How To Choose The Right Exercises For Muscle Growth

In my last post, I discussed how consistency, effort, and progressive overload are the three pillars responsible for the majority of gym results. But moving beyond those, there are still other, smaller elements of the program that matter. Since most of my clients are looking to build muscle in some way, that’s what I’ll be focusing on here. Even if you don’t think you want to build muscle, you probably do. Muscle underpins almost every body composition or performance goal, is a big component of metabolism, preserves function into old age, and will be at minimum an indirect focus for most programs.

So let’s go over what makes an exercise a good pick with a primary, but maybe not sole, goal of hypertrophy:

It targets the correct muscles

This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s the most obvious thing that needs to be addressed. The exercise needs to target the muscle(s) you want to grow. If you're going to grow your legs, for instance, you might choose squats, leg presses, leg extensions, lunges, etc. If you're going to develop the biceps, you might select any one of several bicep curl variants, chin-ups, or any other upper-body pulling exercises.

In a perfect world, the process would be as simple as picking the “best” exercise that targets the muscle you want to grow. But there is no such thing as best—that’s relative and depends on many factors—and there are trade-offs that must be considered. For instance, unless you’ve got hours every day for training, you’re going to have to pick exercises that train multiple muscle groups at once. Which means you may want to do the bulk of your training with compound exercises like squats, leg presses, deadlifts, romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, bench press, chest press, overhead presses, rows, pull-ups, chin-ups, etc.

To give you more concrete examples, most horizontal pushing exercises, like bench press and push-ups, target the chest, triceps, and front of the shoulders. And most pulling exercises, like rows, target the biceps, back, and back of the shoulders. If you wanted to target each of those muscle groups individually, you would need three isolation exercises for each compound exercise.

In many cases, isolation exercises can be better at targeting a specific muscle group than a compound exercise, which is why I often round out my programs with them. But they can’t, and shouldn’t be, all you use. My rule of thumb is to use predominantly compound exercises and add isolation exercises for body parts that are lagging in size or that you want to give special attention to.

It allows the target muscle to fail first, or at the very least, to get close to failure

If you choose an exercise where a non-target muscle fails relatively quickly, you won’t be able to stimulate the target muscle properly.

Although it seems to run contrary to the advice I gave in the last section, this can make compound exercises somewhat problematic. If you’re trying to maximize the stimulus to a particular muscle, that muscle must be the limiting factor in the exercise. If you’re doing bench press, for instance, unless your chest is what’s causing you to fail the exercise, it’s not going to be an “optimal” choice for targeting the chest. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad choice—for reasons I already mentioned and more I will add later—it just means that you might want to add something like the pec deck (isolation) to maximally stimulate the chest.

Another great example is when a failing grip lowers the potential benefit of a pulling exercise. It’s hard to light your back up when your grip fails early. You can either stick to picking exercises where the grip doesn’t fail first, modify them to prevent premature grip failure, or you can use grip assistance.

The decision of when to use grip assistance for pulling is tough. On the one hand, if you always use assistance because your grip sucks, it’s going to continue to suck because it doesn’t get stronger. However, avoiding assistance prevents you from receiving a better stimulus for the pulling muscles. I try to avoid using assistance on rows or pulldowns until the weight truly outstrips your ability to do the exercise. I reserve it for heavy deadlifts, RDLs, very heavy pulling exercises, and any time I’m holding weight for a long time during a lower-body exercise (lunges, step-ups, etc.).

It minimizes “other stuff”

So we’ve covered targeting the muscle and targeting it correctly. For even better results, you also want to limit any other elements that neuter the exercise.

For example, if I want to build muscle, adding too much instability will cap the load I can use, and thus make the exercise less effective. This could mean doing exercises on an unstable surface, on one leg, in a stance that is too narrow, etc. This doesn’t mean you can’t build muscle this way; it just may not be optimal.

This also includes adding any elements to a movement that prevent you from getting the most out of the target muscle(s), whether it’s limiting the load you can use, expending unnecessary energy, or simply distracting you. To give you an extreme example, trying to create a “functional” exercise by combining a bunch of different movements into one may be entertaining, but it’s not going to be a great muscle builder. You need to focus on one thing at a time to create more precise tension and fatigue.

For a less extreme example, I like barbell rows and have put them in many programs over the years. However, there are better ways to train the upper back and lats without the lower back fatigue that comes from being bent over. A chest-supported machine row, for example, allows you to directly train horizontal pulling without the extra fatigue.

It can be done over a large range of motion

There is a lot of hullabaloo being made about training muscles at different muscle lengths, specifically how lengthened partials may provide the same or more benefit than full range of motion training. But even as someone who thinks the word functional is overused and has lost all meaning, I don’t think it’s very “functional” to try to manipulate things to this degree. It makes for some unnecessarily complicated and silly training approaches for the average person.

I haven’t seen enough evidence to compel me to train in any other way but through a full range of motion. That means full concentric (shortening) and eccentric (lengthening) cycles through as large a range of motion as your body can muster while still stimulating the right muscles. Here are some examples of a full range of kettlebell squats and dumbbell presses.

Partial range of motion variants can be acceptable in the proper context, but I would default to exercises that can be performed over a full range of motion whenever possible.

It can be done with a load and rep scheme that results in the adaptation you want

New research has emerged demonstrating that the “hypertrophy zone” is much larger than we initially thought (~4-30 reps and maybe even larger), insofar as you can build muscle at the extreme ends of this range. But what’s possible technically is not always advisable practically.

If I were primarily after muscle growth, I would still try to stay in the 6-15 rep range for most exercises for reasons I will let Greg Nuckols explain:

In the 6-15 rep range, the weights are generally manageable enough that you can maintain good technique, not cheat the range of motion, get pretty close to failure safely, not “burn out your CNS” after just a couple of sets, and not be left with creaky joints. On the other hand, the weights are generally heavy enough that you’re still putting a fair amount of tension on the muscle, you’re more likely to be limited in each set by muscular fatigue than systemic anaerobic fatigue, and you’re not doing so many reps that you’re metabolically crushed after your first couple of sets.¹

All that to say, if you’re chasing muscle growth, it’s a good idea to pick exercises that can create a near maximal effort around this rep range. If you choose exercises and loads that you can’t do for more than a few reps or aren’t challenging until you reach 30 reps or more, they probably aren’t a great pick.

This is why many bodyweight and banded exercises aren’t a great fit for this type of training. You have to do too many reps to get the desired stimulus. They can be okay in a rehab or beginner setting, but you will quickly outgrow them if your goal is to build muscle.

You can progress it long-term

To build muscle and strength, you need to be able to continue progressing an exercise for months or longer. I call this an exercise’s “runway”. Lateral raises, curls, and several other isolation exercises have shorter runways than compounds, which is yet another reason why compounds make more sense as the backbone of your program.

Typically, the more muscles are involved and the greater the absolute loads lifted, the longer the runway. Deadlifts, squats, leg press, bench press, rows, etc. have lengthy runways for this reason.

As is the case with every one of these variables, it needs to be considered in the context of the whole. An isolation exercise isn’t great for time efficiency or long-term progression, but it can be fantastic at targeting the muscle you want to target. More on this tradeoff in the last section.

It’s nice to you

There are too many exercises targeting each muscle group for you to choose ones that seem to beat your body up more than others. We all have those one or two exercises that seem to cause problems no matter how careful we are, and some that we can go full-tilt on without issues.

Deadlifts are the former for me. From what I can only assume is a remnant of my college kicking days, my hips are a little funky, and they tend to get loaded asymmetrically when I deadlift. I’ve tried various stances, loading schemes, and volume distributions, and I’m almost guaranteed to get a cranky left hip at some point. I could keep trying over and over again—and I’m stubborn enough to try—or I could recognize that I might want to take an alternate route for building my back and posterior chain.

One might argue that someone who repeatedly gets injured doing a lift is either not doing it correctly or is poorly managing load and/or volume. But I might make the counterargument that some lifts for some people require so much meticulous oversight to avoid injuries and body fuckiness that they may be better off in the “not for me” pile. After all, what’s the goal here? Is it the exercise itself that you’re after or the adaptation? Give each exercise a fair shake, but if it repeatedly demonstrates its disdain for you, yeet it out of your program.

Build a program with as many nice exercises and as few asshole exercises as you can, because the best results come from long-term progression and minimal to no setbacks.

It uses equipment that is consistently available

It is challenging to progress an exercise if you don’t consistently have access to the necessary equipment. Take a barbell back squat, for example. If the squat rack is always taken in your busy gym, you’re traveling and training in a hotel gym, or you do your workouts across multiple locations with different setups, a barbell back squat may not be the best option.

No matter how good it is on paper, it isn’t viable if you can’t consistently do it. I often tell my online clients to choose greatest common denominator exercises. What exercise equipment will you always have access to? Build your program from that.

Putting it all together

Although that seemed like a lot, you quickly learn most of these organically through trial and error. To succinctly sum up what makes a good exercise pick for muscle growth:

You need to be able to do it, it needs to be through a full range of motion targeting the correct muscles in the right way for an appropriate number of reps, it needs to minimize other stuff that makes it hard to target the muscle in the way you want, and you need to be able to progress it for long enough to get the adaptation you want without it constantly beating you up.

You probably noticed there was some contradictory advice in this article, and that’s because these variables don’t exist in a vacuum. You’ve got a bunch of stuff all colliding with one another, which forces a sort of triage when picking the “best” exercise for any given goal. You have to figure out what’s important to you on a case-by-case basis.

For instance, you may have to choose an exercise that is slightly worse at targeting a muscle group because it’s nicer to you, or add exercises that are great at targeting a muscle but have a shorter runway. And lastly, if you have limited equipment availability, you’ll have to toss a few of these out the window entirely.

Not every exercise will check every box, and you’ll have to make some compromises, but the more of these each exercise hits, the more effective your program will be at building muscle.

That’s all for this one. Thanks for reading.

1. https://www.strongerbyscience.com/hypertrophy-range-fact-fiction/