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Best exercise for each muscle (simplified)
The anti-tier list explanation
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Tier lists on exercises for each muscle get so many views.
Even I get countless emails and dms from guys asking what the best exercise for a muscle is. This shouldn’t actually be happening. Let me show you why it’s easy.
I’ll open up YouTube and I see a thumbnail like this…
I actually think a Tibialis exercise tier list would go hard tbf.
Point is.
Exercises do not randomly somehow happen to hit a muscle.
Exercises hit a muscle because that muscle has a job. There are times where muscles don’t perform it’s job as they’re in a bad position to (Lats and Glutes in a deep stretch 😬) but this is probably rare in your workouts.
This is why muscles exist.
It almost seems too easy when you really think about that.
I mean my mum can literally do it intuitively. She’s spent years doing yoga, and has created her own stretches by knowing what movement lengthens a muscle. Put her inside a gym, she can work out what movement shortens one.
So if this was a skill someone who hadn’t watched hundreds of hours of YouTube to figure out, so can you.
Yeah, I know, that’s all well and great, but how do you work out a muscle’s function?
See every muscle moves a joint. There are 6 types of joints, but most of them aren’t ones you’d be training in the gym.
This leaves two joint types.
The hinge joint is easy to understand.
It works just like your door hinge, it opens, and it closes. There’s no extra rotation, no weird bends, no inter-dimensional astrophysics, it’s obvious what movement is required to open/close the door.
You see this is an easy place to start when learning what your muscles do.
All muscles pull, push muscles don’t actually exist. 😔
So knowing this, you can take a look at a joint like the elbow, and ask yourself. “To open this joint, and to close this joint, what pulls?”. When you ask that question it becomes ridiculously easy.
“Ah, bicep pulls to close on the inside, tricep pulls to open on the outside.”
But wait, I told you there was one other joint type.
This other joint type isn’t so easy. It’s the ball and socket. I don’t know if you ever had one of those computer mice with the ball in it, but it’s quite similar.
Beats the current mice that can be made useless by a piece of tape (i’m fr try it).
To go left the ball needs to be pulled right, to go right it needs to be pulled left.
This is kinda confusing.
At the end of the day you only have four directions.
Up
Down
Left
Right
Any direction that might seem diagonal, is just a certain % Up/Down, and a certain % Left/Right.
I’m sure you’re wondering, “well this is easy too Fletcher. All I have to do is learn what muscle in a ball and socked joint moves the ball in the four directions.” Problem is, the power/strength/general ability to move changes as the muscles do.
I’ll spare you the lengthy overcomplicated explanation, so each muscle usually moves the ball one way, but sometimes it doesn’t. 😬
To make it even more confusing, just as a teaser for a future email (sorry).
When you take a look at the ball and socket joints in the body, the hips and shoulders. You’ll see the muscles that move the ball completely change based on leg/arm width, the amount your arms are overhead, or how close the legs are to your chest. It starts to get confusing.
Thankfully, most of the time it follows the same general pattern as the hinge.
I’ll get you up to speed on those later.
With knowing how these joints work you can invent any exercise to hit what you want. It doesn’t matter if the machine wasn’t intended for that, if you know what the muscle does, you can work it.
This is a lot more useful than you’d think as not all machines are made for the same skeletons.
Here are two ways you can learn what each muscle does (I’d recommend doing both)
Google “What is the function of (muscle name)?”
Stand in the mirror naked and move your body, try to concentrate on what’s moving what.
Following this method will teach you.
Some nerdy words and a pretty guaranteed explanation of what it does
A way to actually visually see how you move your body, and understand it physically vs from some textbook
Now when you’ve learned what the muscle does, load a movement so it’s hardest with that muscle’s purpose.
This will bias the muscle.
I’ve mentioned there are some exceptions, and that’s really only with two muscles. There’s also some additional info which can be really useful. Right now you’re treating muscle groups as if it were one muscle, but a lot of muscles you can target areas.
The upper/lower chest.
The back’s lats, traps, midback, etc.
I’ll teach you how to do these later on, I just want to make sure you understand this principle first. This is where training gets really fun and you can change how our limbs are positioned in order to bias a different part of the chest, back, and legs. There are also a few muscles that require an unordinary approach to work, so I’ll cover that too.
If this helped you, bookmark this page.
Share it to friends the next time you get asked “what’s the best… for…”.
It’ll save you a lot of time, it’s why I made it one of the featured lessons. If someone understands this, they’ll have the building blocks, to understand much more complex lessons.
Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher
P.S. Not all muscles work this way, the ball and socket, and multi-joint muscles behave different, I’ll teaching you this very soon, so stay tuned.
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