Exercise Selection - What you need to know

There are 7 thing you need to keep in mind when going through your exercise selection:

1. The exercise selection should match your goals.
2. You should be able to perform the exercises comfortably and safely (both acutely and chronically).
3. In general, compound (multi-joint) exercises give you more bang for your buck than isolation (single-joint) exercises.
4. Movements you can load heavier are useful because they’re easier to gauge progression with.
5. For muscle growth, you want to be able to maximize range of motion of the target muscle.
6. Machines and free weights can both be useful – exercise selection should depend on your goal.
7. Exercise variety may be useful, but it’s not necessary early on.

Matching your goals

This should be a no-brainer, but your exercise selection should match your training goals. If your goals are strength-related, you’ll generally be quantifying strength via the amount of weight you can lift for a variety of exercises – you should regularly train the exercises you’re going to use to test your strength. For example, if you want to increase your strength in the squat, then you’d better be squatting regularly in your training program. If your primary goals are based on building muscle or changing a particular part of your physique, then you need to make sure you’re choosing exercises that train those target muscles, though the exact exercises you choose don’t matter quite as much. For example, if you want to build muscle in your legs and hips, you could squat, but you could also do leg press and hip thrusts, for example (or lunges, or step-ups, or any of a wide array of exercises that train those muscles).

Comfort and safety

To build a meaningful amount of muscle or to increase your strength to any meaningful degree, you need to train hard, so when I refer to comfort, I’m not saying the exercises you choose should be easy. Rather, the exercises you choose shouldn’t cause any significant pain or discomfort apart from what you’d expect from exercising hard (with some exceptions– the Barbell may be uncomfortable across your shoulders when you start squatting, or the Barbell may dig into your hands a lot when you start deadlifting heavy, for example). Once you’ve spent some time lifting, you’ll get a feel for the difference between “normal” discomfort that just comes from exercising hard, and abnormal discomfort/pain from potentially injurious exercise. In general, though, if you feel discomfort in your muscles, that’s perfectly normal and expected (and if they aren’t burning, aching, and fatigued after a workout, you likely weren’t training hard enough). If you feel discomfort in your joints or tendons, on the other hand, you should avoid or modify the exercises that bring about those sensations.

There’s no quicker way to derail your progress in the gym than getting injured. Pay close attention to the way exercises make your body feel, and avoid or modify any exercises that cause pain. The two most common technique errors that cause discomfort are knees caving in during lower body exercises, and spinal flexion on any exercises where your spine is under load. Even if they don’t cause discomfort acutely, they can contribute to injuries long term. As such, you should make every effort to keep your knees tracking over your toes and to keep your back straight (or slightly arched) on all exercises, and you may need to modify exercises that don’t allow you to maintain good form (i.e. if your back always rounds once you pass a certain depth when squatting, just don’t squat quite as deep).

Multijoint > Single joint exercises

Research shows that when training volume is equated, you can make larger gains with multi-joint exercises than single-joint exercises. This is important to keep in mind when doing your exercise selection. The simple reason is that multi-joint exercises (bench press, shoulder press, rows, pull-ups, dips, squats, deadlifts, lunges, step ups, etc.) allow you to train multiple muscles at once. You could probably build as much muscle with single-joint exercises, but you’d need to spend way longer training in order to target as many muscle groups. So, if you have all the time in the world to work out, you can feel free to build a training program around single-joint exercises. However, assuming you also value time-efficiency at all, multi-joint exercises give you way more bang for your buck. Now, this isn’t to say that single-joint exercises can’t also be used judiciously. If you have a particular muscle/body part that you really want to grow or strengthen, targeted single-joint training can be incredibly useful. However, it probably shouldn’t be at the core of your training program.

Loadability

There’s nothing inherently better about exercises you can load heavier. However, they are easier to gauge progress on. For example, let’s say you can do sets of bench press with 100lbs, and sets of dumbbell bench press with 30lbs. If you want to go up in weight on the bench press, you could add 2.5lb plates to each side of the Barbell, bringing your training weight up to 105lbs, for an increase of 5%. On the other hand, if you wanted to increase your DB bench press, you’d need to hop to the 35lb DBs – an increase of 16.7%. Hence, even if you’re gaining strength on both exercises at the same weight, you can increase the weight you’re lifting 3x as often on bench press, which both helps with motivation, and helps you know your training is on the right track. To circumvent this issue to some degree, you can increase reps before increasing weight. For example, if you were DB benching 30lbs for sets of 8 reps, you could stick with 30lb DBs until you could do sets of 12 reps before going up to the 35lb DBs. However, it does still tend to be easier to see concrete progress with exercises you can load heavier since you don’t have to stick with the same weight for quite as long before increasing.

Range of Motion

In general, a longer range of motion promotes more muscle growth and larger strength gains. For example, going from a full dead hang position to chest to bar, when performing a chin up, will elicit a much longer range of motion in the biceps and latissimus dorsi. So, when possible, train through the longest range of motion you safely can. Safely is the key word, however. In some exercises, it is paramount to decrease the range of motion. For
example, pulling your shoulder blades together and pushing your breastplate towards the ceiling when bench pressing decreases the range of motion slightly, but it also helps protect your shoulders.

There are some contextual exceptions. For example, if you compete in strength sports, you may want to learn how to minimise the range of motion, within the rules of your sport, in order to lift heavier weights. However, for normal training, longer ranges of motion tend to be better.

Machines vs. Free Weights

All implements in the weight room have their place. For strength, train the exercises you want to use to measure strength. For transfer to another sport (i.e. if you’re lifting weights to get better at soccer), free weights may trump machines, as they require you to control your body through space and stabilize the weights which are skills that may also carry over to the field or court (in addition to the benefits of simply gaining muscle and getting stronger). For muscle growth, as long as you can maintain tension on the target muscle through a long range of motion, it probably doesn’t matter too much if you use machines or free weights. Free weights aren’t inherently better than machines, or vice versa. It simply depends on your training goals and level of comfort with the exercises.

Variety

Any program should include a variety of exercises in order to train all major muscle groups. Keep this in mind when progressing your program and going through your exercise selection. However, it’s worth considering whether each muscle group needs to be targeted with a variety of exercises. As with most things, it depends on context. Let’s say you only have time in your training schedule to train shoulders once per week, and you only have time to do one exercise. In that context, I’d recommend against using a variety of exercises, because it would take a long time to master each exercise, because you’d only be doing it once every two weeks at most. If you train a muscle group more often, there’s an argument to be made for using multiple exercises.

There’s good evidence that different exercises for the same muscle group can target different regions of that muscle, it’s possible (likely, I’d argue) that including some variety can decrease your risk of overuse injuries. Furthermore, doing muscle exercises that train the same muscle group may help you gain strength faster than JUST training the main exercise you want to get stronger at.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the exercises you do week-to-week should change very often. For example, within one week, you may do squats, step ups, lunges, and knee-extensions to target your quads (a fair amount of variety within the week), but then you’d do those same exercises the next week to attempt to progress on them, instead of subbing them out for leg press, split squats, front squat, and side lunges. This type of approach (exercise variety within each week, with little change week to week) is probably the best approach for most people, if your training schedule allows for it.