Contrary to the claims of many well-meaning but uninformed trainers and coaches, you do not have to squat or deadlift to build overall muscular strength and size, you do not have to clean, jerk, or snatch to improve explosiveness or coordination for other activities, you do not have to do machine pullovers for ultimate upper torso development. 

There are no specific exercises that you must do, and no type of equipment you must use (but there are some exercises and types of equipment you should avoid).

The only thing you must do—if you want to effectively train your whole body—is include exercises in your program which effectively target all the major muscle groups (muscle groups involved in producing gross body movements). Some exercises are better than others for some muscle groups but many can be similarly productive.

What you should do is choose the best—most effective, safe, and efficient—exercises you can perform for each muscle group with your capabilities and the available equipment.

To design a program that effectively works your whole body start by identifying and listing the major muscle groups and their functions from your neck all the way down to your ankles. Then pick one or two exercises that effectively work each of these.

Use the following guidelines to choose the best exercises for each muscle group:

1. Choose exercises designed to track muscle and joint function, not those which mimic movements from sports or activities of daily living.
2. Choose exercises which can be performed slowly and do not require rapid acceleration or significant momentum. If you can not stop moving instantly and hold perfectly still at any time during an exercise it is a poor one and/or you are moving too fast.
3. Choose exercises which provide continuous, well-balanced resistance for the target muscle groups, not discontinuous or poorly balanced resistance. Avoid exercise “complexes” which involve alternating between repetitions of different exercise movements.
4. Choose exercises and equipment which are more stable with little or no challenge to balance, not exercises performed in an unstable manner or on unstable equipment. Whenever practical exercises should be performed bilaterally and symmetrically, not unilaterally or asymmetrically. Machines with fused or dependent movement arms are preferable to machines with non-fused or independent movement arms (AKA isolateral), all else being equal.
5. For each workout in your program choose the fewest exercises required to effectively work all the major muscle groups targeted, to minimize overall workout volume. Avoid the temptation to excessively isolate unless justified by a rehabilitation issue or bodybuilding or physique competition. Any more exercises than necessary to effectively work all the major muscle groups is counterproductive, increasing the resources and energy required for recovery leaving less for producing increases in muscular strength and size.

I recommend designing your workouts around compound/linear-form exercises if you are able to perform them (some people can’t perform some compound exercises due to hand, foot, or joint problems or other injuries). Compound exercises are generally easier to learn and master than simple/rotary-form exercises, more effective for cardiovascular conditioning because they involve a larger volume of muscle, and more time efficient because they allow you to effectively work multiple muscle groups together.

You do not have to perform these with specific equipment, though. You can get just as big and strong using free weights, machines, even statics with straps, chains, or basic household structures if you perform them correctly. In the long run your results from exercise have far more to do with how you train than what equipment you use.

As a starting point, I recommend building your workouts around six types of compound exercises:

1. Squat (hip and knee extension)
2. Hinge (hip and low back extension)
3. Vertical push (shoulder flexion, abduction, and elevation and elbow extension)
4. Vertical pull (shoulder extension, adduction, and depression and elbow flexion)
5. Horizontal push (shoulder flexion, horizontal flexion, (sometimes) protraction, and elbow extension
6. Horizontal pull (shoulder extension, horizontal extension, retraction, and elbow flexion)

These six types of compound exercises effectively work most but not all of the major muscle groups. You will need to supplement them with simple exercises for your neck, forearms, abs, legs to effectively work your whole body. Depending on your recovery ability you may divide these up over two or more full-body workouts, or into an upper/lower or push/pull/legs split or other split routine.

If you can’t perform a compound exercise due to an injury or disability, every compound exercise can be replaced with its component simple movements, if practical with the available equipment. For example, you can replace chin-ups or front-grip pulldowns with pullovers and arm curls and you can replace a squat or leg press with a hip extension and leg extension.

If you can’t hold a barbell to perform pullovers due to a hand or wrist injury properly-designed pullover machines apply the resistance to the upper arms through pads, so no grip is required. A few arm curl machines are designed with pads which apply the resistance directly to the distal forearms instead of handles so no gripping is required.

If no properly-designed pullover machine or arm curl machine which provides direct resistance is available you can perform a pullover and arm curl with just a pair of yoga blocks and a bench or sturdy table or counter-top using timed static contraction protocol. There are workarounds for most other injuries and physical limitations as well.

I interview SuperSlow and SuperStatics founder Ken Hutchins, who discusses epistemology in exercise, exercise instruction standards, teaching the preliminary considerations for exercise and maintaining a distraction-free exercise environment (covered in The Renaissance of Exercise Vol 1), intensity versus work, the effectiveness of dynamic versus static exercise, strength training versus steady state activity for cardiovascular conditioning and health, and more.

Ken Hutchins books, including the free ebook on transitioning from timed static contractions to feedback statics, are available at https://drewbaye.myshopify.com/collections/books-by-ken-hutchins

Ken Hutchins articles can be read at his web site https://seriousexercise.com/

I designed a basic workout chart with elements of some older Advanced Dungeons & Dragons character sheets for all my fellow old-school TTRPG fans working to improve their real-life strength and constitution scores. Click the link or image below to download a printable PDF.

Dungeons & Dragons Themed Workout Chart.

If you prefer more conventional workout charts and want to learn how to use them as effectively and efficiently as possible check out my book High Intensity Workout Charts and Guidelines for Recording Performance.

High Intensity Workout Charts and Guidelines for Recording Performance includes three printable workout charts (located at the end of the ebook) designed specifically for recording the performance of HIT workouts, and detailed guidelines for their use in tracking your own workouts and/or those of your clients, athletes, or patients.

Feedback from readers:

 

I interview SuperSlow and SuperStatics founder Ken Hutchins, who discusses how he got involved with exercise and became employed by Arthur Jones at Nautilus, the development of the SuperSlow exercise protocol during the Nautilus Osteoporosis Study, the development of SuperStatics, and the future of exercise. We also discuss the importance of focus and having a distraction-free environment for exercise, and the problems with protocols like rest-pause and negative-only and machines that hyper-load the negative.

Ken Hutchins books are available at https://drewbaye.myshopify.com/collections/books-by-ken-hutchins 

Ken Hutchins articles, including The Definition of Exercise and Exercise Versus Recreation mentioned during this interview, can be read at his web site https://seriousexercise.com/

Question: What do you recommend if I want to do high intensity training for bodybuilding and not just strength or general fitness?

Is a higher repetition range better for hypertrophy?

Do I need more variety of exercises to make sure I’m working all my muscles from different angles or in different parts of the range of motion?

How can I tell where I need the most work and what can I do about lagging muscle groups?

Answer: Contrary to popular but uninformed opinion there is no difference in how you should perform exercises for increasing muscular size versus muscular strength, and you do not need a large variety of exercises for any muscle group. However, there are some differences in how you should design your workouts for bodybuilding versus general strength and conditioning.

Training for Strength vs Hypertrophy

Many people confuse strength, which is your muscles’ ability to produce force, with how much weight you are able to lift in a specific exercise, which is a combination of your strength, how skilled you are in performing that exercise (skilled at the assumed objective of lifting the weight, as opposed to the real objective of using the weight to efficiently load and fatigue the target muscles), and specific neural adaptations. Strength is general, meaning it transfers to every physical activity you perform. Skill and specific neural adaptations do not transfer to other physical activities, only the activity or exercise practiced. This is one of the problems with using 1RM testing to compare the effect on strength of different training methods, especially when the same exercises are used for workouts and testing.

The old belief that different repetition ranges were required to stimulate different types of adaptations (e.g. lower reps for strength, medium for hypertrophy, high for endurance) is based on observations of how bodybuilders versus powerlifters tended to train, without consideration for genetic differences and selection bias. We now know this belief was wrong, and a very broad range of repetitions (time under load, actually) can be similarly effective for increasing both muscular strength (general) and muscular size when exercises are performed to momentary muscle failure. 

If your goal is to improve your 1RM in a specific exercise you would benefit from also practicing that exercise with a very heavy weight and very low reps with unrestricted speed of movement. For general increases in muscular strength and size, though, a broad range of loads and repetitions will work, and longer sets with more moderate loads will be safer as well as better for metabolic and cardiovascular conditioning, which is also important.

For more on this, read Q&A: High Intensity Training for Strength vs Size vs Power and The Myth of Training for Sarcoplasmic Versus Myofibrillar Hypertrophy and High Load/Low Reps Versus Low Load/High Reps For Hypertrophy.

The Need for Non-Variation in Exercise

As for variety of exercises, although our bodies are capable of an infinite variety of movements all of these are just combinations of a relatively small number of basic joint movements, and only a few basic exercises are required to effectively work all the major muscle groups which produce them. Just because a particular muscle is capable of producing more than one joint movement doesn’t mean you need to work that muscle through all of those movements, either, just one is enough. Even convergent muscles capable of producing movement in very different planes can be worked effectively with just one or two.

You are better off performing just one or two of the best exercises for each muscle group—the most effective and safest you are capable of with the available equipment—consistently, than performing a wide variety or frequently changing them. Read The Ultimate Routine for more on this.

Exercise Selection for Bodybuilding versus Functional Ability

For general strength and conditioning, to improve your overall functional ability, your workouts should be designed to strengthen every major muscle group as much as possible, which will eventually result in the maximum size of every muscle group your genetics will allow. However, most people do not have the genetics for perfectly proportional and symmetrical growth throughout the body, and will tend to have some muscle groups with greater or lesser potential for strength and size than the others. This difference in the relative size potential of different muscle groups doesn’t matter much if your only concern is maximizing your potential physical performance and not having a perfectly proportional physique, but if aesthetics are a higher priority for you, you need to be careful to avoid over-development or under-development of muscle groups with greater or lesser size potential.

This is not as much about how you perform your exercises as it is about which exercises you include in your workouts and how you organize them.

It is rare to not want a muscle to get bigger, but bodybuilding isn’t just about size, it is also about proportion, shape, and symmetry. If you have a particular muscle group that grows too large relative to the others, it can negatively affect your proportions or overall shape. Reducing the size of a disproportionately developed muscle group or not letting a fast-growing muscle group get ahead of the rest of your physique is relatively easy. If a muscle group is too big stop training it until reduces to a size proportional to the rest of your body. If a muscle group’s growth is outpacing the growth of the rest of your body, stop working that muscle group to failure and do not increase the weight you use for that muscle group until the rest of your body has caught up.

If you normally work the over-large muscle group with a compound exercise, you will need to substitute simple exercises instead to work it separate from the other muscles (e.g. a pullover and arm curl instead of a pulldown or chin-up, a lateral raise and triceps extension instead of an overhead press, or a hip extension and a leg extension instead of a leg press or squat.)

Increasing the size of lagging muscle groups obviously requires a different approach, but not the one most assume. The key to body part specialization is not performing a larger volume of work for the target muscle groups with pre-exhaust or more varied exercises, or working them “harder” with forced-reps, drop-sets, rest-pause, finishing negatives or other set extension techniques, because more volume and/or more time spent performing an exercise past failure will not stimulate a greater increases in strength and size, it will only place greater demands on recovery energy and resources leaving less for growth. Instead, the key to designing a specialization workout for a body part or muscle group is to cut out exercises for all other muscle groups, to eliminate competition for your body’s limited energy and resources for recovery and growth.

You should focus on specializing just one body part or one to three smaller muscle groups at a time—whichever are lagging the most. For example, if your upper arms were lagging, a specialization workout would consist of just one set of one direct, simple exercise for each; one elbow extension exercise and one elbow flexion exercise. Nothing else. You can alternate a specialization workout with your regular workouts, or, if the lagging body part is very stubborn, perform only specialization workouts for three or four weeks before alternating your regular workouts with the specialization workout for as long as it takes the lagging muscle group to catch up (assuming your genetics allow it to).

When you add a specialization workout to your program you should maintain the same workout frequency, rather than add another weekly workout. For example, if you normally do two full-body workouts per week (a good starting point for most), start by alternating between your regular workouts and the specialization workout. After two or three months of this the lagging body part or muscle groups should have improved significantly (assuming they still have the potential to get larger) and  you can cut back to performing the specialization workout every third or fourth time.

Evaluating Physique Improvements

Physique evaluation is rather subjective compared to evaluating improvements in exercise performance, but you can compare the progress of individual body parts by performing regular circumference measurements and you can evaluate your overall physique by photographing or taking a short video of yourself going through the mandatory bodybuilding poses and a few of your favorites every six to eight weeks (same place, same camera position, same lighting every time) and getting feedback from your trainer or training partners:

• Front Lat Spread
• Front Double Biceps
• Side Chest
• Rear Lat Spread
• Rear Double Biceps
• Side Triceps
• Abdominal and Thigh
• Most Muscular

Save your images or videos in folders with the date they were taken or recorded. When you have two or more sets of photos or videos you can compare the before and after side by side. Keep notes on your training charts or in a journal on your progress, including how changes in your circumference measurements affect your appearance. Use yours and others’ feedback on these to determine what muscle groups may need either detraining or specialization, and adjust your workouts accordingly.

If you want a more realistic standard to compare your physique against than today’s competitive bodybuilders—and one generally considered to be more aesthetically pleasing—look for photos of golden age bodybuilders like the one above of Steve Reeves, Mr. Universe 1950, performing a front double biceps pose. Keep in mind those bodybuilders were still very genetically gifted, but developing a physique like theirs is still well within the realm of possibility for some drug-free trainees.

Like most people, when I started working out over 35 years ago I made a lot of mistakes. Fortunately, unlike most people, after a few years I learned to exercise more effectively, safely, and efficiently. I could write several books on all the things I wish I knew when I started working out (and I have), but here are a few of the most important:

Your results from exercise have far more to do with how hard you train than how much or often.

Don’t assume you need to perform some volume and frequency of exercise and adjust your effort to allow for it. Train as hard as possible and adjust your volume and frequency to allow for that.

I wasted years doing anywhere from three to five sets per exercise and performing a much larger number of exercises than needed for each muscle group. I was often in the gym for anywhere from one to two hours, four or five days a week. If I had learned sooner that I only needed to perform one hard set per exercise, of only one or two exercises per muscle group, no more than three non-consecutive days per week, I would have gotten better results, faster, and saved myself hundreds of hours yearly.

When it comes to exercise many believe more is better—more exercises, more sets, more frequent workouts, etc.—but your body doesn’t see it that way. Exercise is a stress on your muscles’ ability to produce force, and on the other systems that support them (metabolic and cardiovascular efficiency) and transmit the force they produce (bone and connective tissue strength). The more intense a stress, the greater the demand it places on some system’s ability to perform its function, the stronger the stimulus for adaptation, but also the more energy and resources your body has to devote to coping with and recovering from it, energy and resources which exist in limited supply. The more your body must devote to recovering from the stress the less remains to devote to producing the adaptations stimulated by it.

There is a limit to how much and how quickly your body can produce increases in muscular strength and size and improvements in the other factors functional ability. Exercise will only stimulate improvements up to a point, and the more intensely you train the more quickly you will reach that point as volume increases. Any more volume than necessary to do this is counterproductive; it will not stimulate your body to produce greater increases in muscular strength and size or improvements in the other factors of functional ability, but it will continue to increase the demands on energy and resources for recovery. Again, the more your body must spend on recovery, the less it has for the production of the desired adaptations.

These days I only perform one set of one exercise per muscle group, of around seven or eight exercises per workout, no more than twice weekly, and I am stronger and more fit now at 48 years old than I was at 18.

When designing your workouts go through each exercise and note which muscle groups are targeted (not just involved). Make sure your program effectively works all the major muscle groups, including your neck, forearms, and lower legs (you don’t have to work every one in every workout, though, and some might be better dividing exercises up). Also try to minimize overlap within workouts, so no muscle groups are overworked.

As an example, here is my current routine, consisting of an A and a B workout, each built around a few compound exercises with simple exercises included to address the smaller muscle groups:

Workout A

1. 1. Safety Bar Squat
   2. Underhand-Grip Pulldown
   3. Overhead Press
   4. TSC Hip ADduction
   5. TSC Hip ABduction
   6. Wrist Extension
   7. Wrist Curl
   8. TSC Crush Gripping or TSC Pinch Gripping (alternating)

Workout B

1. 1. Trap Bar Deadlift
   2. Bench Press or Parallel-Bar Dip
   3. Seated Row
   4. Crunch
   5. Heel Raise
   6. TSC Toe Raise
   7. TSC Neck Extension
   8. TSC Neck Flexion

How well you perform an exercise is far more important than how much you lift.

You don’t have to train heavy to train hard.

The quality of your repetitions is far more important than the quantity.

The quality of your repetitions is related to the efficiency of inroading, how deeply the target muscles are fatigued relative to the time under load.

When I started working out I believed the effectiveness of an exercise was related to the amount of work performed—how much I weight I lifted and how many times I lifted it. As a result I performed exercises in a manner that maximized load relative to effort. I know know this is backwards, that effectiveness is related to relative effort—how hard the target muscles are worked relative to how hard they are capable of working and how efficiently they are fatigued (inroad/time = intensity)—and that exercises should be performed in a manner that maximizes effort relative to load.

When you deeply fatigue a muscle, temporarily reducing the force it is can produce, you send a message to your body that it needs to increase the strength and size of the muscle so you will have more strength in reserve and be better capable of movement the next time you encounter the same stress. The better your exercise form, the more efficiently you are able to create and maintain tension in the target muscle groups, the more rapidly you will fatigue them. The more rapidly you are capable of fatiguing the target muscles, the less weight you require to achieve momentary muscle failure within some amount of time.

The less weight you require to achieve momentary muscle failure within some time, the less load on your joints and spine, the lower your risk of injury.

The less time you require to achieve momentary muscle failure with the same weight, the less stress required to stimulate the best possible improvements, the less energy and resources required for recovery, the more your body has to produce the desired adaptations.

When you perform an exercise take your time, focus on contracting the target muscles, and move in a way that keeps them under relatively continuous tension. Avoid doing anything that reduces the tension and causes the target muscles to be underloaded or unloaded. Avoid doing anything that suddenly and greatly increases tension and increases your risk of injury. From the moment you begin the exercise until the moment you unload, focus on using the weight to empty out the target muscles, rather than using your muscles to move the weight.

Exercise intensely, progressively, and consistently; avoid unnecessary variety of exercises and training methods.

When you learn a new exercise there is a six to eight week period during which much of the improvement in performance is due to learning and becoming more skilled at the exercise and neural adaptations, rather than due to increases in muscular strength and size or improvements in conditioning. Because of this, changing exercises or switching workouts every couple months can appear to break plateaus and keep you progressing. However, what it really does is set you back, since the greatest general physical benefits will occur after this initial phase.

When I started working out there were a few exercises I did consistently, but I switched workouts every couple of months, usually choosing them from whatever bodybuilding magazine I was reading at the time. This was almost as big a mistake as doing too much exercise with poor form.

When you do this it is like taking a few steps forward then one step back. Frequently changing your workouts is not just unnecessary, it is counterproductive for long-term results.

You do not need a large variety exercises to effectively train any muscle group. Just one or two good exercises are enough. If you choose well to begin with you do not need to change exercises at all, much less frequently, to avoid plateaus. In fact, except for making adjustments to your workout volume and frequency to account for changes in your recovery ability over time, or due to changes in the equipment available, you can get great results performing the same basic exercises your entire life.

Consider also, the longer you perform a particular exercise and the more skilled you become at it, the more effective, efficient, and safe it becomes.

Main points:

Train as hard as possible, but keep your workouts relatively brief and infrequent to avoid overtraining.

Perform every exercise as strictly as possible, focusing on efficiently loading and deeply fatiguing the target muscles.

Choose a few of the best exercises for each muscle group and perform them consistently.

In this video Nautilus Sports/Medical Industries alumni and SuperSlow and SuperStatics founder Ken Hutchins explains and demonstrates how to perform the sub-occipital squeeze technique. This technique can significantly reduce the intensity of or even provide complete relief from various types of headaches, including exercise-induced, tension, migraine, sinus, and even headaches associated with menstruation.

My wife Emma (the subject in this video) sometimes suffers tension headaches as well as headaches while on her period, and the sub-occipital squeeze technique demonstrated here has consistently provided complete relief.

If you are an exercise instructor this information could potentially save your business if a client experiences an exercise induced headache (there is a story about this involving Doug McGuff, MD in Ken’s book Heart Strong: How We Learned to Condition the Heart), as well as prevent clients from needing to cancel sessions due to other types of headaches.

I was unable to find the exact neck massager/pressure-point tool demonstrated in the video, but found a similar one at https://amzn.to/2XrWlT2 which I have ordered for testing. I will update this post with comments on it once I am able to test it.

An Excerpted Section from a Chapter in Ken Hutchin’s Forthcoming The Renaissance of Exercise—Volume 2

Inroad: Beyond the Mechanics

Initially, inroad was a foreign word for me. Ellington’s use of it  threw me at first. Then I saw the perfection of his word choice as the concept it represented was both revealing and perfectly representative of what exercise is about. I am sure that I had not considered the concept before, although I was roughly practicing it and teaching it since the 10th grade.

Inroad was solely from Ellington Darden in the early 1970s. It was not a word Arthur Jones used. And now I wonder why since inroad is the perfect way to explain exercise. And the charts I share in Music and Dance and Critical Factors are the best presentation to convey the idea.

Why didn’t Arthur use this? If he had, would he have seized upon his mistakes with speed and camming and friction and independent movement arms? Would he have changed his opinion of isometrics and moved toward TSC and FS? We can never know.

With inroad, Ellington has granted us a tool that may even go beyond his own suggestions. Once we see how to apply it, to dose it, to mediate it safely for the best outcome, then we see that it is nowhere in the realm of thought within the medical, exercise physiology, and physical therapy communities—much less the general public. It’s like quantum mechanics to someone who’s never mastered Newtonian physics. And by this measure we can
assuredly and simply test someone’s understanding of exercise.

When your doctor suggests you engage in a walking program, just ask him if it’s safe to practice inroading activity. He will go blank. He has no idea what you’re talking about. Therefore, he has no understanding of exercise. With him the difference between exercise and inroading is that he erroneously believes he knows something about the first and he correctly believes that he knows nothing about the second, although they are the same!

And going yet further—even beyond this competency test—inroad has business and legal applications that I’m sure Ellington has not considered.

In many states—like in Florida but not in Texas—special “controlled” licensing is required for so-called “health clubs,” “health studios,” and “fitness centers” and “gyms.” In reading of the statutes in these states, it is often apparent that the language does not fit what we do with SuperSlow, TSC, and FS. Therefore, we are often exempt from such special licensing. But this exemption does not fare well if the business owner has words like gym, health club, health studio, and fitness in their corporate and facility names.

[If you insist upon aligning yourself with the fitness cesspool for marketing purposes, you will bring upon yourself the fruits of the cesspool. Did you know that tomatoes commonly grow wild around water treatment plants as their seeds are not digested?]

If he calls himself an inroading facility he escapes notice as well as he should be legally exempt from controlled licensure for his actions (practices) as well.

Then, in 2020, came the Covid-19 Pandemic with its shutdowns  of “non-essential businesses.” Many “gyms” were mandated to be closed and/or went out of business as a result. And this happened because they were natural spreaders. They could not control their crowds of people. They could not enforce sanitation. They did not restrict access to one client per instructor. They did not have the control found in SuperSlow, SuperStatics, TSC, and FS facilities. However, the enforcement authorities in each state did not know of
these distinctions and thus were indiscriminate with applying the mandates to shut down.

Several exercise businesses in contact with me were saved merely because I convinced them to characterize themselves as inroading facilities, and to, in any way they could, distance themselves from the other terms. This included calling themselves exercise
facilities.

Possible questions that might be asked and answered regarding your business are:

• Do you conduct group exercise? Answer: No.
• Do you offer steady state activities (Aerobics)? Answer: No.
• Do you offer weight lifting? Answer: No.
• Do you offer dance classes of any kind? Answer: No.
• Do you offer treadmills? Answer: No.
• Do you offer calisthenics? Answer: No.
• Do you offer Calenectics? Answer: No.
• Do you allow clients to supervise each other? Answer: No.
• Do you offer stationary bicycling? Answer: No.
• Do you offer ellipticals? Answer: No.
• Do you offer stair climbers? Answer: No.
• Do you conduct yoga classes? Answer: No.
• Do you conduct martial arts? Answer: No.
• Do you offer massage? Answer: No.
• Do you offer swimming? Answer: No.
• Do you have a dressing room? Answer: No.
• Do you offer showering facilities? Answer: No.
• Do you have lockers? Answer: No.
• Do you offer gymnastics classes? Answer: No.
• Do you offer rock climbing? Answer: No.
• Do you have a whirl pool? Answer: No.
• Do you have a sauna? Answer: No.
• Do you have a towel service? Answer: No.
• Do you conduct balance instruction? Answer: No.
• Do you offer planking? Answer: No.
• Do you offer stretching? Answer: No.
• Do you have a juice bar? Answer: No.
• Do you have racquetball courts? Answer: No.
• Do you have tennis courts? Answer: No.
• Do you sell memberships? Answer: No.
• Do you service more than one client at a time. Answer: No.
• Do you encourage clients to profusely sweat? Answer: No.
• Do you allow clients to socialize during sessions? Answer: No.
• Do you allow music in sessions? Answer: No.
• Do you provide mirrors during your sessions? Answer: No.
• Do you allow jump roping? Answer: No.
• Do you allow clients to use their own equipment? Answer: No.
• Do you allow clients’ sessions to be observed. Answer: No.
• Do you allow typical workout garb? Answer: No.
• Do you employ bands and balls? Answer: No.
• Do you offer tanning beds? Answer: No.
• Do you offer a boot camp? Answer: No.
• Do you offer barre activities? Answer: No.
• Do you offer suction-cup treatments? Answer: No.

See? You’re not a gym! And, based on your business practices, you do not fall within the purvue of the usual health studio statutes, at least not within the ones I’ve read. And your service is often essential to those clients who depend on your service for joint lubrication and stability. Left unattended, they become debilitated.

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Hutchins, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Click here to get The Renaissance of Exercise—Volume 1 now.

Click here to sign up for my newsletter to be notified when The Renaissance of Exercise—Volume 2 is available.

Most trainees perform the squat very poorly for the sake of exercise because they emulate or take instruction on performance from competitive lifters. This is a mistake, because the goals of exercise are very different than the goals of competitive lifting, and these activities have different requirements and constraints. When practicing a competitive lift you want to maximize load relative to effort, but when exercising you want to do the opposite and maximize effort relative to load.

When performing a squat for exercise, the guidelines below will help you do that and significantly increase their effectiveness while reducing your risk of injury. You will probably need to reduce the weight you squat with by at least half to do this correctly:

DO: Use a stable squat rack or power rack with safety bars or straps at the correct height if using a barbell, or a machine with an adjustable start point (bottom of your ROM).

DON’T: Squat without any safety equipment to prevent you from being trapped under the bar at the bottom of your ROM.

DO: Squat bilaterally with a symmetrical stance.

DON’T: Squat unilaterally or with an asymmetrical stance (no lunges, split squats, pistols, etc.).

DO: Keep your head and neck still in a neutral position, with your chin slightly down.

DON’T: Look straight ahead, extending your neck as you descend.

DO: Gradually apply force and move slowly when loading/picking up the weight.

DON’T: Rapidly apply force and move suddenly when loading/picking up the weight.

DO: Go as low as you can while keeping your back relatively neutral and your feet flat, ideally until your hamstrings touch your calves.

DON’T: Only go down halfway or less to avoid the harder (and more beneficial) portion of the range of motion.

DO: Extend your knees and hips at the same rate so your pelvis does not rise faster than your shoulders.

DON’T: Raise your pelvis faster than your shoulders initially, to shift the load from your thighs to your hips and lower back.

DO: Continue the exercise until you are unable to do so with strict form, then slowly lower the weight to the start point (bottom of your ROM) and gradually unload.

DON’T: Stop the exercise when you are still physically capable of continuing in strict form, or continue the exercise after you are unable to maintain strict form.

Apply these guidelines the next time you squat then let me know how it goes in the comments!

If you would like the explanations for each of the above guidelines, want more detailed instructions on how to squat properly, or want to see videos of proper squat performance with a barbell, dumbbells, safety squat bar, and more, join my HIT List forum and online education platform and visit the Exercise Demonstration section or search for videos with “squat” in the title.