The One Best Exercise for Everyone Forever

Do you know the one best exercise?

If I never hear that question again it will be too soon! Usually I hear it in this form: “So, what’s the best exercise for working my abs (butt, legs, arms, etc)?” I am often tempted to respond with some ridiculous and wrong answer like “You need to do sprangle hops, but be sure to wrap your ankles and wear a knit cap.” I don’t do this because one, it’s wrong, and two, I would have to spend the next half hour explaining what sprangle hops are. Note to those who are new to all this and can’t be expected to know any better: there are no such things as “sprangle hops.”

If there isn’t a “best” exercise, then how do you know what to do? Well, the easy and self-serving answer is “sign up for my program and I’ll tell you exactly what to do every day.” The free answer is this: do everything, but do more of the big exercises. By “more” I mean you roughly 85% of your time, and by “big exercises” I mean full-body exercises where you load the spinal column. Aw heck, sign up for my program anyway (you’ll save a bunch of time and effort.)

Still set on searching for the “one best exercise?” Ask yourself this: if a “best” exists, what does that make all the others? Are they second best? Worst? A pointless waste of time? If they aren’t the best, why does anyone ever do them at all? Seriously, if we knew of a “best” exercise, why would anyone do anything else? There are literally hundreds of exercises and exercise variations and each and every one of them work. How can I say this with confidence?

Simple, any time you use your body to apply force to a load, your muscles are doing work. If you are doing work you are exercising. Now we can debate quality of work all day. Yes, some exercises are better than others for certain people at certain times, but you have to look at variables. I can make very strong arguments for squats and dead lifts being two of the most effective exercises, but that doesn’t mean much for someone confined to a wheelchair, does it?

The working title of this article was originally going to be “everything works, but nothing works forever.” I also mention it in my introduction video, so as you might have guessed, it’s a pretty important concept for me. What I’m getting at is this: if pick out an exercise and really hammer away at it, you will get stronger. If you want to continue to get stronger, you will need to change your exercise selection a little bit. No, this has nothing to do with “tricking” your muscles (don’t get me started on that one). It has everything to do with over-use and boredom! Doing the same thing the same way will eventually lead to strength imbalances and you will almost certainly lose any excitement you once got from exercising. This doesn’t mean that you have to totally give up your favorite exercises. If you love doing squats but you’ve stopped progressing, why not change it a little? Have you tried sissy squats? Split squats? Front squats? Hack squats? Squats can still be an integral part of your program, but it will do you good to change things up once in a while.

“But Phil,” you say. “What about all those other sites that claim to have the secret of a ’super exercise’ that will render the entire fitness industry obsolete? They normally charge $379 for this super-secret stuff, but if I act now I can get it for $29.99. Why shouldn’t I try those guys?”

Easy. Just about anyone who claims to have the “one best way” to do anything is probably a lying dirt bag. There is a chance that they’re just wrong, but they’re probably dirt bags.

Oh, and for the record: I am not about to start calling out individuals or specific websites as I don’t feel like being sued this week.

Thanks for coming back to visit me.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Free Weights vs Machines in Your Exercise Program? It’s Your Dime…

Should you use free weights or machines in your exercise program? If you have spent much time in gyms, you will recognize this as one of the Great Questions. While there are definitely uses for both in your program, I recommend that you use free weights more often than machines. By using free weights you will exercise the whole body more efficiently and use the body in a more natural way.

One of the downsides to machines actually doubles as a selling point. Machines are arguably safer to use; the weights travel along a fixed path and you are pressing or pulling from a braced position. While this can make for a safer lifting experience, you’re not getting all that you can from the exercise. For example, let’s look at squats versus the leg press. With the leg press, you are using all of the muscles in your legs as you raise and lower the weight. When squatting, since you have to stabilize the load while making the weight go up and down with your body, you are using almost every muscle from the neck down. While this entails more work, you get greater benefits. Not only are you strengthening the “helper muscles” along with the target areas, you are burning more calories by recruiting the extra muscles. Surprise: you’re working harder and smarter!

Free weights also give you the opportunity to strengthen your body through familiar movements. Unless you live in a very complicated world, picking a box up off of the floor does not entail strapping cables to the weight, running the cables through a pulley system and then pressing on foot pedals with your legs from a braced position. No, you simply squat down, get a good grip and lift. While there are certainly safety concerns, these can be easily addressed by a qualified trainer like me. There are very few “dangerous lifts,” and even these can be performed safely with proper instruction and good technique.

Machines do have their advantages! They are excellent for rehabilitation work where a very high degree of control is needed and they are used extensively for isolation work (targeting one specific muscle group). They also have the time advantage. It is much faster to move a pin on a weight stack than to load and unload a bar!

In most exercise programs, my clients will spend 80-90% of their time with free weights and 10-20% of their time on machines. This allows the client to train his or her entire body for most of the session while still allowing time to address specific weak points.