Exercise Selection And Why it Can Make Or Break Your Workout
Last week we went over why you should prioritize building muscle with strength based workouts over cardio workouts. This week I want to get into why exercise selection matters and what types of exercises will give you the best bang for your buck! Exercises are NOT all created equally, and surprisingly, the perceived effort is not always a good indicator of how effective the exercise was 🤯 Just because it burns and you are a sweaty mess, does not necessarily mean that the exercise is going to create the change you are looking for.
Exercises that are the most effective at building muscle are early-phase loaded exercises, and this is a fact. In other words, they follow the targeted muscle's strength profile so that the muscle is being challenged at every given angle, and not just where the muscle is the weakest. It's ok if this doesn't make sense yet. Keep reading...
Each muscle has more power potential when it is lengthened, and less when it is shortened. Think about a rubber band. You can fling it further when it is stretched out than when it is in it's shortened position. Same idea here! SO- we want to find exercises that are more challenging when the muscle is in a more lengthened position, and less challenging when the muscle is shortened. Not only that, but we also want to make sure that the resistance being provided, whether it by body weight, dumbbells, or resistance bands, is being applied in the *ideally exact* opposite direction as the muscle pulls and that the resistance is sufficient enough to challenge and fatigue the muscle. It's all about biomechanics!
Let me give you a few examples:
Pliés are better than front leg lifts/ extensions (for quads)
Side laying lateral arm raises are better than standing lateral arm raises (for shoulders)
Step-ups or hinge lunges are better than all-fours back leg lifts (for glutes)
Skull crushers are better than tricep kick-backs (for triceps)
That's not all to say that late-phase loaded exercises like those listed above should never be used. I LOVE using them to either activate a muscle before doing an early-phase loaded exercise or to use them as a "finisher"! But when your goal is to build muscle, you will get so much more out of your workouts if you focus on early-phase loaded exercises.
When it comes to exercise selection, this is not the only principle that comes into play. It's wayyy more complicated. I also like to consider:
The goal I want to achieve with the exercise depending on the class and the sequence because sometimes the goal is to activate the muscle or build muscular endurance rather than muscle and strength, or finish fully fatiguing a muscle that was just worked with an early-phase loaded exercise. In these cases, a late-phase loaded exercise could be perfect!
I look at whether the exercise allows for the targeted muscle to be challenged sufficiently or if the stabilizing muscles will likely tire out before the targeted muscle is even close to fatigue. Each exercise is limited by the weakest muscle at play, so yes, you will always be strengthening a muscle... but is it the intended muscle? If not, I look for exercises that can better isolate the intended muscle!
On that same note, I consider how much your nervous system is having to multitask. For some classes, the goal is to work on sharpening the mind-body connection while the risk is low, such as in a barre class where you are not using heavy weights and you are working on muscular endurance more so than on muscular strength. For strength classes though, we want to minimize the multitasking so we can isolate out the targeted muscle group with as much resistance possible. Not only will this minimize your chance of injury, but it will also allow you to use that muscle to its full potential, which then will translate into more strength/ muscle gained. That's why barre classes are complex and we often work many muscle groups at a time whereas our strength classes tend to lean on the more simple side!
Isometrics vs full range exercises (this is a whole other topic for another day but each of them have a place in our workouts)
I look at any potential risks associated with the exercise and decide whether the benefits outweigh these risks or if there is a safer option we could do instead. For this I usually look at the amount of pressure being applied to the joints and in which direction that force is being applied.
If this is confusing or just more than you want to have to think about when working out, follow along with my program! All of this and more goes into class planning.