When it comes to gaining a great deal of power on all your major lifts, not just some, you can’t think in terms of isolation. When you want to improve your bench press, you might focus upon rotator cuff strength or lockout position with the triceps. If you’re looking to improve your deadlifting power, you may use various rack deadlifting, grip or rowing techniques. When you want to grow stronger on the squat you’ll use partial range movements. Many of these will involve compound lifts, but they are designed to specifically target individual lifts or muscle groups. If you are trying to being up a body part to fit into proportion with others, then these techniques will work wonders for you. If you are trying to grow stronger on a particular exercise for better numbers in competition, then you are already doing what you need to do in order to improve these major lifts.

Today’s discussion focuses not upon these isolation techniques, but upon full power which is used by the entire body. Super-compound movements or exercises which combine several compound lifts can be very effective for improving your overall body size, strength, speed, and power. Let’s examine three movements which allow the lifter to use multiple muscle groups with the goal of improving overall body power.

Combining the deadlift, clean and press, just as they do in Olympic lifting, can be very beneficial for hip, thigh, back, shoulder, hamstring, abdominal, and arm training. You can stimulate growth in all of these muscle groups with just a few sets of this exercise, properly executed. You’ll need to warm up thoroughly, and ensure no muscle groups will be trained in the 48 hours following such a workout. Wear a back brace as well.

We all know how less-than-enjoyable it is to bring the heavy dumbbells from the rack to the flat bench on chest day. Imagine carrying them 100 or 200 feet in a parking lot, as fast as humanly possible! The farmers walk is another movement which can grow muscles all over the body. It is used a great deal in World’s Strongest Man competition. The concept is simple. You pick up a set of dumbbells and walk as far as you can, as fast as you can. The biceps, forearms, shoulders, back, hips, and legs are all called into play as you make the most uncomfortable walk of your life, for growth.

Finally, you can always go “old school”. One exercise that was used by Arnold Schwarzenegger and friends in the 1970s, but not used since thanks to technology, was the use of bench press and squats without proper support equipment. In order to bench press, the men would have to pick up a barbell from the floor and lie down with it. After the set, they would need to lean forward and return it to the floor. For squats, they would have to pick up the weight from the floor (deadlift), being it to their chin (clean), raise it over their head (press), drop it into position on their neck, then proceeded to do the squats. At the end of the set, this press, clean, and deadlift were reversed as the weight was brought back down to the floor. Give these unassisted movements a shot the next time you are benching or squatting!

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