What Makes a Good Exercise?

“Good” and “bad” exercises don’t exist in absolute.

But when training to grow muscle, some exercises likely yield better outcomes than others.

So what are the qualities that make for a good hypertrophy exercise? And how can we identify the appropriate from the inappropriate?

1 - Pain-Free Motion & Force

If an exercise isn’t comfortable, it isn’t sustainable.

This is why the most important variable in any exercise is comfort - not just now, but in a week, a month, and a year.

Of course, exercises may become less comfortable once you reach a certain loading threshold on them.

However, if you can’t sustain comfort in an exercise for several months of progression, it’s likely not a good option for YOU (or you’re altering your execution substantially as you add more load).

Here are some simple guidelines you can use to find comfort in any exercise selection:

• Assess your comfortable range before loading - don’t haphazardly grab the implement(s) you’re using to train. Go through the motion you’re doing (with your body alone) before adding external loads. Use this as a starting and not necessarily an ending point.

• Move slowly before moving quickly - awareness of your body in space is one of the most important aspects of pain-free exercising. If you move too quickly, you won’t be able to take note of which positions and ranges feel good and bad. If you’re having trouble with an exercise, slow down first, and only speed up the tempo when you’re comfortable at a more controlled pace.

• Adjust resistance direction and joint position - don’t be tied to using a single implement for everything. That’s for powerlifters. Adjust the bench angle you’re using, the direction you move your arms, the foot position and toe angle you use, knees out vs knees forward, use just the bottom, middle, or top of the range - the list of potential adjustments is infinite. Be willing to play around. Don’t attach yourself to a single technique.

2 - Target The Goal Tissue

Once you’ve checked the “comfort box”, it’s time to ensure that you’re accomplishing the goal you initially set out to.

To challenge a specific tissue, you need to understand two things:

1. Anatomy of the muscle.

2. The physics behind loading that muscle.

There’s no way around the nitty-gritty process of learning the specific anatomy of each muscle. Learning where a muscle attaches and how its fibers orient is quite boring, but it starts to get fun when you integrate the anatomy knowledge you have into lifting.

To make the learning process as interesting as possible, what I advise is to learn as you lift.

This doesn’t mean that you should bring your textbooks out onto the gym floor with a pen and paper. But it does mean reviewing the anatomy and function of a muscle as you’re training it so that you can not only expose yourself to the facts repeatedly but also understand what kinds of exercises (and general motions) create a sensation in the muscles you’re targeting.

This way, you can integrate your growing knowledge of anatomy with your growing knowledge of exercise.

This integration will not only accelerate learning but it’ll also be more enjoyable and practically applicable immediately.

Recommended resources for learning anatomy, other than my stuff:

• KenHub

• Complete Anatomy (3D app)

• Chat GPT - spam that thing with questions!

Learning anatomy can be a drag, and so can physics.

When I mentioned that learning “the physics behind loading a muscle” is one of the two things you need to understand to target a specific tissue, what I mean is that you need to understand the following concepts:

• Force and the different types of forces.

• Basic properties of resistance: point of application and direction.

• Torque and its parts: moments, moment arms, and how force relates to (and is different from) torque. This includes internal as well as external torque.

• How motion impacts movement (i.e., acceleration/deceleration/inertia).

Once you understand the basics of the above, you’ll understand anatomy on an entirely different level.

This is because memorizing textbook definitions of muscles and their actions will only get you so far. Every exercise that we perform in the gym should be contextualized to itself.

What this means is that a muscle may perform action A in position A, but may perform action B in position B.

For example, when the arm is behind the body (extended), the pecs (chest) act as shoulder flexors; but when the arm is overhead, two of the pecs act as shoulder extensors.

In other words, a muscle can perform two completely opposite functions if position and/or force changes.

If you read a textbook that tells you that the pecs are only shoulder flexors, you will assume that they can only act that way across all positions. This is not only false but paints an oversimplified picture of the reality of anatomy and how it relates to exercise selection and execution.

So, it’s no simple task to know exactly how to target a given muscle. You need to understand anatomy, physics, and how these two interact contextually within each exercise scenario.

Recommended resources for learning physics, other than my stuff:

• RTS & Tom Purvis

• Khan Academy

• Chat GPT - spam that thing with questions!

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