Exercise selection, structure and sequence

Posted Mar.05, 2008 under 2.1 - Fitness Fundamentals

It’s easy for new fitness enthusiasts to walk into a gym and get lost in all the tangled steel, chains and dumbbells. Even experienced strength athletes often find themselves learning new movements for many years – or how to perform old ones more effectively. Proper exercise execution is critical with increases in strength, to avoid injury while promoting further progression. The fundamentals of exercise selection, structure and sequence must also be understood to optimize a progressive program design.

Free weights and machines

To categorize the gym floor, two basic means of exercise are available: free weights and machines. Free weights provide a means to manipulate loads by pushing or pulling them through gravity, unassisted. Dumbbells and barbells offer this free range of motion. Free weights are versatile, use a natural range of motion and promote full-body fitness, with less isolation than machines. However, they can be hard to perform correctly and safely without properly developed motor control, training experience and discipline.

On the other side of the gym, machines provide a resistance with additional support using cables, pulleys and levers. Machines are easy to learn and use; yet their restrictive nature can be counter-productive in building overall strength and musculature. The body’s entire muscular system most be trained for continued growth and less risk of injury. Machines are too restrictive and force the body into a fixed range of motion, often moving against the trainee’s natural pushing or pulling curves. This can cause repetitive stress injuries and joint degradation. A machine’s unnatural resistance stimulates less functional strength development. They are also limited in their recruitment of opposing, supportive and stabilizer muscles. Machines are generally built to isolate resistance training.

For advanced strength training, free-weight exercises should represent the largest portion of the resistance training program.

Single- and multiple-joint movements

Free-weight and machine exercises are further broken down into single- and multiple-joint movements. Multiple-joint movements, more common with free weights, stress more than one muscle group. Performing these compound movements – like bench presses, dead lifts and squats – are generally regarded as the most effective for increasing muscular strength and size. Multiple-joint movements allow greater training loads than their single-joint counterparts. Exercises stressing multiple or large muscle groups have shown to produce the greatest metabolic and neurological demands and peak anabolic hormone secretion. Single-joint movements – like curls and extensions – target smaller muscle groups, as long as proper form is used.

Training routines

There are three basic ways to organize a resistance training program: total-body, stressing all major muscle groups in one session; upper-and-lower body splits, performing upper-body exercises on one day and lower the next; and muscle group split routines, training specific muscle groups during each session. Every method has its own benefits. Individual goals, time availability and personal preferences usually persuade a trainee to use one over the other.

Besides these three basic structures, advanced bodybuilding programs sometimes integrate multiple methods into one training cycle, often called nonlinear or undulating periodization by strength training coaches. For instance, a training cycle starts off with a high-volume split routine to stimulate growth throughout the body over several isolation sessions. Then the trainee switches to a total-body sessions using high-intensity and less volume, performing only heavy free-weight compound lifts. These methods often work well since they allow specificity and variation in the program design.

Exercise order

Studies have shown that the order exercises are executed significantly affects strength performance. If strength and muscle growth is the goal, large multiple-joint movements should be performed early in the training session, when fatigue is minimal. The sequencing of exercises might not be as important for endurance training since fatigue is a necessary component. For that reason, building muscular endurance allows more freedom in scheduling workout variations than strength-building programs.

When training to maximize muscle force production and size, perform exercises for large muscular systems before isolation sets. Sequence multiple-joint exercises before single-joint movements. Complex exercises should be performed first; for example, dead lifts before barbell rows. Furthermore, sequence opposing (agonist-antagonist) muscle groups together to localize blood flow, nutrient availability and warm up joints and connective tissues. Training in a push-pull order also assist in the recovery process by stretching the opposing muscle and surrounding fascia, while the area is warm. For instance, a triceps extension followed by biceps curl uses an opposing muscle order relationship. To train individual muscle groups, perform multiple-joint movements and high-intensity sets before single-joint and high-volume exercises.

It’s important to have a well thought out plan before beginning a strength-building program. The basics of exercise selection, structure and sequence need to be understood to maximize a program’s potential. Additionally, a training log must be used to document efforts and how variations affect the ability to continually retrain with a progressive overload.