The latest trend in strength training that’s spread like wildfire is “movement optimism” – that is, focusing on making every exercise and every rep as biomechanically “optimal” as possible. On its face, this sounds great. Time is precious, so let’s waste no time and try to get as big a return on our efforts as we can.
You’ll hear fitness influencers talk in “do this, not that” terms about certain exercises, equipment and training protocols based on them being optimal or suboptimal. In order to drive views and clicks, these monologues are often alarmist and suggest that you’re wasting your time at best and an idiot at worst if you do ANYTHING that’s suboptimal.
There’s one huge problem: movement optimism assumes that we unequivocally know the “best” way to perform each and every exercise. Optimists lean heavily on research that makes bold assertions about anatomy, biomechanics, sets and reps, etc. As someone who spent about three years immersed in exercise science research and academia (which is not a lot, but heaps more than many optimist thought leaders) to go along with over a decade of coaching REAL people, I feel like I can share my thoughts on the movement optimism trend and make at least a bit of sense.
Training Studies Have Limited Application
When I was in grad school, our exercise science professors cringed any time anyone pitched a training study idea. Training studies are notoriously hard to design, control and execute.
First, it’s hard to recruit subjects from a wide array of populations, so you’re usually studying college-aged people with limited training experience. The cliche is that ANYTHING will work for untrained individuals, so you’ll often get an inflated sense of the efficacy of whatever training method you’re studying. Also, college students are notorious for not taking care of themselves outside the gym. Between school, work and, ahem… extracurricular activities that may impair one’s sleep and recovery, you’re unlikely to get a clear picture of whats actually optimal.
Next, it’s hard to carry out the actual training to a high degree of quality. Untrained individuals typically have inconsistent lifting technique, and in my experience, studies are usually administered by graduate assistants who also are not high-level lifters or coaches, so they’re knowledge of training and they’re ability to coach is limited. When you have sloppy lifting and sloppy coaching, results are stunted.
Finally, the results of any study have to be considered for their real-world application. Research-savvy people understand that your results are only a representation of the population you studied, and in the case of training studies, your subjects are narrow representation in terms of age, sex and lifting experience. If your study consisted of 8 college-age males with 1-2 years of training experience, you can’t say that your results apply broadly to anyone and everyone; just college bros who have lifted a little. That’s not particularly helpful to most people.
All this is to say that it’s hard to conduct high-quality research that has real-world application to advanced lifters. Oftentimes, research is playing catch-up to the methods that have already been vetted by high-level lifters out in the real world. If we always relied on research to guide our training decisions, we’d be sitting around twiddling our thumbs instead of in the gym smashing weights.
EMG is a Messy Measurement
Electromyography (EMG) is a common way to measure muscle activity in research. There are two main types:
- Surface EMG: attaching electrodes to the skin over the belly of a muscle
- Intramuscular EMG: inserting a needle into the muscle
Surface EMG is the most common method because it’s less invasive to the subject and uses less expensive equipment, but the data is less reliable.
EMG testing requires the subject to perform a maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) where they push/pull as hard as possible against an immovable object to theoretically “max out” their muscle activation. Then, they test different conditions (e.g., exercises, sets and reps, etc.) to see how that muscle activation compares to the MVC.
EMG data is messy. It relies on several factors:
- Effort: if the test subject gives anything less than a full effort, the data is skewed (and most people suck at giving a full effort)
- Joint angle of MVC: the study designer makes an assumption that one specific joint angle is going to give the best MVC, when most strength training occurs through a full range of motion
Having helped collect a LOT of EMG data in grad school, I can confidently say that it’s not a reliable way to make confident statements on the efficacy of certain exercises. But that doesn’t stop people from hailing EMG data as gospel. There’s one well-known coach who specializes in derrière training who conducted “research” in his garage using sloppily-designed methods in order to show that his special exercise was the best. His MVC was an unweighted exercise with NO external resistance, done on himself. I do believe this individual has improved his methods and held himself to a higher standard since then, but it shows that you can build a legion of loyal followers using pseudoscience because most people don’t understand research study design.
Finally, just because an exercise shows more muscle activation via EMG doesn’t mean it’s a better exercise. Any exercise taken to muscular failure should theoretically induce maximal activation of that muscle (as long as the exercise allows the target muscle to fail first). An exercise with higher EMG readings might reach failure FASTER, making it a more efficient choice, but you can choose any exercise you like as long as you train with the right intensity.
“Suboptimal” Doesn’t Mean Zero Benefit
Movement optimists often speak in absolutes and make it sound like if you pick the “wrong” exercise, you’re getting zero benefit. Common sense tells us this is untrue. Any exercise can have benefits, but there’s a sliding scale of efficiency. To speak in cliches again, avoiding anything but “optimal” exercises is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The most commonly-debated exercise is the lat pulldown. If I have to see another godforsaken lat pulldown tutorial on social media in my lifetime, it’ll be too soon. Every nuance of the exercise gets picked apart, from the angle of the torso, the range of motion, bilateral vs. unilateral… the list goes on. For sake of brevity, I’ll focus just on lat pulldown range of motion to make my point.
A common argument is that when you use a full range of motion on lat pulldowns (letting your arms reach all the way overhead), the lats lose leverage and the pecs take over when you start the concentric part of the movement. Therefore, movement optimists recommend that you cut the range of motion short and not reach all the way up in order to isolate the lats. Let me break down why I think this is silly.
First, research seems to suggest that using a full range of motion leads to greater hypertrophy. Again, research is NOT the be-all, end-all for making training decisions, but a basic anatomy and physiology textbook will tell you that a muscle that is pre-stretched will contract more forcefully. So even if the lats lose some leverage at the top of the movement, by getting a full stretch before contracting the lats, you’ll hit the lats harder, leading to more mechanical tension, which is the number one mechanism for inducing hypertrophy.
And even if the pecs have better leverage at the top of a full-range lat pulldown, what if that stretch DOES lead to more force created by the lats? More isolation of a muscle group doesn’t make for a better exercise. A barbell hip thrust isolates the glutes more than a squat, but a squat is still fundamentally a better glute exercise (despite lots of quad involvement) because it takes the glutes through a full range of motion and creates more mechanical tension in the lengthened position – two essential factors for a good hypertrophy exercise.
Don’t limit yourself on exercise selection or variations in execution because you’re scared of “wasting” your time and energy.
Optimal Effort Trumps Optimal Execution
When it comes down to it, effort is always going to be more important than execution. That doesn’t mean it’s OK to use sloppy technique. And it doesn’t mean that all exercises are equal in terms of their ability to target specific muscles effectively. But it means that at some point, you’ve gotta put your phone down, take your nose out of the research journal and work your ass off.
Fussing around with perfectly-optimized exercises using feather-light weights and stopping miles away from muscular failure won’t get you anywhere. Bodybuilders and powerlifters have been getting strong and huge using “suboptimal” exercises and barebones equipment for decades because they train like maniacs. Pushing your body and mind beyond your preconceived limits is always going to be the number one ingredient for success.
Start focusing on giving your best possible effort on every rep of every set instead of spending all your time searching for the perfect exercise.
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In conclusion, the take home message is the same: lots of exercises and techniques work, as long as you work your ass off. Some exercises and methods are likely more efficient than others, but there’s no need to whittle your exercise selection down to only “optimal” movements in the eyes of the snootiest coaches on social media.
Want to dig more into what actually matters for building muscle? Check out my free Hypertrophy for Powerlifters webinar, which features over an hour of tried-and-true training principles and exercise selection recommendations.