Compound exercises for a full body workout: the lifts worth your time

A compound exercise is any lift that moves more than one joint at once. A squat bends the hips, knees and ankles. A row moves the shoulder and the elbow. A biceps curl moves one joint, so it isn't one. That's the whole definition.

The best compound exercises for full body workout plans are the boring ones you already know: a squat, a hinge, a press, a pull and a carry. Five or six of them, done for a few hard sets and progressed every week, carry most people further than a forty-exercise app routine ever will. If you'd rather not build the list yourself, an app that programs your lifts and your runs does it for you.

Below: the compound lifts worth your time, what the research says about compound versus isolation work, sample sessions, and how to pick lifts if you also run.

Why a full body workout runs on compound exercises

Three reasons, in order of how much they matter to a normal person with a job.

Time. One squat trains your quads, glutes and adductors. One row trains your lats, upper back, rear delts and biceps. A full body workout with compound exercises covers the whole body in four or five movements. An isolation-only version would need a dozen.

Load. Multi-joint lifts let you move much more weight, which is what drives strength on those lifts. You can squat far more than you can leg-extend.

Transfer. Real life, running included, is multi-joint. Getting stronger at pushing, pulling, standing up and picking things up is useful outside the gym.

That's why almost every beginner program, and almost every ready-made split for people who also run, is built on the same handful of lifts. The split decides which day each lift lands on; there's more on beginner workout splits in the full guide. The lifts are the constant.

The best compound exercises for full body workout plans

Organize them by movement pattern. Pick one or two from each row and you have a complete program.

A few notes on picking:

• ›Squat: the goblet squat is the best place to start and a perfectly good lift to stay with if you mostly run.
• ›Hinge: the trap bar deadlift is easier to learn than the conventional deadlift for most beginners, because the handles sit at your sides instead of in front of your shins. The Romanian deadlift is the best hamstring builder of the group.
• ›Single leg: split squats and lunges are where runners get the most specific carryover, and they need far less load to be hard.
• ›Pull: do at least as much pulling as pushing. It's the pattern people skip most.
• ›Carry: technically every muscle is working, which is the point. It's also the easiest grip work there is.

Compound vs isolation: what the research says

Compound lifts do most of the work, and the evidence mostly backs that up, with one honest caveat.

In untrained young men, adding curls and triceps extensions to a program of bench press and lat pulldown for 10 weeks produced no additional gains in elbow flexor muscle thickness or strength (Gentil et al., 2013). In men with at least two years of training experience, adding single-joint arm work to a multi-joint program for 8 weeks produced similar changes in arm strength and size to the compound-only program, which the authors described as a time-efficient approach (de França et al., 2015).

The caveat: compound lifts don't hit every muscle equally. A 2026 study had untrained adults train one leg with leg press and the other with knee extension for 12 weeks. Overall quadriceps growth was comparable, and only the leg press grew the glutes and adductors. But the knee extension grew the rectus femoris, one of the four quad muscles, far more than the leg press did (Kinoshita et al., 2026). The authors called the leg press highly time-efficient, and said the knee extension was needed to effectively target that one muscle.

The practical version: compound exercises are the base. Isolation work is a top-up for specific muscles you care about, once the base is in place. Not the other way round.

Full body workout with compound exercises: two sample sessions

Two sessions, alternated. Effort targets use RPE, where RPE 8 means about two reps left in the tank.

Session A

Session B

That's 12 to 13 working sets per session and about 45 to 60 minutes with warm-ups. Run it twice a week and most muscles get around 6 hard sets a week, the right starting dose for a beginner. Add a third session and you have the classic 3 day full body workout, with a lighter, rotated third day.

Progress with double progression: when you hit the top of the rep range on every set with clean form, add the smallest weight jump available and drop back to the bottom of the range.

Picking compound lifts when you also run

Running is already a lot of leg work. That changes which compound lifts make sense and where they go.

• ›Choose lower-body lifts you can recover from. Trap bar deadlifts, goblet squats and split squats give most runners plenty of stimulus without the recovery bill of a heavy barbell back squat. Heavy back squats are fine too, if you place them well.
• ›One heavy leg lift per week is often enough in a running-priority block. The others stay at RPE 7.
• ›Never put the heavy lower lift the day before intervals or the long run. Put it on an easy-run day, with an easy or rest day after.
• ›Upper-body compounds go almost anywhere. Presses, rows and pull-ups barely touch your running legs.

The choice between full body and splitting the week by body part comes down to how many days you can lift, and upper/lower vs full body lays out that trade-off. Change the split and the list barely moves: the same lifts anchor an upper lower and a full body week alike. With five or six lifting days, our guide to push pull legs shows the same lifts spread across push, pull and leg days. And PHUL, short for power hypertrophy upper/lower, runs them as one heavy and one higher-rep version of each upper and lower day.

Common mistakes

Too many compounds per session. Squats, deadlifts, lunges and leg press on the same day isn't thorough. It's tired. One main lower lift plus one supporting one is plenty.

Skipping the pull. Rows and pull-ups are the first thing people drop when short on time. Do them first if you have to.

Ego loading. Compound lifts let you move big weights, which is the point and also the trap. If the bar speed dies and your form changes, it was too heavy.

Never progressing. The same weight for the same reps for three months is exercise, not training. Write it down. Add a rep or a little load.

Program-hopping. The lifts only get strong if you do them for months. Pick five or six and keep them.

How exrsz handles exercise selection

exrsz builds a periodized plan from your goal, schedule, level and equipment, so the compound lifts it picks are the ones you can actually do where you train. It balances your lifting and running in one plan, adapts each week to how you trained, and reshuffles missed sessions.

FAQ

What are the best compound exercises for a full body workout?

A squat, a hinge such as a deadlift or Romanian deadlift, a horizontal and vertical press, a row and a pull-up or pulldown, plus a carry. One lift from each pattern covers the whole body.

Can you build muscle with only compound exercises?

Mostly, yes. Adding isolation arm work to compound-only programs produced no extra strength or size gains in short studies of untrained and trained men (Gentil et al., 2013; de França et al., 2015). Some muscles, like part of the quads, still respond better to isolation work (Kinoshita et al., 2026).

How many compound exercises should be in a full body workout?

Four or five is plenty: a lower-body lift, a push, a pull and a carry or second lower lift. More than that usually makes the session longer without making it better.

Are compound exercises good for runners?

Yes. They build strength efficiently and save time. Runners should keep the heavy lower-body lift away from intervals and the long run, and lean on lifts that are easy to recover from, like trap bar deadlifts and split squats.

Is a full body workout with compound exercises enough for beginners?

Yes. Two or three sessions a week of four or five compound lifts, three hard sets each, progressed weekly, is a complete beginner program.