our fundamental movements, like the ones we talked about yesterday in our last video. Those all require more coordination throughout the entire body. And if you don't have that coordination, you might not get the same amounts of muscle fatigue and therefore hypertrophy stimulus or strength out of it because you can't optimize your leverage and you can't load your muscle. For single-joint exercises. Now, there's a little bit of a smaller payoff. Things are more reductionist here for a single-joint exercise. They're only really that good at one particular thing in general. Whereas if I do a squat, I can get a lot out of that, right? I can do, if I do a barbell back squat, I can get a lot of quad, but I can still get hamstring, I can still get glute, I can still get upper back strength, all sorts of stuff, right? I can drive ankle mobility, I can drive knee hip mobility, whatever I need to do with that squat. With leg extension exercise, knee extension exercise, I'm really only stressing the quad and that's all I really get. So I wanna force a lot of fatigue into the quad in that isolation exercise and it helps make my quads big and wide. Now, it's not to say, I think these isolation exercises get a really bad rep. It's not that they are useless, it's just that they don't accomplish as many things. So if I have a general fitness client who really hates working out and doesn't wanna learn anything, then maybe I will give them some machine work and maybe they'll be able to push their body a little bit better, especially if they don't have any athletic background and they can't achieve these multi-joint movements just because they are uncoordinated. But if you're willing to kind of try some stuff out, I'm gonna try to shift the focus a little bit more towards these multi-joint exercises and then I'll throw in some more isolated exercises after that. In general, your isolated exercise is like a, it's almost always an assistance exercise, right? It's not the main goal of the program. My goal of the program is not to do as much weight on a thigh extension or whatever they call it, knee extension, quad extension exercise. It's about getting big legs, okay? And those isolation exercises can serve that purpose. Now, if your goal is only strength, do you think you need isolation exercises? I don't think there's a very clear example or a very clear answer is what I meant to say. But I think they serve a purpose. I don't think you should avoid them at all costs. I think they can still be a good use of your time. So take, for example, a soccer player. They run around and they're always stopping and deceleration requires a lot of quad activity. They're gonna train their quads a lot. Now, I still want them to keep their force output, keep their power output, make them really strong, make them really fast. So I'm gonna want them squatting and deadlifting and whatever, but after that, it might behoove you to program in some sort of hamstring isolation thing because I can then condition that hamstring tissue to not get over-lengthened, to not get underutilized. And it can help balance the knee joint in the, it helps balance the tibia in the actual knee joint because the quad pulls it forward and the hamstring pulls it back. And if I get too much quad, I get too much pulling forward and if I get some hamstring, I can kind of balance that. So that's just a way to look at it. It's not, I mean, I'm not saying that every isolated exercise is good for every person, but think about the goals of your program. Think about the other movements that they're doing and the other physical demands that they have upon them. And then you can plug in the right balance of multi-joint exercises and isolation exercises.