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9: What Are the Best Exercises for Strength?
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Welcome to Episode 9 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel tells you what the best exercises are for strength (for busy people). Here’s what this episode digs into:
- Exercise prescription versus program design
- Training muscles versus training movements
- 8 different types of movements you can train strength within
- A simplified list of 4 movements to train strength within
- Why multi-joint exercises are more bang for your muscles than single joint exercises
- Why multi-joint muscles also strengthen the torso
- Do a full body workout rather than a split routine
- Choose your order of exercises strategically
- “Rules” for putting strength exercises in order
Reference links:
Train with Laurel in her Virtual Studio
Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning book
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Watch the video of this episode at: www.movementlogictutorials.com/podcast
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Transcript
Introduction to the Movement Logic Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaverstorff and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
Is There a Best Exercise for Strength?
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Episode 9 of the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beaverstorff, your host, and I'm on a solo mission today to talk to you about the best exercises for strength. Dr. Sarah Court is taking a much needed day off.
00:01:03
Speaker
You know, probably not, actually. She's probably working, but hey, Sarah, if you're listening, we hope you're not working. If you know me, you know that this question, what are the best exercises for strength, is a trick question. It's a teaser title. You know, I'm not the type of person to have
00:01:23
Speaker
this fixed opinion about the best anything. And so I'm not about to rattle off 5 or 10 or 20 of the best exercises of strength because it depends. Yes, I know that that can be a very annoying thing to hear, but it's true. It depends.
00:01:41
Speaker
However, we will talk about some solid ways to think about strength exercises, and these ways might actually help you choose the best exercises for you.
Categorizing Strength Exercises for Effective Training
00:01:57
Speaker
Strength exercises have been categorized in some pretty helpful ways and knowing about the different categories of strength exercises I think is a really good starting point for helping you make better, more confident decisions
00:02:14
Speaker
about how to spend your precious time while strength training. Because if you're like me, you don't have endless amounts of time to be lifting weights. I don't have all day to spend strength training, let alone an entire hour some days to strength train.
00:02:31
Speaker
So in other words, I'm going to share with you some time saving strategies to help you eliminate the copious amounts of options that there are for selecting exercises. I mean, if you go on Instagram, you're immediately inundated with like 200 cool looking exercises to try. But this episode is helping you decide on what not to do as much as what to do. What I hope you end up with is a clear idea of like what the
00:03:00
Speaker
If I were to liken it to food, what are the macronutrients of a workout, specifically a whole body workout? But we'll talk
Simplifying Exercise Choices: What to Avoid
00:03:08
Speaker
about that. To define terms, as we like to do on the movement logic podcast, when I refer to choosing exercises for strength, in this case, I'm referring to a very important aspect of strength training, which is more formally known and referred to as exercise prescription.
00:03:29
Speaker
Exercise prescription is a really important consideration to make because it's literally choosing the exercises that you're going to use to build strength, not just within a single workout, but actually over time, whether that be a two, three, four, five, six week training block, these are going to be the exercises that you keep coming back to.
00:03:49
Speaker
to progressively load and to build strength in. So choosing these exercises is like a little bit like choosing what you're taking with you on vacation. You know the suitcase is only so big so you want to make sure you have what you need and you also want to make sure
00:04:04
Speaker
that you have maybe what you like and what's going to be most useful to you on that vacation. So we're going to pack our suitcases light and we're going to pack them well today.
Movement-Based Categorization of Exercises
00:04:12
Speaker
Now, before I go further, exercise prescription is not everything we need to consider. Exercise prescription is like one small piece in this bigger puzzle. And that bigger puzzle is program design. Program design takes into account many more variables
00:04:29
Speaker
in addition to what exercises you're going to be progressively overloading. These can include variables like how often is this person or are you going to work out every week? How long are the sessions going to be? That'll determine how many exercises you can choose, right? And then like how specifically are you seeking to target strength, this, you know,
00:04:53
Speaker
might involve asking what are the goals? Is there a performance goal? Is there an aesthetic goal, a physique goal? Is there just an overall general strength goal? Someone just wants to feel more confident and capable in their body type of a thing. So now we've defined terms, right?
00:05:11
Speaker
Exercise Prescription fits into the bigger puzzle of program design. Let's zoom back in on Exercise Prescription and how we should go about doing this. What are some ways to think about this process, this enormous collection of exercise that we could choose to help us narrow down our options? I think it's helpful to take stock of the inventory
00:05:34
Speaker
of exercises that you have to choose from. And because there are just too many to consider individually, we'll avoid the overwhelm of that. And instead, I'm going to give you a total of five tips for organizing your thoughts around what exercises choose for strength, depending. Tip number one, there's two main ways that you might think of an exercise.
00:05:58
Speaker
One is to think about an exercise in terms of the muscles it trains, maybe like the glutes or the hamstrings, or this is a quadricep exercise, or a bicep exercise, or triceps exercise, or a delt exercise, or back muscle exercise. We have like 600 plus muscles in our body, so that could become quickly overwhelming, like which to choose, right? Which one am I gonna pack in my suitcase? So that's one way to do it, but I actually like this other way better.
00:06:29
Speaker
And it's to think of exercises in terms of movements and the movements they train. Now, maybe you're going, well, Laurel, you know, there are actually many, many more ways that we can move our body than there are muscles in the body. So I don't see how this makes it any simpler. I hear you. But what I want to say now is that there are many ways to move, but there are some basic ways
00:06:57
Speaker
There are some ways that have been branded as basic human movement or functional movement. However you want to think about it, there are ways that we move as humans, that we move often, that we in many cases really kind of rely on being able to move in these ways to get the daily
00:07:13
Speaker
kind of work of our lives done. And these are the main kind of movements that I'm going to share with you now. So just to go back, think about exercises in terms of the movements they train rather than the muscles they train. That's probably going to help narrow down, maybe simplify a little bit how you think about what exercises to choose because
00:07:39
Speaker
Almost every single exercise you encounter in strength training is going to fall into one of these eight different categories of movement that I'm just going to list off. But then I actually have a shorter list of movements to kind of simplify this. So if you think about choosing your exercises in terms of the movements it trains, you could be working on an upper body push, an upper body pull,
00:08:02
Speaker
You could be working on a squat slash lunge. A squat is typically done in a bilateral fashion where both legs are kind of doing the same thing. Both hips are in the same position versus a lunge, which is unilateral. One hip is doing one thing typically flexing and the other hip is doing another thing typically extending.
00:08:24
Speaker
So that's a third category. Fourth is a hinge. So a hinge could be something like a deadlift, but also it could be something like a bridge, a bridge pose. Rotation, this is rotation of the spine specifically. Locomotion is walking or crawling or running or skipping.
00:08:45
Speaker
It's maybe done pushing something like a sled or carrying a heavy weight like a farmer's carry. The next is seven, anti-rotation. Anti-rotation is very common when you're doing a unilateral exercise. So for example, if you do a single arm row, a single arm bent over row, imagine you're
00:09:08
Speaker
bent over in kind of a hinge position, but that you're holding onto a weight in one hand and you're pulling the handle of that weight towards your lower ribs just on one side. Your other arm isn't really doing anything.
00:09:19
Speaker
you are working anti-rotation because you're working on not rotating your spine while you're rowing that weight. There's many other ways to work on anti-rotation that don't also involve like another one of these categories like an upper body pull, but I give you the example of the upper body pull as an anti-rotation exercise because actually a lot of these categories, they don't exist in isolation. There's a lot of
00:09:42
Speaker
crossover where the exercises will exist in the center of the Venn diagram between two exercise categories. So a single arm row is both a upper body pull and an anti-rotation exercise. So just heads up. And then the last category is everything else.
Prioritizing Key Movement Categories in Workouts
00:09:59
Speaker
Think about calf raises, bicep curls, tricep extensions, more isolated areas of strength. Maybe you need to improve your grip strength, so you're just going to focus on your grip strength rather than your pulling strength as well.
00:10:11
Speaker
For example, okay, so we've got upper body push, upper body pull, squat, lunge, hinge, rotation, locomotion, anti-rotation, and everything else. Okay, that's a long list, so here's my simplification, here's my simplified list. When you're choosing the movement to train, you could just think about these four movements, and you would
00:10:41
Speaker
be going a long way toward covering a lot of different muscle groups. And they are the upper body push, the upper body pull, the squat slash lunge, and the hinge. Now, within these four categories, and within the eight that I mentioned earlier as well, but within these four categories, because you might say, well, isn't that kind of a limited inventory? Are you sure we're going to be hitting all the bases here?
00:11:11
Speaker
It depends, but there's a ton, a ton of pose variations, exercise variations. Of course, I said pose variations because I'm a yoga teacher at heart. There's a ton of exercise variations of each of these categories, so dozens of them. There's dozens of ways to upper body push. There's dozens of ways to upper body pull. There's dozens of squats and lunges. There's dozens of hinges, okay?
00:11:37
Speaker
There's literally so many ways to work on these basic human movements. So there's a lot of variety within this minimal inventory. So we take this shorter list. We think of it kind of like macronutrients, like this is our protein, carbs, and fat, right? This is our hydration, okay? If we've got protein, carbs, and fat and some hydration every day, we're good. We're gonna be good to go. This is tip or slash insight number two.
00:12:07
Speaker
Now you gotta determine how many exercises can you do in your workout, right? This of course depends, right? I typically only have time to do three.
00:12:21
Speaker
Truthfully, three exercises is all I got. Some days it's four, some days it's two. I'm busy. I'm often interrupted. I strength train from home and I'm often interrupted. Things come up. My husband needs help. My daughter needs help with something and it's like, okay, well, that's it. That's all I can do for today. But I start off with
00:12:41
Speaker
deciding, okay, I'm going to try to do four exercises today, three exercises today, five, six exercises, whatever you have time for. You decide on how many you're going to do because how many you're going to do is going to determine what you do. I know there's four categories and for the purpose of this episode, we're simplifying it down to four categories. There's more than four categories. There's more than eight categories, by the way. It just depends on how you want to codify these exercises and organize them in your mind.
00:13:08
Speaker
if there's only four categories but we can only do three exercises in a workout and you're like oh no then it's not you know whole body or i'm missing a major macro ingredient don't worry oftentimes um a squat will work some of the same muscles as a hinge okay and with the upper body push in the upper body pull you can kind of ask yourself like all right if i have to triage here if i have to let
00:13:34
Speaker
eliminate someone from the island or I can't pack that third pair of shoes, what am I going to get rid of? Well, ask yourself, what have I been doing more of lately? Have I been doing quite a bit of pushing lately? Maybe I did a really strong vinyasa flow practice yesterday. Okay, maybe I'm going to triage the exercises and I'm going to do my upper body pull because I haven't done enough pulling or I haven't done as much pulling. So just FY, you don't have to do all four categories, but if you can,
00:14:04
Speaker
You know, I think you're hitting pretty much four good bases to hit in your workout.
00:14:11
Speaker
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Efficient Full Body Workouts and Exercise Order
00:15:54
Speaker
All right, so tip number three, choose primary
00:16:00
Speaker
or multi-joint exercises rather than what you could think of as accessory or single joint exercises. We'll talk about what that means.
00:16:14
Speaker
Exercises are often categorized into two distinct categories, primary exercises. These are also confusingly called core exercises. By core, we're not talking about body weight abdominal exercises. We're not talking about crunches and planks. We're not talking about side planks. We're not talking about bicycles. We're actually talking about
00:16:36
Speaker
multi-joint exercises that involve loading the spine in addition to loading the lower and the upper body. Okay, so all of the categories that I named could be core exercises, like a squat is a core exercise. If you think about where you're holding the weight in a squat, typically on your shoulders or in your hands, right? And this is applying force through your spine a lot of the times.
00:17:01
Speaker
If you think about how you are doing a deadlift, you're applying low to the muscles of your back, your spine, right? Same thing with a press and same thing with a pull, depending on how you're setting yourself up in these exercises, you're going to be working on your spine. You're going to be working on the muscles around your spine. Why is it called core? I'm not exactly sure. It might be because really what they mean is not core as in torso.
00:17:26
Speaker
but they might mean core as in like central, like main ingredient. I don't actually know, but what I do know is that the four main categories I shared with you, right? The upper body push and pull, the squat lunge, and the hinge all actually
00:17:43
Speaker
simultaneously, while working the lower and upper body, also work the muscles of the core. And this is what's great about these exercises. This is why they're time-saving, is that they also target the muscles of your torso in addition to targeting the muscles of your shoulders and hips, or your upper and lower extremities.
00:18:00
Speaker
So primary or core exercises are multi-joint. And this means because it's multiple joints that are moving in the exercise, multiple different muscle groups are also targeted in the exercise. And because of that, we work a larger portion of our muscles when we do these exercises. They're more bang for your buck. They're actually time saving for this reason.
00:18:27
Speaker
They also have a higher loading capacity, so you're probably going to be using heavier weights for these multi-joint slash primary slash core exercises. Contrast this with single joint exercises, and they have a lower loading capacity. And these could include things like calf raises,
00:18:51
Speaker
you know, if you go to the gym, you work the adductor machine, the abductor machine, you might do like the knee extension machine or the hamstring machine, the knee flexion machine, you might work on biceps, curls, tricep extensions, things like that. These are considered accessory exercises. So when you are
00:19:13
Speaker
Making your decision for what exercises to do in your limited amount of time and you're trying to eliminate options so as to not be overwhelmed, my tip to you is to choose primary exercises, multi-join exercises, because you're going to get
00:19:29
Speaker
more bang for your buck. It's like a one-stop shop, all right? You know, going to bigger stores, you may not be into that, but like sometimes it can be really time-saving to go to Target because they have everything. They have your groceries, they have your bedding, they have your toys, they have everything. They have clothes. All right, so these are like the targets of
00:19:51
Speaker
exercises. Tip number four, train full body rather than doing a split routine. So what the heck is a split routine? We're going to talk about what that means. Here's the deal. If when you're choosing your exercises for your workout, you're choosing your primary exercises for your workout, you're training movements, not muscles, right? You're doing all the things and you're like,
00:20:16
Speaker
okay, should I just do upper body? Should I just do lower body? You could. And in this case, you'd be working on a split routine. Now, in bodybuilding, oftentimes split routines are divided up a little differently and it might be like there's leg day and then there's back day or biceps, triceps day. I mean, I don't know how it works because I'm not really into bodybuilding at all, but there's many ways to split up a routine. But the takeaway is that when you split up a routine,
00:20:46
Speaker
you aren't getting stimulus to your whole body, you're stimulating some muscles or some regions, not all your body. And I recommend trying to work full body. And the reason is that if you train full body, the benefit of that is that if you're working out because you're very busy and all you have time for is two
00:21:13
Speaker
strength sessions a week. But both of those strength sessions are whole body sessions. You are going to be targeting the same muscle groups twice in a week instead of once in a week. Whereas if you do two strength sessions and one is an upper body session and one is a lower body session, you're targeting muscles once in a week.
00:21:33
Speaker
So, with whole body workouts, there can be redundancy in a week. That doesn't mean that both of those workouts have to be the same workout, right? They might just have the same movements targeted or the same category of primary exercises.
00:21:50
Speaker
On Tuesday you do a squat, and on Thursday you do a lunge. Those are your squat slash lunge category, otherwise known by the way as knee dominant. And then on that Tuesday you do your deadlifts, but then on your Thursday you do your your loaded bridges, your glute bridges, whatever it is.
00:22:11
Speaker
Those are both hinges, so you hit those major lower body food groups, but you did different exercises, but in both cases, your quads were targeted twice in a week, your glutes and hamstrings were targeted twice a week. There might have been more emphasis on the glutes in one of those hinges and more on the hamstrings in the other hinge.
00:22:34
Speaker
Yes, they're different, but you're still stimulating those muscles twice a week rather than once a week. This is why I like full body. And then if you're working out three, four times a week, you still work full body, but you can choose even a wider variety of exercises from your categories. Or maybe you have a day where you're doing mostly accessory exercises or you're sprinkling in some more accessory exercises.
00:22:59
Speaker
in addition to doing those primary exercises because you're just working out more frequently. You have more time devoted in the week to workout. This also eliminates the possibility that you would have to go an entire week without training a muscle group because, say, something comes up.
00:23:17
Speaker
if you're doing a upper lower body split and but you keep getting interrupted your workout keeps falling by the wayside on those days when you plan to do lower body so you end up for a week or two or three in a row only doing upper body. This whole body approach helps you avoid ending up you know missing whole muscle groups in a week. Okay tip number five
00:23:45
Speaker
Once you have chosen the movements you're going to train, you've decided how many movements you can do. You have selected your primary exercises, maybe if that's all you have time to focus on. And you have put it together in kind of a whole body fashion. The fifth tip is now you've got to decide which exercises are you going to do first.
00:24:13
Speaker
And then which exercises are you going to do last? I think of this in two ways. One is I follow the rules of ordering exercises. So this isn't the topic of exercise prescription because it has to do with
00:24:33
Speaker
putting the exercises that we need to be most energy rich to be able to do first in a workout, like we're the most energy rich after the warmup, right? Everybody is the most strong and energy rich right after the warmup. So it would make sense that we would want to program particular exercises that might demand more energy, more skill, more focus first, right?
00:24:59
Speaker
So, I like to follow these rules and I'll share with you what these rules are, although it might be a topic for another episode. The second reason that you want to have an idea of what you're going to do first, second, third, fourth, fifth, whatever, is that if you're like me, you never know when you are going to have to stop your workout because
00:25:19
Speaker
God only knows who might be needing your help or attention if you're working out from home. Maybe you forgot the plumber was scheduled to come and oops, now you have to cut your workout short. Maybe you're at the gym and you wanted to do this exercise, but the machines are not available, whatever it is.
00:25:41
Speaker
want to know which exercise you're doing first because it's a little bit like triage. Rules for exercise order are first you want to start with those multi-joint exercises because they work more muscle mass and so they demand more energy you will fatigue quicker. Another rule is that if you are using power exercises in your workout like if you are doing
00:26:07
Speaker
ballistic kettlebell swings, perhaps, or if you're doing something like a clean, like an Olympic weightlifting, you know, power clean or snatch. These are velocity based moves that you would program before the traditional slow pace, slow tempo weightlifting exercises. Okay.
00:26:31
Speaker
Another third rule is program those movements that are a little bit more complex that require more skill before moves that are less complex and require less skill.
00:26:44
Speaker
Um, so I would say like an example of this, um, for me would be, okay, if I'm going to do a single leg deadlift and then I'm going to do a squat. Okay. Both are lower body. Both are primary. They're both multi-joint. The single leg deadlift though is a lot more technically challenging than the squat. So I'll do the single leg deadlift first. Now, all of these rules are.
00:27:13
Speaker
meant to be broken, like basically all rules, right? So you just can use them in the beginning as guideposts, as guidelines. So you're using this exercise order to decide what to do first, second, third, fourth, last, but you're also going, okay, but what do I really want to make sure I get in today before I'm interrupted if you are the kind of person who tends to be interrupted a lot? Let's review. Okay, let's
Recap of Key Tips for Choosing Strength Exercises
00:27:35
Speaker
review the five tips. We'll just rattle them off.
00:27:38
Speaker
These are my five tips for choosing the best exercise for strength, especially if you're busy and especially if you get overwhelmed by the number, the sheer number of choices out there. Okay, so number one is train movements, not muscles. So think about movements. Two is decide how many exercises you're gonna do in a session. You're going to kind of estimate like how much time is gonna take me to complete
00:27:59
Speaker
the sets of this exercise. How much time do I have to work out? And then you choose your exercises from there. Number three is focus on primary exercises, especially if your time is limited. So there are some days where I can only do two exercises. So I take those multi-joint upper body pulls and I take those multi-joint hinges. And that's it. I call it a day. I do an upper body, lower body.
00:28:23
Speaker
Number four is to train full body. This actually helps you determine what exercises to do because you know that if you only have this amount of time but you're working full body, you can maybe only choose a few or one exercise from each of the main categories.
00:28:42
Speaker
that actually eliminates choices because you can't do three upper body pulls. You really can only do one realistically if this is going to be a whole body workout. And then number five, put the exercises in a logical order, not only to maximize the benefits of the workout so that you are prepared for those maybe more energy demanding, more technically
00:29:06
Speaker
challenging or maybe faster speed-based movements at the beginning right after the warmup, but also to triage in the event that you are often interrupted and end up not having as much time for your session as you thought.
00:29:22
Speaker
I hope that this rapid fire list of tips around selecting the best strength exercises has been helpful. A note to you listeners that you can check out show notes for references that you might find helpful to compliment this episode. You can also visit the Movement Logic website.
00:29:46
Speaker
To get on our mailing list, to be in the know about sales on our tutorials, which often do involve strength wisdom and strength exercises and strength training advice.
00:30:02
Speaker
And then you can also watch the video version of this episode so that you can see what I look like talking to myself in my basement. Because if that doesn't sound interesting to you, I don't know what will. And then finally, thank you for joining us. If you can please like, slash, I think the correct term is subscribe, subscribe to this podcast and rate and review us.
00:30:30
Speaker
in iTunes, it's very helpful and we would very much appreciate it. And then join us again next week for more movement logic and more strong opinions, loosely held.