Your Program Sucks Part 3 - Exercise Selection

Mixing It Up is a Shit Idea – if muscle mags have taught us anything it’s how to not make any progress so we’ll keep buying them and one thing they always say is this. When you mix it up all the time you’ll get nowhere (unless you’re getting “assistance”, then it doesn’t matter what you do).

When you start a new exercise you’ll see a pretty rapid increase in strength which is your nervous system learning the movement and becoming more efficient at it. Now what people get disappointed at is that they may have increased the weight for 6 weeks in a row but I’m not seeing any size gains yet so they’ll do something else instead. In fact you are now about to hit the getting big part which is what you’re training for in the first place (I assume). Once the nervous system recognises ever increasing stress put on a muscle and it realises that it can’t handle all of that stress at it’s current size, only then will it give the OK for the muscle to increase in size. Unfortunately you’ve now swapped those squats for leg extensions and you still look like needle leg man.

Justification – the most important factor in your exercise selection is the justification of using that
particular exercise. The questions you need to ask are:

• Does this exercise fit the client?
• Can the client perform it safely and correctly?
• Can I get the same outcome with another exercise?
• How can I modify the exercise the client?

I love deadlifts and I have all my clients do them but I also have 5 or 6 variations in my arsenal because not everyone can pull 100kgs from the floor. By modifying the height that you have your clients lift from, they too can perform deadlifts and get most of the benefits of them. In the end I’m training a hip hinge, not a deadlift so it doesn’t matter what variation I go with so long as it teaches the client to hip hinge correctly.

By the way those deadlifts where you start standing like a romanian deadlift but you simply drop your knees forwards keeping your torso upright are moronic. Get a better teacher, preferably not the one from your 6 week PT course.

Weak to Strong Exercise Progression – I have a progression for each movement pattern pretty much set in stone that I follow with my clients of which I will go into detail about in the next few points. I don’t really like trisets in the way they are performed traditionally. Just throwing 3 or 4 exercises together because they train the same muscle is a little haphazard for me so good way to go is to use exercises that train the same movement pattern but order them in the order of mechanical advantage. What I mean is that some variations of the same movement pattern are easier and allow for more weight to be used than others. So you would start your tri or giant set with the hardest variation and finish with the easiest.

For the lower body a hip hinge would look like this - single leg deadlift, romanian deadlift, sumo deadlift, rack pull

For the upper body a shoulder press would look like this - db military press, 2 db military press, 2 db push press, 1 arm db military press, 1 arm db push press

Regression / Progression – when plugging in your exercises for your programs, it is crucial that you also have a regression and a progression for your staple exercise in case you need it, especially when training small groups as not everyone will have equal abilities.

For a floor push up your regression would be to elevate the hands to decrease the amount of bodyweight required to lift and a progression would be to elevate the feet which increases the bodyweight you're required to lift against a regular floor push up.

For an inverted row your regression be similar to the push up where you'd have a higher setting for the bar or handles and a lower setting for a progression so you're almost lying flat against the floor.

For the deadlift your staple lift is from the floor with your regression being pulling from a mid shin to knee height setting in a squat rack to progressing to deficit deadlifts where you stand on a 2 - 3" platform to increase the range of motion you lift over.

Lastly for splits squats you'd progress to step ups as they require no eccentric contraction and progress to bulgarian split squats.

Progressing Exercises through Increasing Stability / Leverage Demands – Please do not think that this involves bosu balls or dura discs because I’d rather plant my own DNA at a scene of a crime then have people stand on them while they juggle puppies. What I refer to when I say increase stability demands is to actually stability adding in a dynamic component. This works best with single leg training and core training.

For single leg the progression would go step ups, split squats, reverse lunges, walking lunge and dynamic lunges.

For lumbar stabilisation you'd use a stability hold, add on hand taps, add on toe taps, add on a lateral shuffle and then repeat the sequence through from a push up position.

Exercise Selection and Rep Range Relationship – I believe that certain exercises suit specific rep ranges, not all of them, but most of them. Let’s take a single leg exercise for example. I bet we’ve all seen a lunge prescribed in a program for something 4 x 15 reps each leg with a 211 tempo with 90secs rest between sets. It pretty much looks like we’ve got all bases covered there but let’s look a bit closer. At 15 reps per leg, or 30 in total, at a tempo that works out to be 4 seconds per rep. This means that each set will take 2 minutes to complete. If you couple that with 90secs rest and the entire exercise will take over 10 minutes of training time. A client paying big money probably doesn’t want 15% of their hour dedicated to lunges and nor should they. Taking into account the aerobic capacity needed to perform a decent set of lunges and the muscular endurance required to maintain form during the entire set also means that anything over 8 reps is probably not the way to go. 

I don’t do anything over 8 reps for deadlifts and will very rarely go over 5 reps per set. If I want a hypertrophy effect then I’ll move to a hip thrust or single leg variation for extra volume. For squats I’ll do the same, low reps for the squats and higher reps for a single leg variation. For bench and military press we’d do the traditional exercise for low reps and then a db or bodyweight exercise for higher reps. Above all it’s just safe practice. So use the staple exercise for a movement pattern for low reps as it will let you load it up the most and then use an easier variation for higher reps.