Autoregulated Exercise Selection
On the topic of rotating exercises more frequently, a 2017 study
compared trained lifters who had to use a fixed combination of three
exercises for a given muscle group paired with a specific loading zone
(e.g. squat, bench press, etc. @6–8RM, leg press, incline DB press, etc.
@12–14RM, and leg extension, cable fly, etc. @18–20RM) to a group that
got to choose what exercise they wanted to perform for each session,
with each loading zone. Interestingly, the autoregulated exercise
selection group made more upper-body strength gains and gained
more lean mass than the group with a fixed selection [15].
What this tells us, is that trained lifters have some insight into which
movements are best suited for their body, seem to work best when
paired with specific rep ranges, and most importantly it tells us that
for hypertrophy purposes, it’s okay to switch things up within reason.
But what is reasonable? Well, the lifters in the autoregulated group still
trained each movement 4–14 times over the 9-week study. Meaning,
they didn’t switch it up so often as to lose movement proficiency,
and a large part of why they probably gained more lean mass was
because they selected compound exercises more often, and isolation
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movements less often, resulting in probably more volume, frequency
and stimulus per muscle group than the fixed order group.
How does this translate to you? Well, for hypertrophy goals, your main
compound lifts which you use to gauge progress (at the very least a
upper-body push, upper-body pull, squat and hinge pattern) should
remain in your program for the length of multiple mesocycles, up to
a full macrocycle, but isolation movements can be rotated workout
to workout or mesocycle to mesocycle. For the goal of strength, you
can basically apply the same principle to all non-main lift movements
(squat, bench and deadlift patterns).
Efficiency: Compound vs. Isolation
Now that we have established some guidelines for how many exercises to
perform based on your primary goal, and how often they can be rotated,
the question becomes how do you actually decide which exercises to do?
With exercises that involve multiple joints, you can train more muscles
at the same time, accumulating volume for multiple muscle groups
simultaneously. Thus, it is efficient to include compound exercises at
the core of our programs. Additionally, compound barbell exercises
allow you to use heavier loads, which is important so that you can track
small relative changes in strength over time to measure progress as we
discussed in the previous chapter.
However, recall that the 2014 study showed that training with Smith
machine squats exclusively, led to uneven growth in the quads (or
perhaps just less growth and this only showed up statistically for a few
heads of the quad). Thus, for those focused on maximizing proportional
muscular development as their primary goal, it would be a smart idea
to ensure a broader exercise selection for balanced development. To
