More often than not when watching videos or reading articles advising on maintaining and preventing muscle loss with age is to favor compound over isolation exercises.
Almost every online guru will speak volumes on the merits of compound exercises like squats, pullups and pushups. Emphasizing how multiple joints are facilitating such movements, therefore more useful.
After awhile it causes me to pause and evaluate if it makes the best sense...
I would say it depends on our starting point and goals. My journey has evolved quite a fair bit even over this short span of ~1.5 year journey. Now in my 50s it is a balance of maintaining and maybe slightly gaining muscle mass while still possible.
But the key focus would be increasing muscular endurance/ strength while not getting overly stiff in the process. That is having a certain level of various joint mobility/ flexibility. The other things attached to the equation will be to further improve overall stability and cardio. All of these is part of the reason I chose calisthenics over bodybuilding type of activities for resistance training.
Currently, body weight exercises (including weighted calisthenics) is about 85% while heaving dumbbells take up the remainder- which mostly consists of curls and dumbbell press.
Ok, in short I just want to have everything. Hence the word "Balance"
Secondly, even if two person has all these same goals/ targets, the way each one takes their approach would be markedly different.
Intensity and volume makes a big difference both good and bad. At my kind of volume, with repetitive explosive movements and bad forms-- strain injuries will soon follow. Something I have learned the hard way by getting medial epicondylitis (Golfer's Elbow) and various shoulder pains. This was the reason that got me re-evaluating my form for every exercise done these days while injecting in loads of mobility and flexibility training daily.
Pullups and Chinups are default go-to for building overall upper body strength especially the back. However if you have been doing these pull exercises like me, surely you can't miss how much they work other parts like biceps as well.
This is where I think isolation moves like bicep curls benefit in your overall arm training when you combine these exercises together. To super-set the exercises. More on this below.
Isometric
Isometric exercises is in somewhat of a different class and most
commonly touted as being great for core training ( and yes it is
indeed). The most poppular would have to be planking, although personally
for isometric core exercises I prefer the strict hollow-body hold instead.
But one often much overlooked isometric exercise is the hang. Dead or Passive Hang, it doesn't matter, just make sure you hang.
And my recommendations after a wall of text above?
Compounding. - I don't mean just doing compound exercises but compounding in having combination of different exercises. Supersets
The thing I like about supersets is getting an intense workout within a shorten amount of time.
My few favorites combinations, some are working on antagonistic muscle groups and some works the same muscle groups more.
- Pullups > Diamond PushUp
- Pullups > Dips
- Pullups > Ex Bar Curls
- Pullups > Dumbbell Hammer Curls
- L-sit ChinUps > Diamond PushUp
- Unilateral Squats > PullUps
- Dragon Flags > Abs Rolls
- Dragon Flags > Flutterkicks/ Hollow Hold
Another is combining more within one exercise, eg.
- L-sit Chin Ups
- L to Dips (getting into an L-sit before transitioning into a normal dip)
There is no right or wrong but as we progress, the differences in different muscle groups or fitness components (strength, cardio, mobility, balance and flexibility) will also reveal itself. It will require continuous adaptations or changes in the way we move forward or combine things for what's needed at those point in time.
Like now, after talking about how I have relied little on weights so far-- I have just signed up back in the gym getting ready to ramp up my next phase with more benchpress, deadlifts and squats. Because while progress up till now has been great-- but there is a certain strength plateau which I would need to breakout of with my hypertrophy training and nothing beats those with heavier weights.