We are trying to deliver the most amount of good for the most amount of people in the safest way possible.

Which is the safest option that’s still going to produce fantastic results.

Safe, effective, efficient.

And that’s what you see every time you step in an exercise coach studio and you go through a workout.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, We will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode.

Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. We are in a series entitled Principles of Exercise Design. In this series, we’re breaking down various components that make up what we call whole effort exercise. We’re discussing those different components and we’re sharing why they’re important. Today’s episode is on exercise sequencing and selection. What exercises will a coach select for clients to do?

why will they select those, and some of the factors we should consider when it comes to the order in which we perform those exercises. So, Dr. Fisher is with me today and he has done quite a bit of research on this topic, so let’s start, Dr. Fisher, by describing sort of You know, why, if you walk into an exercise coach studio, are you going to see a small handful of machines available in order to perform various exercises? Why aren’t there more or why aren’t there hundreds of possible exercises? Why are we narrowing it down to the few that we are focusing on in a whole effort exercise session?

Yeah, that’s a really important question. And there’s a lot of people listening who maybe are unfamiliar with an exercise coach studio and are unfamiliar with the fact that it is narrowed down to what I would say is the essential and most efficacious exercises. You know, there aren’t free weights and dumbbells and kettlebells and battle ropes and sleds and things that you might see in a typical commercial gym. One of the things that I love about the exercise coach about the philosophy and about the application of strength training is really all the fat has been trimmed off. It’s down to the most effective exercises. which are also the safest exercises.

So you’re never going to have somebody doing a free weight barbell back squat. And that’s purely because a barbell back squat, while it’s a great exercise, has a higher risk compared to a leg press. So why would you choose a higher risk exercise compared to a lower risk exercise, and so forth. So really, the exercise coaches has taken that approach throughout the entire kind of menu of exercise choices. And I said, OK, which is the safest option that’s still going to produce fantastic results? And that’s what you say every time you step in an exercise coach studio and you go through a workout.

Right. We always use the three phrases safe, effective, efficient. We are trying to deliver the most amount of good for the most amount of people in the safest way possible. And so the selection of exercises we are doing are known to be the safest, but the most effective So we’re going to talk a little bit more about that. Why are there so effective in some of the exercises that we choose?

So, you know, Dr. Fisher, what factors should somebody keep in mind when it comes to kind of the selection of exercises they do in a given workout and the sequencing of those exercises? Yeah. So when we start to talk about exercise order and exercise sequence, there’s a few things that we can consider. So most of the research, and as you mentioned at the start, I’ve done a few studies around this, most of the research is considered kind of strength or muscle size adaptations, so strength or hypertrophy adaptations in exercise order. And we’ve looked at things like pre -exhaustion, which is the idea of performing a single joint exercise immediately before a multi -joint, or post -exhaustion, which is performing a single joint immediately after a multi -joint exercise. We also looked at whether it makes any difference to perform all multi -joint exercises at the start of a workout followed by all single joint exercises later.

And the reality is it seems to make absolutely no difference to someone’s chronic adaptations to resistance training. So after 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, it really doesn’t matter whether the exercise order was multi -joint followed by single joint, or pre -exhaustion or post -exhaustion or any other derivative or whether it varied or so forth. The strength and the muscle size adaptations are really very, very similar and not discernibly different. And that’s the key thing. Now, of course, all the health adaptations that we’ve previously talked about on the show are attainable irrespective of exercise order as well. So the key thing I would say is, are we including multi -joint exercises, which we know are going to give us bigger bang for our buck?

Are we including them somewhere in the workout? But we’re still going to get our health adaptations. So that the only other factor really to consider is our perceptive or our subjective experience. So If I go into an exercise coach location, I get put through a workout with the leg press at the start of the workout, then the strength index that I see on the screen, the force output that I have through those repetitions will be higher than if I go in and I do the leg press at the very end of the workout. And that, of course, is completely natural because by the end of the workout, I’m in a state of fatigue.

My muscles are tired, they’re depleted of energy. I’m potentially centrally tired as well, so there’s a central fatigue and so forth. So we know a workout is metabolically demanding. And so by the end of a workout, we’re weaker than we were at the start of the workout. You know, we’ve talked about that previously. So anybody going in and engaging in a workout should expect to see that in their last exercise, they are not going to have the same acute performance as if they did that exercise at the start of a workout.

But the reality is that it doesn’t make any difference to the longer term outcomes. Now, on a personal note, I find it much easier to perform big multi -joint compound exercises at the start of a workout. Things like a leg press, a chest press, or a row exercise where there is potentially more load or potentially higher force output because there is a lot more muscle mass involved in those, in those exercises. I find it easier to do them at the start of a workout than I do at the end of a workout. But I’m well aware that I will get the same adaptations.

wherever in the workout they are. So it really doesn’t matter, but there might be some individual kind of tastes over where certain exercises lie. Right. Yeah. We often explain to clients if they are doing a leg press last, for example, and their overall performance is lower than their previous, you know, some of their previous performance data. We will be quickly able to point out, well, this is the last exercise you’ve done today, and you’re already very fatigued, and so a lot of these other data points you may have been

this exercise first. It doesn’t mean you’re weaker. It means that that’s all you could give today, and that’s still a win. So you brought up a couple really good points, Dr. Fisher, in what you were just explaining. In terms of motivation, people feel stronger. So I heard you say doing those multi -joint exercises compound movements at the beginning of a workout tends to feel better because we’re refreshed.

And then the other point that you’re making, too, is that, you know, they provide a big bang for our buck because of the large muscles involved in those. Can you break that down a little bit more? So why is doing compound exercises involving larger, more amounts of muscle mass? Why does that create a bigger bang for our buck? Yeah, absolutely. So when we do a leg press exercise, then we can compare it to multiple single joint exercises.

So for example, we’re training the gluteals, which you can do with hip abduction. We’re training the quadriceps, which you can do with knee extension, and we’re training the hamstrings, which you can do with a leg curl exercise. So you can still train all of those muscles, albeit individually. So you’re kind of getting The same effect of three exercises all rolled into one in the leg press. So you’re training all three of those muscle groups, the quadriceps, the hamstrings, and the glute shields. But there’s the added bonus that we’re also training our neuromuscular system or our coordinative system to be able to recruit those muscles in the right order to perform a whole movement.

So for example, a leg press is analogous to walking up a flight of stairs or rising from a chair or so forth. So we want to be able to kind of coordinate our body to be able to perform those tasks on a day -to -day basis.

We want our quadriceps and our hamstrings to know that they don’t contract at exactly the same time in the same way, they contract slightly differently. So we’re kind of training our body to do that when we do those multi -joint exercises. And in that sense, You could argue that multi -joint exercises are more functional than a single joint exercise.

Seldom in the real world will we ever only contract our quadriceps or only contract our hamstrings or biceps or so forth. That’s really interesting. So there is a natural order in which our body wants to recruit muscle groups. Can you say more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So, for example, if you go for a run or if you go for a walk, then our quadriceps contract during knee extension and our hamstrings are contracting during knee flexion or hip extension.

So, if you consider a runner, let’s say a sprinter or a soccer player, well, typically they experience a higher degree of, or as a population group, they might experience a higher degree of hamstring injuries. And the reason that they do that is because of neural fatigue rather than muscular fatigue. So what’s actually happening is their quadriceps and their hamstrings are contracting at exactly the same time because of neural fatigue and the quadriceps being stronger are winning and therefore the hamstrings are losing and therefore the injury is sustained to the hamstring. So when we train a multi -joint movement like a leg press, we are training the coordination of recruitment for the muscle fibers of our quadriceps to extend our knee, but our hamstrings to extend our hip rather than for our hamstrings to flex the knee.

So there’s this coordinative process that occurs during a multi -joint movement. The same occurs in a chest press, a row exercise as well. You know, they’re much more similar to what we would perform in a real -world environment in pressing or in pulling movements compared to just training the biceps or just training the triceps. Okay, thank you for breaking that down. That makes sense.

What my takeaway from this episode is, you know, there is a big hormonal and metabolic response that we’re after from the workout itself.

And we’re going to get that by focusing on working hard, the largest muscle groups in our body. So I guess, you know, as a wrap up to this episode, so why can you describe a little bit about sort of the response that we’re going for from the exercises we’re selecting? What is the intended outcome of a whole effort exercise that is a total body workout, you know, designed to really challenge every muscle group that we’re doing on a given day. What is the ultimate goal of that session? Yeah, so our goal whenever we engage in resistance training is any movement or any external load that’s moving is always secondary. What we’re trying to achieve is muscle fiber recruitment and ultimately muscle fiber fatigue.

So we’re trying to get the muscle fibers within our muscle to contract. we’re trying to stimulate contraction. And by contracting the muscle fibers, we’re stimulating adaptation or by contracting them forcefully, we’re prompting adaptation. So we’re prompting them to grow stronger, we’re prompting them to release myokines, we’re prompting them to grow bigger. So muscular contraction is the key thing that we’re aiming for. And as a and as a product, we want muscle fatigue.

Now, once we’ve contracted muscles forcefully, we have to have energy to be able to do that. So we’re going to use the sugar that’s within our muscles to be able to contract them. So we want glycogen depletion. So we’re going to use that sugar to be able to forcefully contract these muscles. We’re going to empty that muscle of sugar so that the next time we consume food, we have somewhere to store that sugar as well.

And then, of course, the key thing that we see with the isokinetic devices at the exercise coach with the exerbotics pieces is high load eccentric component. So, we have a supramaximal effectively a super maximal eccentric component. So we’re about 40 % stronger in the eccentric compared to the concentric component.

And by having an isokinetic device where we can resist a heavier load than we can push, we actually recruit, we preferentially recruit type two muscle fibers to adapt and they’re the ones that adapt to become stronger and bigger.

And they’re the ones that we just can’t stimulate properly with a free weight or a traditional resistance machine. So, you know, there’s three key components, which I think we’ll probably talk about another time as well. Our muscle fatigue, our eccentric component, and our glycogen depletion. Perfect. Do you have any other comments about exercise sequencing or exercise selection, you know, for trainers out there or for clients out there to leave listeners with today. Well, the only thing that I would say is that there are, you know, almost an infinite number of exercises available for people to choose from, but there should always be a risk to reward ratio that’s considered with any exercise choices.

You know, I’ve published papers on some high -level athletes who got injured and ended up having career -ending injuries because of you know, poor exercise selection in a gym effectively.

So, we really can make poor choices.

if we just go to the gym and ignorantly start to move weight around.

So, of course, supervision is key because it’s going to guide us through the right exercises and it’s going to guide us through them with correct technique. But ultimately, there are some poor things within a gym. So, I guess the best way to put it is there’s no right way to do a wrong thing. That makes a lot of sense. Yes. If, uh, if exercise has been intimidating to you, we meet people every day who, you know, complain that they have sort of stepped foot into, you know, large seas of fitness equipment before and have that intimidation factor on, I’m not sure if I know how to do this.

I don’t want to do this incorrectly and injure myself. And so, you know, what we aim to do is really create an atmosphere that is very safe and dignified. All exercises are performed on. equipment that is going to stabilize your body so that you’re reducing that risk of moving wrong and holding yourself in the air and tightening something up how you shouldn’t be. It’s really, really removing a lot of the individual downfalls that people experience when it comes to their form so that we really can focus on the muscle group itself. and kind of eliminate all those other risk factors.

And so if that is appealing to you, if you really are looking to gain strength and you haven’t really been able to successfully strength train on your own, we encourage you to check out an exercise coach studio. We’ll see you next time on this series of principles of exercise design. And until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything .

com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. episode. Here’s to you and your best health.