These are the 3 most overrated exercises to build muscle (with superior alternatives)

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:12 #1 Deadlifts

05:33 My Online PT Course

05:58 #2 Rows

10:50 #3 Cable Crossovers

14:11 Outro

Transcript:

These are the top 3 most overrated exercises to build muscle. If you do any of these exercises in your program you won’t make any gains any more for the rest of your life. Period.

#1: Deadlifts. I know, I know, they are part of the big three, but just because they are powerlifts doesn’t mean they are great tools to build muscle mass. They are powerlifts mostly because they are good tests of strength. But to build muscle mass, they have a number of significant shortcomings. Specifically, deadlifts, traditional powerlifting deadlifts at least, are very concentric dominant. That means you start from a dead stop and you pull the weight up and you are performing a shortening muscle contraction without a stretch reflex to potentiate it. The stretch reflex increases muscle activity, and research conclusively shows that performing concentric only muscle contractions is inferior to performing exercises that have an eccentric component as well, in which the muscle also lengthens.

Muscles grow in response to mechanical tension. Mechanical tension, active tension and passive tension have higher potential during eccentric muscle contractions. During the eccentric phase of movement you can experience higher passive tension, in part because of the titin elements that essentially get spring loaded, and muscles can produce higher active muscle tension during eccentric contractions as well. During the eccentric phase of the movement actin-myosin cross-bridges, which are basically the bridges that form to help a muscle contract and shorten and produce force, they can be cleaved mechanically instead of having to be built biochemically, and that’s part of the reason you are stronger and you could lift more weight lowering it, then you can lift it in addition to not having to resist gravity as much, because it’s literally a case of the muscle actually being stronger and being able to produce more force, not just you being able to lower more weights than you can lift.

Now, in theory, you could perform deadlifts and just lower the weight as well and gently set it on the floor, act like the floor is made of glass. In practice, many people don’t do this, and even if they try it can be injurious anecdotally. And the last part of the movement in particular is where most people struggle, even performing the movement, and that is probably the most important part. Even if you completely set the weight down on the floor you don’t have a stretch reflex and you lose the tension at that point of the movement, which again, is one of the most important parts of the movement, because you reach the longest muscle lengths, and you are now transitioning from the eccentric to the concentric phase, where you would normally get a stretch reflex that helps with muscle activity.

So even if you are lowering the weight, you’re not lowering as much weight as you would be if this was a dynamic movement in which the eccentric phase and the stretch reflex helps you with the concentric phase. You will always be limited by your concentric strength during a deadlift, more so than during other exercises that don’t have a dead stop in the hardest part of the movement. The second major limitation of traditional deadlifts to build muscle is that the range of motion is arbitrarily limited by the radius of a 45 lb plates, or whatever plates you are using. You would like to go deeper and you could do something like a deficit deadlift and it would be a little bit better, but even then, if you look at the ranges of motion of all the joints that you are targeting, what happens with a deadlift, especially compared to something like Romanian deadlift, is that you involve the quadriceps, but even if you are doing a deficit deadlift, the quads don’t get to near maximum muscle lengths. And as a result the hamstrings also don’t reach maximum muscle lengths.

Basically, by involving the quads you make the exercise a little bit better for the quads, but still not great, and also a little bit worse for the hamstrings and probably the glutes as well. All of the upper body musculature is contracting only isometrically, so while those muscles will grow, it’s probably not ideal, especially because these isometric contractions are performed at medium to short muscle lengths. Essentially, that lift is a jack of all trades exercise, master of none. You will train a lot of muscle groups, to some extent they will grow, it’s viable, you can get jacked doing deadlifts, but it’s not optimal.

So what I recommend for bodybuilding purposes is that you separate the quads work and the posterior chain work. Romanian deadlifts are a great exercise that don’t suffer any of the limitations of being concentric dominant, or having a limited range of motion. Romanian that lifts, therefore, are basically superior to traditional deadlifts from the floor for every muscle group except the quads. And for the quads deadlifts are not that great to begin with, so you’re not missing out much. So I recommend you do separate quads work and you do something like Romanian deadlifts or other type hip changes ,depending on if you want to involve the upper body. If you don’t want to involve the grip or the traps, then you can do good mornings. And if you don’t want to involve the back at all and the upper body in general, then you could do other hip hinges like 45 degree hypers or pull throughs where the upper body stimulus is significantly reduced.

Now, while I’m hitting on deadlifts, I will stand up for deadlifts and say that’s the most common reason that deadlifts are avoided for bodybuilding purposes, which is so supposedly that they fry the CNS, the central nervous system is not supported by scientific research. Multiple studies have shown that deadlifts are no harder to recover from, and induce no more neuromuscular fatigue than squats and bench presses. Deadlifts can definitely beat you up a lot, but it’s not the case that your nervous system is being fried or anything like that. I think it’s just high mental effort and possibly some connective tissue stress that makes you feel kind of stiff and can induce pain because you are training a whole lot of muscle mass at the same time during exercise that’s relatively technical, and you can definitely mess up quite badly and get injured if you do something wrong.

So the mental stress, the anxiety and the focus required in addition to the cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory stress is relatively high compared to other exercises. But physically, for your muscles, deadlifts are not uniquely hard to recover from. In that sense, though you could make the argument that deadlifts have a poor stimulus to fatigue ratio because the muscular strain is evidently no better than for other exercises, but the strain on connective tissues, potentially or at least mentally, is greater compared to a lot of other exercises.

Overrated exercise #2 is rows. Rows are generally regarded as a great back exercise, but just like with deadlifts, when you try to train all of these muscles together, you end up with an exercise that is a jack of all trades, master of none. You stimulate all the muscles to some extent, but you simulate none of them optimally. If you’re trying to teach people fitness and you don’t want to teach them functional anatomy, it’s very useful to teach them to do a horizontal and a vertical pulling exercise and call that your day. But if you’re a serious lifter that wants to optimize muscle growth, you cannot design your program based on things like a vertical pull. A vertical pull doesn’t mean anything in a biomechanical sense, and one vertical pull can be completely different in stimulus from a different one.

So what do the rows train?

Rows train the biceps, the traps, specifically the middle and the lower traps and the lats, and depending on the type of row, you may also involve the erector spinae, the lower back. Finally, rows train the posterior deltoids the rear part of the shoulder. The problem is that none of these muscle groups experience high muscle tension at long muscle lengths during the execution of most rows, like dumbbell rows, barbell rows, or standard cable rows. The resistance curve during a row is essentially the opposite of our strength curve, which is why you feel the exercise in the shortened position.

When you are pulling the weight and the weight is very close to you, at some point you can no longer complete a full repetition, you can no longer touch the weights to your chest, for example, but you could do still many repetitions with the weight almost touching your chest. And that is usually an indication that there is a mismatch between the strength curve of you and the resistance curve of the exercise. In fact, in the most lengthened position, when your arms are outstretched in front of you, or your single arm, if you’re using a dumbbell row, in that position only the traps are actually experiencing high muscle tension. And the traps are probably not trained maximally at that point either, because you are not using as much weight as you could, during a shrug because the shortened position is what’s limiting the movement. Because the lats can not hyper extend the shoulder. So the lats are a primary mover up until the point that your elbow gets in line with your body.

When you keep pulling and the elbow gets behind the body, at that point, the lats lose leverage. Which is also why technically in the bottom position of a bench press the lats slightly aid actually in helping you press the weight up. The lats, just like any muscle group, bring the origin and the insertion closer together. When your elbow is behind your body that means that the first little bit of the movement the lats actually help you pull the elbow back in line with the body. After that point the lats are again what you could consider a pulling muscle group.

Because of this you face a dramatic decrease in your strength as your elbow gets close to your body and you want to pull the elbow behind the body. After that point it’s mostly the rear delts and the traps that are performing the movement. Those are a relatively weak muscle groups, which is why you are much weaker in that position. As a result, the other muscle groups are also limited, like the traps by how much weight you can lift because the other muscles are serving as a limiting factor. And as for the biceps, rows are also not great for the biceps.

We have one study actually comparing dumbbell rows to biceps curls, and I found the dumbbell rows only trained the biceps about half as well. Muscle growth was about half as much doing a dumbbell row as it was doing a biceps curl. I think most people don’t do rows for their biceps anyway, but it’s good to know that again, you are involving another muscle group, but you are not training it optimally with this exercise. So generally I’m not a big fan of rows in bodybuilding type programs. If you do a row then usually I recommend it is something like a high row where you specifically take the lats and mostly the biceps out of it, and you really focus on the rear delts and the traps. In that sense it can be a good exercise. Even then, though, I recommend that you also include some exercises like side lying reverse flys to train these muscle groups, specifically doing your delts in this case, at long muscle lengths.

For the lats I think isolation exercises like lat prayers are unmatched, but if you are doing a compound exercise, I like doing more vertical type exercises like pull downs, pull ups, and similar exercises like that. You can lean back during the movement, which is actually beneficial. It might and do some eccentric overloading, and it also involves the rear delts and the traps. So you get most of the benefits that you would get from rows, but you train the lats a lot better and the resistance curve matches your strength curve a lot better.

So you just got higher total force production and mechanical tension throughout a larger range of motion. For horizontal type rows, I somewhat like motorcycle rows and exercises in which you lean forward a lot, like Arnold Schwarzenegger style rows where you lean forward a lot and you also involve the erector spinae, actively flexing the spine. I like that for high repetitions sometimes, and in that case, you are actively also targeting the erector spinae and you get more stretch in the lats because the leaning forward motion increases the stretch in your lats significantly.

You can also do diagonal type exercises, yes, those exist. Everyone’s training horizontal and vertical pulling exercises, but few people do diagonal ones and they’re actually in many aspects better than horizontal ones. Again, because you increase the range of motion for the lats, and the lats reach longer muscle lengths. These exercises will generally give you a more targeted, optimized stimulation of the target musculature, in contrast to rows which kind of train the whole back and a little bit of the biceps without training any of these muscle groups very well. Again, you can absolutely get jacked doing rows, it’s just not perfectly efficient.

Overrated exercise #3 is cable crossovers. Specifically high to low or low to high cable crossovers. These are very common in most gyms, but they just don’t make a lot of sense. Research finds that doing exercises with a high incline or decline just takes one of the parts of the pecs out of the movement, as opposed to emphasizing that part of the pecs. So if you do an incline press, for example, it’s not that you train the upper pecs more than with a flat press, it’s just that you train the lower pecs less. Biomechanically that makes perfect sense, and I explain the biomechanics of this in detail in a previous video I did that you can see here or here or wherever my editor puts it.

The implication for this for crossovers is that when you do a low to high crossover, you are effectively turning the fly, crossover is essentially a fly, into a very incline type fly. The result of that is that the exercise is more of a front delt exercise, and yes, some upper chest exercise, than a true full pec exercise. You take the lower pecs out of it, but you don’t make the exercise much better for the upper pecs, and you significantly involve the front delts more.

Now, if you’re doing a front raise – front raises would be a serious contender to be on this list of overrated exercises, especially for men, because most people overtrain the hell out of their front delts and they neglect the sides and the rear delts. There’s actually some research showing the bodybuilders routinely have overdeveloped front delts relative to their side and rear delts, and that’s likely because most people just do a lot more volume for the front delts. You train the front delts with most of your shoulder and chest work, so they don’t need additional isolation work on top of that in most programs. Just as bad and even more popular is doing crossovers from high to low. I think part of the reason for this is that people don’t have adjustable cable pulleys, but in this case, you’re turning it into a very decline fly.

The decline fly is even worse than an incline fly, in my view, because the upper pecs are typically lagging in individuals. Many people want to emphasize their upper pecs more and the lower backs are not the issue. So when you do essentially an isolation lower pec exercise it doesn’t make a lot of sense. And it’s not even a great lower pec exercise because you cannot get a full stretch in practice, or at least many people don’t do the exercise so that they get a good stretch in the lengthened position, because when you let the weights go up in the top position, you’re essentially doing abduction with the shoulders in an entirely rotated position. Many people shoulders don’t like this, so people don’t go all the way up with their elbows coming above shoulder height, which would be necessary to get a full stretch in the pecs. Therefore, I think in most scenarios you’re best off with a horizontal type fly movement like a Bayesian fly, dumbbell fly or some type of pec deck movement.

Research finds that the horizontal type fly movement or a pec deck stimulates equal growth in the lower and the upper pecs. So there’s no need to do extreme decline or incline variations. You can experiment with the angle somewhat and do some variety that way, but I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to go really high to low or low to high. And if you only have high and low cable towers and you want to do a standard fly type movement, you can do it in the following ways. If you have only the low pulleys you can put a bench in between them and do the exercise lying, performing a lying cable fly. If you only have the top pulley available or you’re too lazy to get a bench, then you have to lean over a lot. You want to get about a 90 degree angle between your body and your arms, a 90 degree angle of shoulder flexion. When you are doing that, you are doing the equivalent of horizontal standing fly. But this means that you have to bend over a lot. In fact, your torso has to be bent about 90 degrees, so most people do more like a 30 degree bend. You have to lean way the hell over. Bend over, boy… No. Let’s not make a joke there…

So there you have it. 3 very popular exercises that I think have almost universally superior alternatives available to people that want to maximize muscle growth in the most efficient manner. If you like this type of evidence based content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe. And if you want to learn everything there is to know about building muscle, then check out my online PT certification.