In this blogpost I will tell you why you want to pick your exercises very wisely.
You want to be efficient with your time and energy. Don’t you?
Carry-Over Exercises
You want to do exercises that carry-over to your main lifts.
So what do I mean by that? What do I mean by carry-over?
Carry-over means how the progression of multiple exercises carry over to the progression of other exercises.
Example:
If you do heavy back squats, heavy deadlifts and heavy barbell rows. They will all strengthen each other.
Take a look at the bent over row: it’s the same stance as your deadlift, same hand positioning as your deadlift, and you’re also pulling the weight explosively with your traps and lats while keeping your posterior chain tight and driving through your heels.
Thats also where leg drive in a great bench press comes from:
Keeping your whole posterior chain tight, compress like a spring and explode back up while driving through your heels.
So there’s tremedous carry-over through the specificity of training.
Let’s say you stop deadlifting.
You will still maintain your deadlift max if you continue your heavy squats and barbell rows. That’s because they all carry-over to eachother.
If you switch the squat for a hack squat or leg press, and the barbell row for a lat pulldown or a chest supported row, trust me. You will not maintain your deadlift strength.
And we all know that your strength goes pretty lineair your muscle size.
If you get stronger on an exercise, if you’re able to lift more weight on any given exercise (given that everything else stays the same) you will likely put on more muscle mass.
So focus primarly on these carryover movements to rapidly increase your strength in order to grow more muscle mass.
Now you will see that you end up with pretty much all basic compound movements.
Movements that will have the same hand positioning, same bar path to some degree, and the same focus on keeping your posterior chain tight.
So deadlifts, squats, different barbell variations of them, pendlay rows, bent over rows. They all benefit eachother.
And for your push muscles theres the bench press, close grip bench press preferably, incline press, overhead press, push press,
and all with a barbell. On the presses, you’re better off using the same grip on all the lifts, going with a pretty close grip.
Incline dumbell bench press
Let me give you another example of an exercise that will carryover to your barbell bench press: the incline dumbell bench press.
If you build up some mass on your chest or you have a cute powerlifting belly, you will notice that your range of motion is limited on the barbell bench press.
The barbell is stopped by your chest creating a weakness whenever you have to press against resistance that is further than your chest.
So you want to do incline dumbell presses with your elbows slightly tucked in while going through the full range of motion and moving the dumbell further than a barbell even could, because the dumbell isnt stopped by your chest.
On the bottom you will generate a stretch reflex and bounce back up as explosive as possible.
You’ll also train the left and right side seperately and work on your stability.
Leg extensions
My last example is the leg extension. Leg extensions are going to do absoltely NOTHING for your progress on your squat or deadlift, except for destroying your knees. So elimate these kind of exercises if you want to be efficient and effective.
Dont do an exercise for the sake of just doing an exercise.
Just keep this in mind: If you pick an exercise, always think: ”How is this going to benefit, contribute to my main lifts?”
Thank you so much for your support. I appreciate it!
-Stefan
