Thread: The Science Of Training: 7 Principles Of Exercise

To paraphrase a wise man, “Small, weak, and injured is no way to go through life.” But if you design your workouts around the wrong exercises, that’s exactly how you’ll end up; dreadfully unmuscular, embarrassingly weak, and prone to chronic injuries.

Featured Athlete: Kris Gethin

Proper exercise selection can be tough. There are countless lifts to choose from and most of them have several similar-but-different variations. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t have a systematic method to select their exercises. They just do what feels best, what looks best in the mirror or what others do. When they find out the latest hype exercise, they immediately plug it into their program without analyzing how it fits in. Fortunately, there’s a set of objective criteria to qualitatively rate exercises, which allows you to make the most effective choice between any group of exercises with the same purpose – like figuring out why an overhead extension is a better choice for triceps than a pressdown. I devised these criteria for bodybuilders and recreational strength trainees, but powerlifters and other athletes should also find some use for them. Admittedly, these criteria are incomplete, but they do apply to the vast majority of exercises.

Let’s take a look at exactly what these principles cover and then learn how to apply them to several basic exercises.

1) The Limit Factor

An exercise is most effective for a bodypart if that bodypart is a limiting factor in the execution of the exercise, overlooking the other criteria. If your grip always gives out first on deadlifts, then your posterior chain will remain understimulated and deadlifts end up being a poor choice for training your lower body. Similarly, your lower chest and the long head of your triceps are active movers during a pull-up, but they’ll never limit your performance in the lift, so pull-ups are not seen as an effective exercise for these bodyparts. This criterion removes almost all unstable exercises from the bodybuilder’s exercise menu. Standing on an unstable surface will make your balance or, at best, some small stabilizing muscles, the limiting factor in the exercise. This principle also applies to using unstable objects as weights.

Single-arm barbell overhead presses suck for shoulder training because your forearms and the stabilizers in the rotator cuff will give out long before your delts get the chance to do enough work.

2) Compoundedness

For any selection of bodyparts, a compound exercise is superior to more isolated exercises, provided the compound exercise fulfills the other criteria for said bodyparts. This isn’t so revolutionary. If you can train three muscles at once, why train them separately? Compound exercises put much higher neurological, hormonal, and cardiorespiratory demands on your body than simple isolation exercises. Compound exercises are more than a sum of their isolation exercise parts, which is why the guy with the bigger bench press will be more impressive than the guy focusing on flys and skull crushers. Compound exercises also allow your body to spread the external force over multiple joints, which is beneficial for joint health and strength. Basically, they’re a more natural way to move your body and they lend themselves to meeting the other exercise criteria better than isolation exercises alone.

That is not to say isolation exercises are useless. They absolutely have their place, but they can never rival compound exercises and should never be prioritized over them when it comes to getting big or strong.

You can certainly include curls in your program, but only if the program already contains compound pulling exercises. However, note the second part of this principle’s original definition: For any selection of bodyparts, a compound exercise is superior to more isolated exercises, provided the compound exercise fulfills the other criteria for said bodyparts. That means chin-ups are superior to the combo of Scott preacher curls and straight-arm pulldowns, because chin-ups train the lats and biceps in the manner that meets at least all the same criteria (which we’ll learn in a moment) and possibly some others. Chin-ups in this example are at least as good as the isolation exercises in every aspect and even better in some ways. An economist would say, chin-ups dominate Scott preacher curls and straight-arm pulldowns. However, when it comes to triceps work, the bench press is not superior to overhead extensions because the standard bench press doesn’t work the triceps through the full range of motion and it thus leaves the long head understimulated.

As such, overhead extensions and bench presses can’t be directly compared using the compoundedness criterion. They’re just different, like comparing a hammer and a screwdriver. Both can be good tools, but they can’t do each other’s job very well.

3) Range of Motion

The more an exercise moves joints through their full range of motion, the better it is, overlooking the other criteria. It has been empirically demonstrated that lifting with a full range of motion (ROM) is superior to a partial ROM for building strength. For size there was also a trend towards significance in the one study that measured it. Another study found that full ROM training is better than partial ROM training even when you use a partial ROM exercise for all parts of the full ROM. So full ROM bench presses are generally more effective than heavy partials in the bottom, middle and top position combined. Furthermore, using full ROM increases your mobility for that movement pattern and increases the muscles’ length and it does so more effectively than stretching.

Increasing the ROM also increases the compoundedness of the exercise.

Partial squats are only somewhat effective for training the quads and maybe the spinal erectors, but full squats effectively involve the entire posterior chain. Lastly, training with a full ROM is easier on your nervous system and your joints because lighter loads can be used. Wait, what? Using less weight creates a better exercise? Yes. If absolute, maximal weight was all that mattered, everybody would be doing isometric-only or eccentric-only exercises and they’d be outgrowing clothes faster than a Kardashian marriage. But that’s clearly not the case. We all know that, ideally, the bar should touch the chest when we bench press and shallow quarter squats are only done by frat kids in between sets of curls, but few people realize that the ROM principle is actually applicable for all exercises. For almost every pulling or pushing movement, whatever implement you’re gripping (bar, dumbbell, cable handle) should touch your body at some point during the exercise. That includes pull-ups, rows, and overhead presses. The ROM principle also dictates that the optimal grip for most exercises is near shoulder width. The way most human bodies are built, right around shoulder width offers the greatest ROM for pushing and pulling movement patterns, unless your hands actually become an interference to the ROM, like during the military press, in which case your hands have to move slightly outward.

In short, cutting down the ROM on an exercise demands a damn good reason. And for the record, “a shorter ROM lets me go heavier, and that gives me an ego-boner,” is a damn silly reason.


4) Tissue Stress Distribution

The more an exercise’s stress is applied to its targeted structures, and the less stress is applied to peripheral tissue, the better the exercise, overlooking the other criteria. Evidence for the tissue stress distribution principle comes from many sources, including studies on EMG activity, isolation versus compound movements, open versus closed chain movements and machine versus free weight movements. Targeted exercises should stimulate your muscles maximally and target other tissues, like tendons, only insofar as their adaptations are required for maximum muscle growth. Factors like bone density, tendon strength, and cardiovascular health tend to take care of themselves if you do high-intensity compound exercises, so you don’t need to worry about actively strengthening anything other than your muscles. For more information on how to maximally stimulate individual muscles, see my previous Muscle Specific Hypertrophy articles (Part 1 and Part 2). Applying this criterion further is generally done on an individual exercise basis and partially depends on a person’s anthropometry (that is, body proportions), but some generalizations can be made.

The following are essentially sub-criteria of this principle:

• Your body isn’t structurally adapted to pushing against things that are behind your body; it’s unnatural and causes unnecessary shoulder stress. As a result, exercises such as dips, behind-the-neck presses, and behind-the-body side or front raises should be excluded due to this criterion.
• The “core” is structured to stabilize the spine, not move it. Spinal movement, especially flexion, is unnecessary for bodybuilders. Never round your back: keep it flat or arched. Anatomical position is almost always the optimal position for force transfer, maximal core muscle activation, and minimal peripheral tissue stress, such as spinal shearing forces.
• The more an exercise forces your body into a specific movement pattern, the worse the exercise, overlooking the other criteria. So, dumbbells are more favorable than barbells which are more favorable than machines. Free weights generally have a very acceptable tissue stress distribution, while machines rarely do.
• Closed kinetic chain exercises are superior to open kinetic chain exercises, overlooking the other criteria.

Use this simple test to see if an exercise has an open or closed kinetic chain. When you apply force to an object, either you move or that object will move.

If you move, the exercise’s kinetic chain is closed. If the object moves, the exercise’s kinetic chain is open. The classic example is to think of a push-up compared to a flat dumbbell press. In the first, you’re moving (closed chain), and in the latter, the object is moving (open chain). Closed chain exercises allow your body’s structure to determine which joints move and how much, which takes stress off of the joints and lets the muscles do the work instead. This finding has been replicated many times and is hugely underrated. Closed chain exercises are better for your joints and your muscles. This is why squats are superior to leg presses and pull-ups are superior to pulldowns. It’s also why rows, bench presses and military presses aren’t perfect. As a final illustration of the tissue stress distribution principle, consider bench pressing using a barbell or the smith machine. Many bodybuilders intuitively think the bench press activates more stabilizer muscles, but the smith machine activates the prime movers more. Wrong.

Using a barbell does increase stabilizer muscle activity, but the stress of the extra weight that can be used in the smith machine goes to your joints and prime mover activity is actually the same.