Are You Doing TOO MANY Exercises For Best Muscle Growth?

if you look at your RP hypertrophy app and it says flat dumbbells for four sets and then incline for four you're like this is going to be fucking awesome I love it plug in warm up get it go switch warm up Get It Go and I'm out but if I have four chest exercises on there for you you're going to have to find that new piece of equipment every time after only two sets you guys after two sets you're just getting in you're like yeah man I was feeling great you look at your program you're

like okay that's it I guess I have to go warm up for machine flat press there's an old lady on it you're going to have to warm up for a new machine you're going to set the fucking rack height blah blah blah and then just two sets later you're under your next shit why hey folks Dr Mike here for RP strength I have a question for you are you using the right number of exercises to get the most muscle growth or using the wrong number of exercise and thus you're going to die really soon H

luckily it's not that high stakes but you may be struggling with your muscle growth and you may be wondering does it have something to do with the number of exercises I'm doing because I'm not sure about all this muscle growth training crap and should I be doing five exercises for the same muscle every session should I just be sticking to squats and only squats for a year like that one dude said that's kind of fat but kind of jacked I mean what the hell is going on here let's find out and let's look at the

basic science let's look at some good recommendations you guys can use for choosing exercise number and let's look at some common mistakes so we can learn a little bit from them and not have to make them ourselves all right fundamental science we got four ideas here first is that some muscles not all but some muscles with complex multi-joint actions can benefit from more than one angle of attack because they have slightly different functionality it requires slightly different kinds of exercises to fill in the blanks for example quads and hamstrings both work at the knee and

at the hip so if you only do leg presses for quads you actually never train that middle part of your quad the rectus femoris which is cool and pops out that's only trained if you lean back lay down do a sissy squat or a leg extension with that quad and hip already pre-stretched so if you're only doing press for your quads maybe that's not enough to make the most complete muscle growth possible especially if you plan on competing or something like that of course hamstrings they cross the knee and the hip so if you only

do leg curls or only do hip hinges you're missing out on a function and actually activating some decent amount of muscle that the majority of uh only one movement or the other really does well for that part of the hamstrings it's a complex muscle shoulders I don't like the term shoulders I think it's kind of fucking weird because the anterior deltoid and the your deltoid the front and the rear delt they actually antagonize each other they're completely opposing there is not an exercise really that you can do that hits them both the side delts are

altogether really different and while the front delts get a ton of work from pushing and the side uh rear delts get a ton of work from pulling and back work the side dels need the kind of their own approach altogether so we can't just say like here's a shoulder exercise for shoulders we have to think about it a little bit more in depth than that and of course back One does not simply train the back as the ultimate most complex quote unquote muscle group and it really is a group of muscles at that point we

have at least vertical pulling that needs to be optimized we have horizontal pulling including the pro and refraction of scapula muscles lots of thick ass big muscles in the back do that and if you don't do any kind of rowing you're going to be missing something and of course loaded flexion and extension of the spine because the spinal rectors are huge part of the back and if you just do pull-ups it's not the whole back that's being trained so if you're choosing an exercise for the back you have to think about a little bit more

than just like whatever choose any exercise that you want Point number two on the other hand most muscles don't need more than one to two exercises per session to get their best work why most exercises don't have more than kind of two ways of doing them or uh most muscles don't have more than two approaches exercise design wise that they really need in order to really get their their their best muscle growth in most cases and most muscles grow best per session this is something we'll talk about in in the series later on is they

usually grow best between four and eight working set per session so if you wanted your session for quads to go as well as possible let's say have two sessions of quads per week four to eight sets of quadriceps work working sets forget about warm-ups those are extra in any one workout 48 sets is really getting close to that sweet spot for most people which means if you have each exercise taking roughly four is sets at most well that's it that's two exercises but if you're closer to four sometimes you may be doing three four five

sets for a muscle in any given time I'll get to an example of that later then maybe just one exercise will do just totally fine so it's one to two exercises I'll put it this way and this is something we we'll talk about in a little bit where it's a Folly a mistake people make if you're using four or five exercises for a single muscle in a single session there's a lot of redundancy there and that has downsides of it of its own next related is that most muscles don't need more than two to four

exercises per week to get their optimal growth you're going to train most muscles two to four times per week anyway that's a good idea and if they just have different exercises each time that's cool it's not mandatory you can reuse exercises from earlier in the week later in the week but I highly encourage you to use a different rep range and potentially even a different exercise order so if you did leg presses first on Monday on Thursday maybe do them a second after squats and instead of on Monday doing sets of five to 10 at

a leg press maybe on Thursday you just set a 15 to 20 very very different you want something different almost every time you train with the same week but week to week to week to week it's going to be the same just slightly higher load maybe some different sets maybe slightly higher reps lastly in basic science number four you can do more exercises than just one or two per session or two to four per week per any given muscle group you absolutely can but you have to be aware of the fact that you are reducing

your variation variation is how many exercises for that muscle do you still have left in your bank that are fresh and ready and you haven't been using them and they're not stale and they're Ultra effective they're some of your best if you have five good exercises for your quads which at a decent gym with decent equipment as possible and use all five in one week and thus in one several month period what the hell are you going to use when all of them are stale they ain't nothing else you might have to use exercises that

you hate that aren't that good and spend several weeks resensitizing the old exercises because you overused them but if you only use let's say two to three of the exercises at any one point you can do several months of two to three exercises dump all of those that have gotten stale another several months of two to three exercises dump all those that have gotten stale and guess what your old stale exercises they're feeling fresh and new again because it's been months and months since you've used them again and that way you can recycle and never

have long-term stainless so yes we want to use all the exercises we can in our deployment in our Arsenal but we have to be strategic about how we use them only use them when they're fresh and awesome and when they get stale we have to discard them and if we're using too many exercises that means we're preparing to be stale on everything it's kind of like if you just go out to eat and try every kind of different food in your town in one weekend the next weekend it's like what do you want like I

don't know GNA try everything huh like yep we shouldn't have had shouldn't have gone out eight times in one weekend even though we didn't need to go out we could have done a couple meals at the same place because there's different stuff on the menu we could have looked but no you had to eat at all the restaurants all the time now that all the variation we'll have to wait a few weeks until anything is exciting the thing is in restaurants that's totally fine you just eat at home for a few weeks but it working

out you got to have fresh stimulative variant and exercises ready to go every single time you train and if you just use all of them up in one week you ain't got nothing else to lead on and that's not good all right what do we do for recommendations on that three best recommendations for you guys you want to choose exercises for the week that cover all main muscle functions and areas in most cases that means if you're looking at chest exercises flat SL lower or sorry uh middle lower chest is usually worked while with flat

pressing you can do dips and stuff too but there's a distinct C ular component to the pectoralis which means you need to do some incline work in most cases in the week you'll choose at least one or two movements that's flat pressing and at least one or two movements that's incline pressing to make sure you take care of both of those angle if you're doing hamstrings maybe you'll do a hip hinge stiff leg a deadlift good morning something like that and you might do some kind of leg curl just to check both boxes so for

back you'll do some kind of vertical pulling and probably some kind of horizontal pulling as well now if you're in a fat loss phase you have to make sure to TI all these enal boxes because if you don't train a Subs a Subs segment of muscle in a fat loss phase you're going to reduce that muscle size and that's no good but on maintenance and especially on a muscle gain phase where you're targeting certain parts of your body you don't have to train every part of the muscle every week so for example if you really

need much bigger upper pecs and your lower pecs are pretty good you can do incline pressing only for three months while you gain weight and because you're gaining weight and incline press stimulates the lower packs a little bit you'll get no change in the lower PCS midex will grow a little bit upper PEX will grow a lot see but Dr Mike you literally you don't have any flat or decline pressing movements in the week aren't you going to lose muscle not in a muscle gain phase you won't with that much nutrin and that much General

muscular training happening not a thing to worry about so in specialization phases and muscle gain you don't have to attend to every general part of the muscle that you're training on a fat loss phase yeah you probably do number two in your training in most cases you probably want to use as many distributed compounds as you can there are two types of compound lifts as I've categorized them focused compounds and distributed compounds focused compounds are technically multi-joint lifts but they're really focused on just one uh muscle my best example here is the wide grip bench

technically it's compound right shoulders and elbows are moving but really it only hits or vastly majority hits your pecs and doesn't really hit your triceps much but a close grip bench is a compound movement you have movement at the shoulder joint and elbow joint but the triceps are involved a ton and so are the pecs so you get a really good measure of both if you use a lot of distributed compounds you just don't have to use that many exercises and you get amazing results let me ask you a question what's better to do three

sets of chest flies and then three sets of tricep pushdowns or to do three sets of close grip bench and leave the gym I mean from a time and efficiency and having more exercise variations in the tank for later perspective distributor compounds are King are they King in every situation no but most training reasoning should start with them as the core and have good reasons to choose other kinds of compounds to choose Focus compounds in specialization phases Etc versus distributed compounds especially this is the case if you're a beginner in intermediate is an advanced person

don't worry about all that stuff you're going to know how to train yourself at that point Haven watched a ton of your videos definitely you will number three a lot of questions are how many exercises should I use per session in any given session but my best question back to you is how many sets are you going to need to do for that muscle in the session then we choose how many exercises exercises you can think of are like plates dinner plates and uh actual sets of exercises are like the meal items like if it's

just you're stopping by your parents on a Thursday night to say what's up to them one plate of food is totally fine but if it's Thanksgiving dinner you're going to need a couple plates because you're not just putting some fucking turkey here and some mashed potatoes here you putting this shit Skyhigh on two or three plates but another way if you have to do four sets that session on average because it's lying it's stiff-legged deadlifts for hamstrings and any more than five sets you just can't feel your legs for a week and a half or

something something then yeah if it's three four or five sets just program on exercise stiff leged deadlifts that's it you don't need any more exercis why the hell would you your stimulus is fully filled with one exercise worth of sets and an exercise worth of sets generally is about three to five three to six sets per exercise any more than that you need a another exercise at least but if you have a muscle group that is very complex like the back and requires 12 total sets to execute a good job with then you might have

three exercises that you use generally at 1 to three but usually 1 to two because remember 4 to eight sets unless it's a real complex muscle group like the back is usually the winning formula if it's closer to like 4ish that you're going to be doing during most of the meso pick one exercise for that slot if you start at six sets and work up to 10 pick two exercises and you're be in a really good spot and if you start from eight and work up to 12ish or so pick three exercises no big deal

no big deal at all can you do more than two or three exercises per session yes totally 100% but you're better off doing more sessions at that point so if you have 16 sets to do in one day you should be doing two days a week of eight instead of one day of 16 you're going to get higher quality training because you won't be so tired for the last set of eight every time but in addition to that if you can do a great job training with two exercises you could just do four I mean

you can do instead of doing let's say four sets of flat dumbbell press and then four sets of incline barbell press you can do two sets of flat dumbbell two sets of flat machine two sets of incline barbell and then two sets of cable uh incline crossovers still hitting all the same muscles but just what I would call sort of needless variation that's totally fine it's totally cool to do but remember you're taking away good variants and replacing them you won't be able to use them anytime soon because they'll accumulate stainess and another much more

practical concern is like once you're warmed up on flat dumbbells you're warmed up you're grooved in the movement feels amazing keep going also you don't have to fucking move your equipment if your routine if you look at your RP hypertrophy app and it says flat dumbbells for four sets and then incline for four you're like this going to be fucking awesome I love it plug in warm up get it go switch warm up Get It Go and I'm out but if I have four chest exercises on there for you you're going to have to find

that new piece of equipment every time after only two sets you guys after two sets you're just getting in you're like yeah man I was feeling great you look at your program you're like okay that's it I guess I have to go warm up for machine flat press there's an old lady on it I told myself I'd stop yelling at old people but I can't do it they can't hear well and Alo they're old who cares I'm kidding kidding you're gonna have to warm up for a new machine you're G to set the fucking rack

height blah blah blah and then just two sets later you're on to your next share why uh unless you have your own personal gym and you really want to you know burn $100 bills of exercise variation stick to one to two exercises per session in most cases per muscle sometimes three if needed but four five or six exercises maybe not a great idea common mistakes let's talk about them let's talk about how to fix them I can think of six but I'm sure there are way more than six and I'd love to hear some of

your suggestions in the comments number one some people are insisting that you should only be doing one exercise per muscle ever you want big legs squat people tell you that you're like but what else like nope you're a pussy just squat that's how Grandpa did it that's how dad did it right very well now this is okay per session if Monday for quads you only have squats that's totally fine but per week you should attack the situation from a few different EX exercise different angles this is great from fatigue management squatting twice is exceptionally fatiguing

because you retarget exactly the same weak points in the same ways multiplying their fatigue accumulation if you squat one day and leg press the other the the limiting factors are slightly different the points of iritation are slightly different and you're just much more sustainable to do two exercises uh over time than it is to do an exercise the same way multiple days a week especially as you become intermediate Advance that's a big deal and you can do the same EX exercise you can it's not ideal but if you insist on doing this same exercise at

least change something change the rep range change the exercise order maybe even change the Cadence so the ultimate change would be let's say squat Monday squat Thursday fine fine squat Thursday let's say you're in a home gym in a garage gym all you have is a rack it's got to be squat squat okay fine but the first squat sets a 5 to 10 normal Ecentric control and squats are done first the second squat exercise on Thursday is done after sets of dumbbell walking Lunes it's done in the 10 to 15 rep range and it's done

with a slow Ecentric and a full pause at the bottom so it's the same exercise but it's done differently enough to produce enough of variation to prevent that stainess from accumulating in just a few weeks versus the few months that you wanted to I mean ideally it would never happen but ideally my ex-wife would have never left me and I still would have been happy oh shut up Scott you don't mean that she left for you and then he dumped her just another day for Daddy we call it yeah it's like the woman of your

life was not good enough for a single hookup with me tough there is no avoiding hard training if you want to grow but if you want to grow the most your training needs to be hard and smart RP hypertrophy app will make sure you're progressing on track monitoring and adjusting your workout at all times so for all that work you're doing you can be sure you're getting the best results in any case Point number two thinking you have to do all angles and all movements for a single muscle group in every session this is the

ultimate freshman year frat boy workout you go you do chest Monday it's really the only Dependable day of the week you make it to training you'll make some other days maybe what are you guys going to do say it along with me you do flat bench you're going incline bench you're going to decline bench mightbe just some dumbbell work right also definitely got to do some dips and who can finish a session without some cable cross overs and yelling into the mirror every angle hit bro every fucking type of fly every type of press every

type of everything that is insane insane insane levels of redundancy what the fuck are we doing this for come on now this is getting a little crazy we got we can spend a third of the time in the gym come back several times during the week and get the best results ever we do not have to go over the top absolutely just categorically not a thing and I'll get this feedback on my own workouts on post on Instagram regularly on my RP hypertrophy app I will do like you know hack squats and so good mornings

and then do hack squats and then do a couple sets of walking lungos and people comment like that's it I'm like yes that trains every muscle of the leg insanely robustly and enough for me to have to heal about a week half a week later to do it again and they're like but I feel like that's just three exercises uhhuh yes yes I can also count it's good it's good count to three that's very good and they usually don't have anything else because they're like well okay but like other people do more exercises that's okay

other people might have really good reasons for it but you got to have some good reasons for it don't just do extra shit it's just waste your time and it burns variation which we don't want do you have to do all the angles per week so number three myth is thinking you have to do all the angles per week like okay Mike okay fine I don't have to do dips and incline work all in one chest session but over the week at some point in my two to four chest workouts I have to do lower

chest mid chest and upper chest that's not true unless you're fat loss dieting if you're fat loss dieting you got to cover all your bases if you're M maintaining one move per muscle maintains 90 some per of the muscle so godamn well you don't have to worry about it and for muscle gaining you can just do incline work or just decline work or just upper back Work and No midb Work and No rowing or anything like that to emphasize it one muscle versus the other no problem at all so thinking you have to get every

single angle done is true in a fat loss phase it's not true universally number four this is a personal pet peeve of mine that I've already sort of uh um hinted at but this is just like baffling to me it is the act of doing very low set numbers per exercise but doing a lot of exercises and a lot of times high-intensity training people who just haven't thought this through will do this they'd be like high volume is bad you're like okay so you do what and they're like one working set every single exercise oh

I got you okay sweet one set that's very low how many exercises like well we do eight exercises in a day for a muscle like well fucker that's eight working sets that's not low volume and a lot of times people do like a top set down set or they'll do one set and then they'll move on and you'll end up having this workout where they do like five things for chest that's so much warm-up time that's so much transition time and worst that's once you've developed a mind muscle connection and the ability to generate tension

exactly with the target muscle after a few working sets your training partner is like hey it's it's time to switch exercise you're like I'm just getting in the groove over here right a terrible terrible analogy but if you're doing the sww with a consenting adult that's right I said it Scott are we allowed to say sex yeah hey imagine you're just finding your fucking great positions like you just found that Groove in a position like you got 15 seconds you gotta like slide your knee against that pillow and take that other pillow that's up your

fucking ass and throw it away from you and rearrange her hips and shit and you're just 15 seconds later all right all right and she's like okay let's switch and you're like I'm sorry what what are we here to do just jump around a different bullshit like if you're shooting a fucking adult film your pleasure is irrelevant yes just do as many positions you can it's great production work but you're actually trying to enjoy the shit once you start feeling the groove that's where you stay same thing with exercise variation I have no IDE Scott

video guy have you ever figured out why a lot of top bodybuilders just walk around the gym and do seven exercises is it just she boredom yeah I would say boredom just looking for novelty like I don't want to do another set of incline I want to do something else oh God I hit all the angles we got two myths in one so don't be that person instead of doing a top set and a down set why don't you try two heavy sets in the exercise and then three lighter sets it's going to be a

good enough variation on load and you're going to be ultra connect to that exercise and five work sets later you might not need to do another exercise it makes everything simpler and faster and better number five is the opposite it still exists and I promise you you will see a Resurgence of it pretty goddamn soon Ultra Basics type of shit our industry goes through waves cotal waves of the average person is biased a little bit towards fancy optimal down to they they just had enough of it blw in the face and then the average person

is biased towards Ultra fucking simple no fucking nonsense barbells only brother machines are fucking stupid biomechanics is gay the usual it's just it just does this all the time and there is a nuanced happy middle that's really fun that you and I are in but a lot of people don't happen to be in that part and they'll just shit like this you're like hey you're training Lex like yep what you doing like I'm doing eight sets squats you're like okay after what number of sets of squats is the shit so goddamn stale and do you

not want to be there anymore and just your knees and hips hurt at that point your pump is going down they're like like six okay so what are those two extra sets for they're like fucking squats build fucking legs brother like oh I see you're like a a GPT that was trained on Old tation articles that's all you got my man so it would be better in that case to maybe do four sets of squats and then four sets of leg presses generally myself my co-authors for our book uh the scientific principles of hypertophy training

Dr James Hoffman and Mr Jared feather ifb Pro we found through our coaching tons of people in ourselves experience and looking a little bit at the data that five to seven sets of unex exercise work sets in a session is the realistic top end in most cases for uh stimulus to fatigue ratio staleness acute staleness hits so goddamn hard that on set number eight or set number seven of the same exercise you're like dude fuck this and I've done programs have 10 of the same exercise over and over and over and over and over and

they were suboptimal compared to programs where right around the three to six set of an exercise Mark I cut it off and I go to another exercise that's just a thing and it can impact your enjoyment of training but it can also impact your joints I've hurt my joints overusing bent rows overusing stiff-legged deadlifts overusing squats I could have just split up the actualise a little bit better would have been better for me and lastly is similar and it's assuming certain Act exercises hit the whole muscle where they actually don't this isn't a huge problem

but it's just something to know get your um functional Anatomy knowledge upscaled a little bit so for example people will do they'll proudly I don't know why they be like yeah man you look at you like my back and dude your back's really impressive like only pull-ups like oh dopes so actually your back could be even more impressive if you did rows they don't know that they're like thought you just needed pull-ups man like nope nope there are huge parts of the back that do this and they don't they don't do this part like your

Romo and your mid traps they don't pull your arm down they just pull it back and they pull the scaps back so this vertical shit it trains a lot of your back but not the whole thing so don't pretend it's the whole thing I used to train for years squats and presses for my quads and my rectus femoris is uh just not very impressive it's barely there and I'm now doing lying lean back leg extensions to expose that muscle and it's getting sore regularly and it's awesome but it took a while for me to even

get on board with that because I thought oh I just train the whole like this bullshit I was missing a whole quad one quarter of my quad was missing and that's not good and of course leg curls only for hamstrings hip hinging is really important trains a bunch of your hamstring that leg curls do train to some extent but not fully so yeah you do want to make sure that you don't oversimplify the shit and I know this is crazy right but there's a group of people that like do five six angles and exercises for

everything there's another group people that's like fuck and just squat Brothers just one we're in this fucking terrible science place again where it's like it's like one to three usually one to two sometimes three exercises that's probably what works best if you cover all the bases you're usually good to go guys if you need help picking exercises the RP hypertrophy app can help you do it there's a link in the description for that if you want to buy things and pay me money and if you just like the color of my amazing Scott V guy

what color is a sweatshirt burgundy burgundy Ron Burgundy I'll see you guys next time a [Music]