Best Exercises for Every Muscle Group: Part 1 | Bryce Calvin and Chris Beal
Transcript of Ep: 71 - P2 Podcast
Chris Beal (00:13)
All right, you know, this will be a good one. We have kind of I feel like kind of gotten away from like just brass tacks, training opinions, and then the science to back the opinions when it comes down to coaching or thought processes on, you know, strength and muscle gain, muscle growth.
Bryce (00:38)
No, yeah, I agree. And I think part of it is just like entertainment. I think for us, like over time, it does just get a little bit stale. Maybe not for people listening or, you know, taking in content, but for us, because we live with training and fitness and health every single day, like, you know, 20 hours of the day. Every once in a while, we do want to have a conversation that is not revolving around fitness, health, bodybuilding, muscle growth, et cetera. But there is that aspect of like, yeah, you know, we understand like what puts money in our bank account, right? So like we have to, we have to every once in a while bring it back around and talk about the meat and potatoes of just trading. And honestly though, like I do think that the topic that we're gonna talk about today is interesting in its simplicity. Sometimes it's tempting with what we do to really go far out into the weeds because again, a lot of what we do is very repetitive. We do a lot of the same type of thing every single day whenever it comes to coaching and whenever it comes to putting together programs or putting together any kind of protocols. So, yeah, whenever we get on a podcast or conversation like this, it's inevitable that we start going out into the more esoteric of topics.
Today is going to be super simple. It's going to be very easy. It's going to be very digestible for everyone listening. So what we're going to do is we're just going to take each major muscle group and we are going to rank our favorite exercise for that, or I guess technically just state our favorite exercise for that muscle group. And I guess what we'll do in terms of ranking is we will compare what we can, what we come up with because we wrote down our choices before actually getting on this call. So I have no idea what Chris is going to say, and I'm sure he has, well, maybe he has some ideas of what I'm going to say just based on knowing me and knowing how I coach. But I do think that this will be interesting. It will be simple. It will be straight to the point, and hopefully it'll also be extremely practical for anybody listening.
Chris Beal (02:44)
Yeah, and I think that it was, it'll definitely be really interesting. And I think people miss being able to immediately take factual data from a source that they trust and then go implement or be quote unquote better for it. Right. I think when we talk about a lot of concepts, they're fun. And also people probably leave like, well, that was fun. I don't really know how I can take and apply anything they just told me, but like, you know, that was fun. But at least people will very quickly be able to go and like speak to it, you know, based on how we decide to support our selection, so on and so forth. They will give insight to not only how we think, but also the science of the matter and why we decided to choose certain science over other science. So I actually laid a criterion board out for myself because I found myself, as I got to certain muscle groups, going, well, wait. But that goes against my logic for the other movement. And I'm like, I do want to keep, for simplicity and understanding's sake, a relatively cohesive criterion for why I chose movement patterns. And so like for me, I'm like, I'm old. I will be 33 in, you know, next week. And as a person who's beaten my body to a pulp by running into people and, you know, just collisions over and over again on the field and then collisions over and over again with my inside my body, my joints and tendons. I'm speaking from like, could have probably done some things better here.
So I came from a place of wanting to avoid injury and understanding that you can still grow and continue to get stronger and continue to make aesthetic changes that are favorable. but you should not lose sight of being holistically and functionally strong. And also you don't have to beat the shit out of your body. And that is where some of my decisions will come from. So I think you'll find some of them interesting.
Bryce (04:35)
Yeah, and that is funny because whenever I went into this, I was 100 % thinking in terms of an idealized scenario for just putting muscle on. I wasn't necessarily trying to compare this to my situation or think about the average person. Like in my mind, this is, okay, there are no concerns about someone getting an acute injury from doing this movement or I guess not no concerns because some of these I am definitely weighing that. But for me, this is almost purely hypertrophic. This is about how do I grow the muscle the most efficiently? It'll be good. It'll be good. I do think that this will be two different viewpoints with some overlap. But I think that the way that we explain some of our choices will probably be the most useful aspect.
Chris Beal (05:13)
I was going to say, I may cut you off, but I knew for sure. I know exactly how Bryce will answer, at least his thought process in answering these questions. So I purposefully bootstrapped myself to a different criteria because I'm like, I agree with this. I agree that this is the more optimal movement given certain scenarios. And also lived experience coupled with the people we want to talk to, too, because it's not just competitors and stuff like that. There are people out there who are just trying to get better, right, that don't have the experience, the fucking drive, right, to go in and beat their body up with a certain pattern each week. So it's like, okay, well, how do I best meet the mean here with all the things that I think are important and also the given audience? Where do we want to start? I figured we start with something that's kind of heavy hitting. We leave glutes, we leave glutes to the end. It's gotta be towards the end, right? And then in the middle, there'll probably be a kind of a lull. I mean, I still love the calves and the erectors and whatnot, but like they're important and we understand that they'll be a bit more straightforward. And then we can end with, again, the more like hamstrings, glutes, whatever, right? So I'll let you decide what we go with like lat or delts first. So I think that's kind of interesting. Yeah. Word. So actually, this one will be really interesting to you.
Bryce (06:37)
Let's start with delts. Yeah, yeah, you go.
Chris Beal (06:51)
So I said machine laterals. So my thought process here is you can overload the fuck out of a machine lateral pretty safely, right? Also, you can vary how you approach this. Do I want to go really heavy, with a really slow tempo? Do I want to kind of like speed this up a little bit, go for more of a pump? And because you are in a rigid setup, it's locked in.
Go until you can't right and I can very safely push you to failure often and If given something like this versus an overhead press, I think overhead press I love them, but they lend themselves to more injury, right? They know there's more risk and I think that you get enough One person especially your average individual could get enough dealt stimulus via other pressing patterns when targeting other push days and stuff like that, so I could say, you know what, my direct delt movement that I'm gonna lean on is gonna be a machine lab.
Bryce (07:51)
What do you think I said?
Chris Beal (07:52)
I went back and forth. I think Bryce could actually probably get behind this idea because I know he fucking loves machine laterals. But I also think he could go with a machine overhead press.
Bryce (08:01)
I said machine laterals. Yeah. Yeah. 100 % No. And for a lot of the same reasons, right? You mentioned being able to overload the eccentric control the tempo in every aspect. It is extremely controlled and stable. If you're trying to do laterals with cables or dumbbells or band anything, it is always going to have an inherent instability and more degrees of freedom.
Chris Beal (08:03)
Nice!
Bryce (08:30)
But whenever you're using a machine lateral, especially, and I think that this is a very important point that I want to make, maybe not that important for too many people. But if you are really, really focused on optimizing specifically hypertrophy, the pad should be at the elbow or forearm, not holding in the hand, right? If you're using a machine lateral where you have to hold the handle like doing a dumbbell lateral raise, that is going to be less effective than if you shorten the lever arm and you're using something that has a pad at the elbow forearm, all right, that is in my mind, inarguable. I will go to the death. And part of this too is because you remember whenever we did those eccentric overloaded laterals where you have a partner assisted eccentric overload. Whenever you do the concentric, you hold that you have someone else press down through the eccentric. There is nothing else that you can do something like that for delts outside of using a machine lateral raise, specifically one that has the pad at the elbow. So yeah, I think throughout a lot of these selections, I'm going to be defaulting towards stable movements, but also ones that don't have too many other limiting factors outside of the target muscle. So you mentioned overhead press. I thought about that, but then I was like, okay, well, what about someone's overhead mobility? Like most big men, we're a little bit more restricted with what we're able to do overhead comfortably. And then you're thinking about, all right, well, what if your triceps fatigue faster than your delts? Then all of a sudden you have one more limiting factor than you otherwise would. And there's just a lot that's going on there. And in general, if we're just talking about side delts, which I think is where my mind is going directly here too, because if we're talking rear delts, front delts, like that's going to be a completely different plane. So yeah, machine laterals, we can lock that one in.
Alright, so next muscle group, which one do you want to do?
Chris Beal (10:29)
Lats.
Bryce (10:32)
Lats, you want me to go? All right, so I'm going to say a single arm supinated machine pull down.
And all of those caveats, all of those qualifiers are very important. So unilateral for lats, I do think is very important. I think that if I am trying to optimize for a lat movement, I want it to be single arm. There are a few reasons for that, but just in terms of the way that the lats actually are, are structured, they're their architecture. It's very diverse. There's a lot of different fibers directionally. So you want something that allows you to manipulate your body a smidge to better align with the force vector. And you can't really do that if you're doing it bilaterally, you can't really cock yourself to one side, you can't really, you know, adjust your torso angle to more favorably favor one side or the other. So inevitably, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be making concessions for both sides, if you're doing a bilateral row, which is okay, sometimes like that's totally okay. But you're almost always gonna be able to get more range of motion with a single arm versus bilateral variation supinated or it could even be machine or excuse me, not machine, neutral. It could be neutral as well, but definitely not something that's pronated. So supinated or neutral because you're going to be able to keep your elbow a lot tighter and you're gonna have much more of that, much more of that lat engagement versus like your, your rhomboids, your traps, your mid -low traps. And then some kind of stable pull down something that has a well defined arc. Again, very important because you just don't want to be losing much energy. You don't want there to be any force that's escaping outside of exactly where you want it. And if you're doing something like a pull down variation, even a cable pull down, there's just some aspects of instability, some energy that's being lost there. So yeah, that is my choice.
Chris Beal (12:35)
So I was gonna ask, because I typically differentiate these, because machine pulldowns to me are more vertical. And then I like a machine high row, a supinated high row, where it's kind of extended out in front of you, and there's a horizontal component to it as well. So I was gonna ask, are you talking more high row or more strict supinated pulldown?
Bryce (12:53)
So I think the machines that I'm thinking of specifically are They're more of a vertical pull for sure But I think that the easiest way of performing them is with like a subtle lean back So I mean it's gonna always be more of a vertical pull than a horizontal or even like a hybrid But to effectively target your lats, you can't be straight vertical. Anyway, there has to be some degree of backwards lean so I would say trending a bit more towards vertical. But if you could stay at that 60 degree 70 degree pull down range, that's probably going to be the most out.
Chris Beal (13:35)
Yeah, no, I would agree. I always like when clients go, I have a pull down, like, well, you have a pull down or a high row. And then if you have a high row, like, how far out did the arms extend? Like, is it still more of a vertical pull with a horizontal twist? Like, what do we have going on here, you know? OK, cool. No, I can definitely get behind that. Actually, I had to rethink my own answer. And I think I'm still, I'm like 51 my answer, because I was between a machine high row and actually step back rows. And so step back rows for me.
The only con that I see with Step Back rows is the stability component, the initial proprioceptive control, being able to get into position. But in years of being a coach and teaching my clients and men and women alike, and also friends, turning them onto this and seeing them gravitate and continue to do it even after I'm not around anymore, which means you obviously fucking liked it, coaching it and in tweaking it to make sure that it fits the person is not been very difficult. And I think that kind of leads me into why I like it is I do like the individualization that you get, right? A person can sit down, they can stand up, they can lean a bit more, they can position themselves at a bit more of a rotational angle. So I think that they can kind of align in whatever their goals are or align better with whatever their goals are. And also they can align with their own natural setup, their own physiology, they can make sure like, hey, I'm shorter, I need to be here, I'm taller, I need to be here. So once they have that set up down, you can really load length and state. You can go pretty fucking heavy here, right? And then I also think it still calls it back to full body control. Like I do want people to subtly have to stabilize, not in so much a way that it severely detracts from the ability to drive stimulus in the target group, but I think a little bit of stabilization for just being wholly healthy and strong is good.
Bryce (15:33)
I would actually totally agree and that might be my second favorite movement. The only thing that I'm a little bit wary of and you know, maybe this is me adjusting my clear criteria on the fly. But I have seen quite a few instances of people being able to change the mechanics of a step back row just by how they're setting it up and how they're getting into place. And if they get something very subtly wrong, or even if they're like dropping their hips a little bit too far, they're taking too wide of a stance. If they have the wrong foot forward. And again, like this isn't necessarily something that we need to be thinking about. And you know, if I am keeping this more like my idealized universe and it doesn't matter anyway. But yeah, I agree. And I think that step back rows are fucking awesome.
Do you ever worry about the standardization? Because that's always been something I found myself easily shifting towards and taking advantage of is like the ability to almost cheat the movement whenever you start to get fatigued or start to go a little bit too heavy. So you can kind of just drop your hips a little bit lower and change the like the strength curve of the movement. So I don't know. What do you think about that?
Chris Beal (16:54)
I 100 percent agree with that. And it's actually a reason why I like it because I think that I think there's a time where I'm like, yeah, give me a little bit of body English, drop those hips, get that heavy load back. I don't want you doing it with fucking warm upsets. I don't want you doing it in week two or three of the block, but if we're in week six, seven, eight, we're doing a drop set and I want you to keep this shit going. You can, and you can very easily. They're like,
We have those movements that you cannot cheat. So when you fucking reach technical failure, it's a wrap. Like you can't do it. This isn't one of those. And we know that if you can get it back to you, you can control that stretch and still get that two, three, four second eccentric and really lengthen the lats. And then if you just drop back, almost like an assisted concentric, get it back in position. You can continue to do that. I like it for that reason.
Bryce (17:43)
You make valid points. I might have to weigh my options here. Yeah, we can move on while I weigh my options.
Let me see. Quads.
Chris Beal (17:55)
I'm gonna go with cannonball belt squats. Yeah, so I know that there's probably a decent amount of bias in this for me. I do like that it's a movement that again, once you find the position that works best for you, like the width of your stance, so on and so forth, it's very easy for the majority of individuals to get full range of motion at the knee.
Bryce (17:58)
Interesting, okay.
Chris Beal (18:22)
We love a full range of motion. It's a belt squat, so it still gives you that stabilization component, right? It's not just a, you know, a hack squat or a squat press, so on and so forth. But you can get a shit ton of range of motion. And because it's not you fully sitting upright, because you are kind of bent over and you're just focused on the actual just knee flexion extension, you can take those bitches far. Like you can take them far. You're not nearly as cardiovascularly taxed as you would if you were standing straight up and doing a traditional belt squat. And if you're talking about training your quads in a way that again requires you to stabilize your hips, but also you can still take the pitch heavy and far, I like cannonball squats for that.
Bryce (19:06)
That's not even something I thought of, but that is a good choice. I feel like I overlook cannonball squats or cannonball belt squats pretty frequently, and then I'll do them. I'll throw them in my program every once in a while, and then I'll be like, fuck, I remember why. I love this movement. And then by the next week, I forget about it completely, and I go back to doing my normal bullshit. But yeah, that is actually a great one, definitely does not get nearly enough love.
But I'm going to say pendulum squats. Probably could have guessed that I am a huge slut for pendulum squats, especially a good pendulum squat machine. If you can find one that is not ridiculously heavy, like the arsenal ones to where like, yeah, you put like a 10 on each side and you're already getting buried. But if you can find a really good one, a smooth one, it is such a lifesaver, not even just for building your quads, but just for building a strong squat pattern and also building healthy knees, it allows you to get deep as shit. Now I have to worry about your mobility. You can adjust your feet, adjust your stance, get as much knee flexion as you want. You can limit your knee flexion if you move your feet all the way on top or forward on the platform, but it takes a lot of pressure off of your low backs. You're not worried about that. You can push incredibly intensely close to failure beyond failure. If you want to with very little risk of injury to be honest. And another aspect of this that I absolutely love, and this isn't actually the best for building muscle because we really want an overloaded stretch at the bottom of the movement. But the way that pendulum squats are actually set up mechanically, it takes a lot of stress off of your tendons, your joints, your low back at the bottom of the movement where you're typically most vulnerable and the risk of injury is going to be the highest, especially if we're talking about a squat, like, you know, if you were going to pull a quad or if you were going to, you know, pop a quad tendon or an Achilles tendon or something like that, it always happens at the bottom of the squat. But the way that pendulums are set up, it really reduces that risk and it overloads the top, it overloads the lockout where your quads typically will have a little bit of a break. So again, mechanically, it is built to absolutely annihilate your quads. You don't get the same stretch that you might if you're doing a Smith squat or a hack squat even. But I think that the trade -offs are more than worth it for pendulums.
Chris Beal (21:32)
Yeah, no, I mean, I actually 100 % agree. I think the contingency for me is going to be the type of pendulum. Like I love, loved the pendulum at American Barbell. I hate the pendulum at Transform. I won't even use it. And so it definitely for me does depend, like, because it gets to a point for some that are just, in my opinion, poorly engineered for tall people. It gets to a point where I'm not buried in the bar at the bottom because I'm not strong. I'm buried at the bottom because it's like the angles of this are designed to bury me at the bottom. And now I can't even continue to push further to, you know, the intensity that I want. I can't get the volume that I want. And so that was my hesitation. There was just like, it's a specific engineering that I need to have for me to be like, yes, I want to do this.
Bryce (22:36)
I get that. This is a weird question, but what is the one movement that you would choose if you wanted the biggest pump in your quads?
Chris Beal (22:46)
See, I think most people would think like, yeah, you'd go like a leg extension or something like that. But I would probably actually choose a cybex squat press, like just really, really slow, like, like, pause at the bottom. And if you're doing that for like 10 to 15 reps, like you, your quads will be being throttled at the bottom of your compression shorts. Like you will have some fat fucking quads for the rest of your session.
Bryce (22:58)
Yeah, actually I think I might agree with that too. Specifically a Cybex squat press or squat press. Something that has like those mechanics and allows you to get a really deep range of motion and very similar to the pendulum squat. I mean, in a lot of ways it's just kind of like an inverted pendulum squat. It overloads lockout and if you do something like that for moderate to high reps with a very slow tempo, you are going to be fucked in a way that leg extensions cannot even compare to like a leg extension is like, it's like a superficial burn, right? It burns for sure. But as soon as you get off of leg extension, it goes away pretty quickly. The burn that you get from doing high rep leg presses or high rep hack squats or even like Spanish squats, like Spanish goblet squats, something like that, right? It is like such a deep burn, it stays with you, you have to elevate your legs, like you can't get it out. And that is the type of shit that's like, and that's like what grows your legs in my opinion, right? Like, yeah, everyone enjoys chasing the pump with leg extensions, which I mean, it's great. It's sexy. Like if you want a nice little vascular picture, you can totally do that. but I think that doing moderate to high reps, the slow tempo for compound movements, safe compound movements for your quads.
That's the type of shit that will actually grow your quads.
Chris Beal (24:39)
Yeah, I mean, short of doing some sort of like, occluded leg extension, you know, or whatever, right? Something fucking insane. Yeah, exactly. You, I, like you said, the burn is superficial. You can hop off, you shake your quad out and you walk it off. But like, if you get to set four, set five on like a deep side back squat press for sets of like eight to 15, good slow tempo, and you try to stand up after like your knees will buckle and your quads are burning and you're like you have the metabolic effect and also this like extreme fatigue like you just did these super heavy squats and you're like walking your knees are buckling but then they're also burning like you just did a million reps like there's just nothing like it.
Bryce (25:24)
Or even like a cluster set on leg press. I mean, that combines the overloading with the metabolic stress in a way that is really hard to hard to match and equate with anything else, which is why I love cluster sets. Like we talked about this ad nauseum, but doing them on like press, it's like it is so efficient and just fucking you up on a visceral level. But yeah, we can move on. all right. You choose now. Yeah, we can do traps. Want me to go?
Chris Beal (25:25)
Yeah, I separated into two. I did upper and mid to low traps. Just because I didn't feel like I found one that matched everything there. But you can go ahead.
Bryce (25:55)
Okay, all right, so we'll just break this up then. All right, so if we're gonna go upper traps, because I just did traps as a whole, but if we're gonna go upper traps, I would probably go with, ooh man, I might go with like a hybrid upright row. And that seems a little sacrilegious, but the reason I say that is because I like shrugs. I do. But my problem with shrugs is that you're always dealing with weights getting in the way. There's just always something in the way. Or if you're using a trap bar, which the weights aren't going to get in the way, it's just a little bit too wide. It just shrugs never feel right. They never feel right. unless you go super light and then they feel good, but then you have to do a million fucking drugs. And it's just like my neck starts getting fucked up. I don't know about you, but anyway. So I've always liked upright rows for traps, upper traps specifically. And I've even liked overhead plate raises for upper traps. Granted, you are going to have to take a little bit of that trade off with delts in there for sure. But I think for upper traps, I might say like a hybrid, easy, upright row.
Chris Beal (27:07)
Cool. I can rock with that. I went with Smith machine shrugs, a Cybex, give me a Cybex Smith machine shrug, aside from your dick getting in the way if you're a dude, but as long as you can like tuck it off to the side and compression shorts and it's not in the way. I feel like if you have a really good smooth Smith machine, you can load that bitch up and now you just get into position and pull, right? Cause the bar is going to go where it's going to go. You don't have to worry about controlling it and stuff like that. So as long as you're not uncomfortable pulling it close to your body. And like I said, your dicks out of the way. and women, you don't have this issue. Obviously. I think that you can take those very, very far in there. Also again, first of all, in the way that I can go really heavy or I can also go really light, close my eyes and go to a happy place and do that shit for, you know, three minutes and not raise my arms for the rest of the day.
Bryce (28:11)
Have you ever run into the issue? I mean, I'm sure you have, but this has always been something that's extremely frustrating for me, especially whenever it comes to anything with Smith Machine, anything heavy on Smith Machine is the bar inevitably wanting to just roll right back into the locked position. And that's something I've always dealt with because I do like heavy Smith shrugs and they make a lot more sense than doing barbell shrugs for sure. But I always get super frustrated mid set whenever the fucking thing just wants to roll back into the rack and I'm like, okay, well, let me just reset here, get my straps ready to go like to go again.
Chris Beal (28:46)
So the hack is you either have to be the one designing the gym or you have to be, to use your word, sacrilegious enough in a way to not want to stare in the mirror at yourself because typically Smith machines are facing the mirror, but they're facing the mirror in the way that if you were to walk into a Smith, you'd have to roll it forward almost to get it out. And then you're pulling up and you're kind of pulling with the way it wants to rotate anyway. And so as you start to fatigue and your hands are like rolling on themselves, they're going to pull it back into the lock position. I made Aaron, and me and Brian moved the Smith machine. We reversed it. So we could still look into the rack, you actually pull it towards you. So you'd have to actually lean up and roll it forward to lock it back into position.
Bryce (29:21)
All right, I got you. I got you, that makes sense. All right, what about mid lower traps?
Chris Beal (29:36)
I went with meadows rows. Again, for some of the earlier reasons that I use for other movements, very versatile, whether you want to road belly button when you roll up, but obviously if you were going to mid traps, you want to be able to step out a little bit, flare your elbows a little bit, drive more into that upper back. You can overload this, you can go from a deficit, like you can do a lot of different things. And because it's a landmine, you're also not restricted by any sort of rigid machine pattern. Like you can go with whatever mobility you have and kind of make this movement fit. And also like, I mean, it's a unilateral pattern, so you can take your time. It's painstaking, but they're very effective in my opinion.
Bryce (30:14)
No, yeah, I love Meadows rows. I think that that's a great choice. I'm actually gonna say something that is probably pretty unique. I'm gonna say Snatch grip RDLs.
Chris Beal (30:24)
Mmm.
Bryce (30:26)
And this is for sure my bias showing. I know that there are probably 1% of people that like snatch grip, anything or find any use in them. And that's okay. Again, let me live in my idyllic universe, but whenever you do snatch grip RDLs or any kind of snap snatch grip deadlift correctly, you are placing your traps, specifically your mid lower traps in a position that forces them to contract statically in a postural way to just maintain that position because otherwise your shoulders are going to roll forward and it's going to put you in a very compromising position to be able to do whatever you're trying to do, whether it's a hinge, whether it's even like a snatch grip high pool or something like that. But your traps have to work incredibly hard just to maintain that upper back position.
So one of the reasons I love something like a snatch grip RDL for building your mid lower traps is because of the postural component. You can't do the RDL unless your traps are working hard as fuck to control the weight. And if anyone has ever done a heavier heavy ish snatch grip RDL, snatch grip block pull, snatch grip deadlift, anything like that, what you'll know immediately the next day is your traps are working super, super fucking hard. It is a soreness that is pretty hard to replicate with anything else. Yes, it's probably just because you're not training your traps and your upper back in that way regularly. But I think that that kind of goes to my point as something like a snatch grip. RDL is going to hit your mid and lower traps in a way that they're just not used to with any kind of other row variation. So that is what I would say. And again, you know, this is me kind of deviating off of what I've gone with for other movements because there are other limiting factors. There are a ton of prerequisites and contingencies to go with a Snatch Grip RDL. But I do think it's unique enough and I find enough value in it that if you are one of the 1 % of people that enjoy Snatch Grip, find value in them and can also view them without fucking yourself up, if you want to build your mid lower traps, might as well give that a shot.
Chris Beal (32:46)
Yeah, I actually could be swayed here because I thought about a postural movement like a stiff leg that lifts like a snatch grip block pool, a snatch grip rack pool. I've never felt the soreness that was so similar to football soreness. Like the day after just like running into people for a full game, the way I did when my upper back, my mid back was affected by those heavy block pulls that we would do, especially when we would go snatch grip and you'd wake up the next day and it didn't feel like the muscle had been contracting, you know, against heavy load. It looks like someone had been punching you in the back for however long the day before. And you're like, motherfucker, like this is uncomfortable.
And I think that the point that then I would make is that because I mean, anyone listening, how often do you see really, really well -developed mid and low traps? Less so often than you see other parts of the back, right? People have a hard time driving into their mid and low back over and over again because it fatigues, it's weak. People start to cheat a movement like people will inevitably do with the metals row or any sort of like t -bar row or whatever, just a row more into your lats because that's where you're stronger and you can carry the set on and people don't have that that deliverance to say no I want to really target this group so I'm going to go lighter and focus on keeping my elbows flared so on and so on. So if you wanted to like in a sense foolproof like I know that we're going to like fuck the right muscle grouping your upper back up and I can trust you to perform this movement. I think this is a really good choice.
Bryce (34:27)
And another thing, not to appeal to authority here, but it is telling to look at the people that have extremely well developed mid backs, mid lower traps and see what they do. Some of the most well developed jacked people in the world are going to be some smaller weight class Olympic weightlifters in terms of pure density of muscle mass because they have to they're in weight classes. But look at their backs, look at their erectors, look at their traps, their mid lower traps. They're so fucking muscular, so dense. A lot of it is because of the exercises that they're doing. They're doing a lot of snatch grip stuff. They're doing a lot of high pulls. They're doing a lot of front squats. So they're having to hold things in rack positions. And if you hold something in a rack position, your upper back is getting absolutely fucking annihilated. So this is another point. If you want a very strong upper back, just hold a heavy barbell in the front squat position for like a minute. Your upper back will get fucked. We'll get fucked up. That's not what I would necessarily say is the best use of your time and energy for growing muscle, but it's indicative, right? It kind of gives you hints as to what you need to be doing or ways that you can be improving your training here or there. And again, like you're upper mid back. It's very responsive to things that are postural in nature. So snatch grip RDLs. Maybe give them a try. One of these days. Don't break in half.
All right, next one. Let's go. Go biceps.
Chris Beal (35:59)
Word. pretty straightforward for me here. I'm thinking for pure growth and with something like biceps, any curl variation, that's not a machine. You're going to get people who start to swing. It's hard to standardize. It's hard to make people stay disciplined and make sure that they're targeting the bicep, not swinging and getting a lot of shoulders. There's one and so forth in there. So I said machine preachers and sit your ass down, take that seat, sit it low so your arms are fully extended in the eccentric. The shit's going to suck. You're going to use less load. Give me good, strong adherence to tempo, full extension, full flexion. And I think we got, we got a money deal there.
Bryce (36:50)
Why machine over EZ?
Chris Beal (36:51)
I think the machine just still lends itself to like a good stable setup. And also, I think that when you have a machine, the load is in a single point. Whereas you do have the, well, the bark kind of do this, or whatever the fuck. So if you're pulling a single point, it kind of mimics a cable in that aspect. But then you also have the elbow pad. You can load it up with plates, so you can microload. So that's why I want a machine.
Bryce (37:06)
Yeah. So I had two written down here, kind of 1A and 1B. One of them is machine preachers. So that is one of my choices. The other one, again, this might be completely out there, but I said supinated pull -ups.
Chris Beal (37:31)
That's my second one. I was like, I could go with this. Though I'm curious what your argument was because my reason why I went with machine preachers was their unfuckableness right. Like it's like it's harder to get like, hey, I want you to bias your biceps really, really like focus on what's going on with your elbows, not your back, not trying to pull yourself to the bar. And because that can be a snag for some people.
Bryce (37:45)
Yes.
Chris Beal (37:57)
I said, machine's easy. I don't have to teach you anything here. Like just do it right and we should be good.
Bryce (38:03)
Yeah, I would say that for 90 % of people, we're probably talking about machine preacher curls for the better movement. But you know, if we're surely breaking this down into which exercise is going to give you the highest growth stimulus in your biceps, discounting everything else, right? I think it could be supinated pull ups and I think most people will fuck them up and, again, it's meant to be a more biceps biased pull up, which is very hard for a lot of people to conceptualize. And inevitably you're going to be using a lot of lats. You're going to be using a lot of forearms, a lot of rear delts, a lot of a lot of things. And it's going to be pretty unstable as well. Right. So anyone who's ever done a pull up, especially if you are not just an extremely coordinated and strong individual, you know that you swing all over the place. Right. And whenever we're after hypertrophy, that's not what we want.
We don't want a lot of that extraneous energy, which is why I would say that most pull up variations in general are not my favorite for hypertrophy. So I would say that like a wide grip pull up or neutral grip pull up, you know, they wouldn't be at the top of my chart for back development. But whenever we start going to something like an assisted pull up or a rack pull up, all of a sudden now we have a conversation, right? But the stability is the difference there. That is what I think detracts from normal pull ups. But with supinated pull ups specifically, I really liked the range of motion that you get with biceps. And I like the ability to just overload the fuck out of your biceps, right? And there is also that component where because it is a compound movement, it feels to me like your biceps would be aided to a degree by your lats and by the other muscles that are contributing. So it wouldn't be as isolated as a machine preacher curl, which we know that, but there might be some, some other effect that would maybe even allow you to push beyond the traditional failure point that you might see with a curl variation. If you are doing a supinated pull up, for example, but nothing set in stone there. I just thought that that was something to throw in because it's not something I ever see talked about whenever it comes to biceps training and you know, there are definitely good reasons for that. I wouldn't recommend it for most people, but in terms of magnitude, it's a really hard hitting movement and so are a lot of back movements, a lot of rows, a lot of pull downs. Most people don't understand just how much that stimulates your biceps, your forearms, your brachialis.
Chris Beal (40:38)
Mm -hmm.
Bryce (40:52)
Most people don't even need to train their biceps directly because if you're doing a sufficient amount of rows and pull downs, you're getting a buck ton of biceps training. Same thing with triceps with normal presses. You're getting a ton of volume in just from being a secondary, you know, ancillary muscle group to all of those other movements. But yeah, interesting thought experiments.
Chris Beal (41:13)
I know I definitely, especially when you throw in a machine assistant there, right? Because yes, to echo the point we made about the step back rows, being able to push beyond failure, but also like if you have a machine set up where you can appropriate the load in a way that allows you to get a certain volume. And then like you said, like you can on a machine set your knees back a bit more posterior. And all of a sudden now it's like super bicep dominant.
But then as you start to fail, you can elevate your chest a little bit and all of a sudden you can recruit your lats a bit more to get yourself through the concentric and again, fully lengthen, really focusing on the biceps lengthening. So I think there's a strong argument for them when done correctly to be an excellent bicep movement.
Bryce (41:59)
Let's move on. You want to choose?
Chris Beal (42:01)
I want to do triceps or calves.
Bryce (42:03)
Let's jump right into triceps.
Chris Beal (42:05)
Word. What do you think?
Bryce (42:07)
Alright, I'm gonna say machine dips.
Yeah. So, I'll, I'll say a pen loaded machine because I feel like most plate loaded machine dips are trash for the most part, but a good, well -designed machine dip is fucking awesome for triceps development. And there are a lot of things very much like biceps, a lot of things that can be said here for the more traditional isolation, single joint movements.
Chris Beal (42:18)
Hmm.
Bryce (42:39)
And, you know, triceps definitely do not have a lack of those types of exercises, but just going for magnitude and going for exercises that can effectively load the muscle through various points of the range, but also like muscle lengths, stretch, midpoint contraction. I think that a machine dip is going to be pretty dope, especially if we're talking about like, I hate to say it hate to be sacrilegious again. It's blasphemy, but like a good hoist machine did. Man, it's nice. It's nice if you can get it set up right. It feels good.
Chris Beal (43:11)
No, I definitely love a good machine dip. I'll usually take the seat, set it all the way down, get on my knees and like get that full, full reach. I love the machine dip for all the reasons you chose. I also think that the triceps being a large, large muscle group, and especially speaking to the guys out there, you know, when you're trying to grow your triceps and you want to find an opportunity to really stress them under a heavy load.
Typically, they're always getting the seconds of the chest. Well, I did this for my chest, but my tris got kind of burnt out here. So then I'll just finish off with dips or extensions. But look at what your triceps start to do and how they start to change if instead of a traditional machine press at the beginning of one of your push days, you implement an inclined close grip Smith machine or a pin press. And you just get like a really, really good stretch at the bottom. You pause there, you drive up and you don't lock out. You come right back down. So you get that like constant time under tension, but also you can put it under a shit ton of load, pretty much unmatched by any other tricep exercise, short of like a really heavy close dip setup.
So that would be my answer is probably like a close grip Smith machine incline or not. I like the incline because I like the stretch you get to your shoulders and the chest activation that I get or like a pin press.
Bryce (44:39)
How do you feel about overhead tricep extension variations? So whether that's like a dumbbell, whether that's an easy bar, whether that is a cable, like being bent over facing away, single arm, bilateral, like how do you feel about those?
Chris Beal (44:54)
I feel like you have to be in too much of a vacuum for me to trust that they're gonna help us long term. Like I have to know that your shoulders are still healthy, your upper back is strong enough to stabilize, right? Because what happens is people start here and then they end up way out here because they have to start making it more advantageous when they continue. And I'm like, eh, I love this movement. Mostly because I love how it looks. I love a good stretch. It looks good in the mirror. You can like fully, fully just sync that fucking easy bar behind your head or whatever you're using. But as you fatigue, the movement breakdown is pretty drastic.
So I'm like, we'll leave it. It'll be in the top five maybe. Maybe top eight.
Bryce (45:30)
Yeah. Honestly, I don't see too much of a difference between doing something like a seated EZ bar overhead tricep extension versus doing something like a machine overhead press. And in terms of what your triceps are actually receiving, sure, the extension is more isolated, right? Like you're not relying on your delts to be the prime movers, but your triceps are getting an absolute fuck ton of stimulus doing any kind of overhead press and they're in a very similar position, not the same stretch, not the same mechanics, but they're in a similar position that they would be if you're doing an overhead extension. And I agree with you strongly that most people's mobility is going to not allow them to sustain a good enough and risk free enough position doing an overhead extension to where a bilateral variation makes much sense long term. You're going to beat up your shoulders. You're going to beat up your elbows. And it's just really, it's not worth it. Right? So if we're talking about unilateral, I would start to listen to that. But at the same time, it's like, you're not really getting that much stimulus anymore. Right? Because it's still a very, it's an unstable position. Like just put your arm above your head and start trying to do some extensions. Like it just feels weird on your shoulder, you like moving your elbow around, moving your upper arm around, trying to figure out what is the best angle to do that at. And nothing really feels that great. It just doesn't feel that great.
But what the mythology around overhead extensions has always been is that your, your long head of your triceps, it crosses your shoulder joint and to fully train your triceps, your long head, your triceps in general. You have to lengthen it. You have to add in some kind of, you know, shoulder flexion to fully lengthen your long head and allow it to get stimulated to the degree that a skull crusher variation would with the other two triceps heads. And I still think that that's kind of bullshit, but what I would counter with is like, has anybody ever done something like a more extended range of motion skull crusher? So rolling or even like a PJR pullover? Have we ever done those together? So if anybody who's listening has never done a PJR pullover, go try it. Go try it. Start lighter and load, but it will fuck you up so hard. Like your triceps will be so wrecked the next day. You'll have to be careful because you'll be worried that you're going to tear your shit.
It's a pullover and a tricep extension hybrid. So you just do it on a flat bench, but you can do it on decline, incline, whatever you want to do. But it combines that shoulder movement, that shoulder flexion extension with the elbow flexion extension. So it turns it into a hybrid movement. But in reality, that's all you're really trying to get from an overhead extension anyway. You're just trying to get that shoulder flexion to be able to lengthen your long head. But you can do that without having to go fully overhead.
Chris Beal (48:40)
Mm -hmm.
Bryce (48:45)
Right. It's the fully overhead that puts you in a compromising position and it tears your elbows up. So all that to say is I think that we should be aiming to take all of our muscles through full ranges of motion. We should look for movements that put them in the most extreme ranges of lengthening and also shortening and sticking with triceps like, you know, cross cable tricep extensions. Just a sick movement if you want to get your triceps as short and contracted as possible. But magnitude isn't going to be the same as some of the other movements that we're talking about in terms of stimulus. But this is going to be a theme that we talked about. There's always going to be some kind of trade off, right? There are very, very few exercises that allow you to maintain the same tension in the extreme shorten range, but also the extreme lengthen range for one muscle group. It's very, very difficult to find something like that.
So whenever we get to glutes, just using glutes as an example, no, that's where you start to have to figure out what you're after. Are you trying to overload the shortened position with something like a hip thrust? Or are you trying to overload the lengthened position of your glutes with something like an RDL or deadlift variation or squat pattern? And you have to make those choices, right? And there aren't always binary yes or no questions or yes or answers to these questions.
Chris Beal (49:45)
Mm.
Bryce (50:04)
It's really just about what your circumstances are, what you're trying to do, you know, what, where your strengths and weaknesses lie. And then you have to kind of plug and fill in the gaps from there. But I actually think that maybe we turn this into two episodes because we still have, we still have five muscle groups. And I think that might be another episode. And those are all kind of big ones too, because we have hamstrings, glutes, calves.
Chris Beal (50:18)
Word? Yeah.
Bryce (50:31)
Erectors and pecs and I feel like we can talk quite a bit about at least three of those
Chris Beal (50:36)
We're, you know, I'm down with that. We can definitely make this a part one, part two. I will add on the tricep stuff, bent over cable skull crushers, where you allow the cables to like carry up and you get that short reflection. And also, and I understand why. I just like it because it's obviously like it's on a cable.
Bryce (50:47)
But that mimics, that mimics like a PJR pullover.
Chris Beal (50:59)
And so that could get a consistent feeling for the person using it. Also, I think that it's just easier on the shoulders. You're not laying down and reaching back. You're bent over, so you have a bit more core support. You're braced. You can kind of control a bit more of your destiny there. And then I understand why it doesn't get as much love, because the wrists are always an issue for most people, but like a reverse grip tricep extension, especially if you're leaning forward and you really allow it to stretch. When it brings your elbows in, when you take your elbows from being here to being here, you do get that really good long head stretch. And if you're doing any sort of high volume, like reverse grip, it's gonna feel like you have a knot here. Like you're gonna have to like go and shake your arm out. So you could definitely get some long head action with those two movements.
Bryce (51:43)
Yeah, for sure. and then there also is something to be said, just continuing with the triceps, about whether it is possible or not to even isolate or bias the individual heads. so we were just talking about long head versus the, the other two heads, two, we're going to fucking do this again. I'm in my head. I'm like, okay, long head, short head, medial head. But I've seen some people on YouTube, some content creators who are very knowledgeable talking about how there is an ability to bias the individual triceps heads with the way that you're performing movements, the angle of your upper arm relative to your torso. You know, if you cock out your elbow a little bit more and abduct it away from your body some then you know, through different studies that they've done with EMGs. Like, you know, there might be a little bit more muscle activity and like the lateral head of the triceps. If you're a little bit more cockeyed, I tend to be one of those people who really don't give a fuck about that stuff.
I think that it's arguing semantics and I don't think that any of that has practical value, like legitimately almost zero practical value outside of thinking it's semi interesting on an intellectual level. But whenever it comes to giving people recommendations, like with pec training. And this is something we'll get into, I think it's almost a fool's errand to try and tell people to train based on your sternal or clavicular pecs. But same thing with lats, right? Like I think it is too much cognitive load, too much for people to think about to tell them to try and bias these muscle groups by heads, by regions, whatever, right?
Unless you're talking about something like the delts, where it is so apparent and so fucking easy to do, then you almost have to be stupid to not be able to do that, right? Like you can visually see the difference just by looking at someone do a front raise, side raise or rear delt raise, right? But again, if we're talking about just this super obscure esoteric shit, minimal differences between like minimal mechanical differences between movements. Or if we're talking about having to extensively set up an exercise to be extremely specific in particular, it has very little practical value and that's a hill that I'll probably die on. Again, I think it's interesting if we're doing this from the perspective of like what if scenarios or if we're trying to use that, that data and that knowledge to carry that back into how this affects the way that you do certain exercises at a more practical level and how that integrates into your programming as a whole.
But from the perspective of being able to isolate specific regions of very complex muscle groups, I think that it's almost always better to just focus on movements that feel good for you. Those that you get a lot of positive biofeedback from, that are easy to set up, easy to replicate, easy to progress over the long term. And outside of that, that's probably a fucking great movement for you.
Chris Beal (55:13)
Short of professional Olympians. I get it. I get it if a professional Olympian is like, hey, I really need to isolate this part of my hamstrings or this part of my glutes or this part of whatever. I'm like, okay. But also, the reason why I also concede that is I'm like, you're going to do all the necessary things all the time to make sure you do this, because this is your profession. This is what you do, right? Your average everyday person who is like, I really want to target this part, the upper glute. I really want to target this part of my back. It's like, well, sure. But let's talk about why you are the way you are and just basic high level stuff. Your body's built the way it's built because of your genes and then angles, the angles of your bones, where your insertion points are, so on and so forth. So what you're essentially going to do is in your three to five sessions a week, you're going to try to counteract what your body does for the other eight to 15 hours.
Bryce's bowlegged as a motherfucker and I have a strong, a strong inclination, a strong belief that it probably plays into why his fucking medial teardrop is the way it looks on top of also just having a really, really low insertion point and it hangs right next to his knee. But I'm like, if a person is literally like their legs are wrapping around shit and they're like almost doing this, I'm like, I could see them really emphasizing the medial side of their fucking medial portions of their quad.
Who knows, right? Like who fucking knows it's interesting to think about. But I think about that and I go, true or not, all of our bodies work that way. If your hips are slightly rotated, if you have slight versioning, all of those things are going to lead to longer lasting muscular development than anything you do in the gym. So if you go to the gym and you go, well, I'm going to actively try to work against this or work around this. I'm like, but are you going to do that for the other however many hours, are you gonna walk differently? Are you gonna sit differently?
So when you think about it that way, like you said, what's the ROI on you really focusing on this? Especially if you can't dedicate the time throughout the day to always focus on it versus just being like, you know what? I got a low ass. Most of my glute meat is at the bottom. I don't have that glute shelf, but I can grow the fuck out of the lower glutes, the glutes that naturally just kind of sit there for me and I can still grow a giant fucking ass. I just won't have that fucking whatever and that's fine.
Bryce (57:45)
Yeah, no, another huge aspect of this is if we're talking about people at the absolute highest level Olympians, right? So the people getting on the Mr. Or Miss Olympia stage. These are people who are not going to be losing anything by making these trade offs or by experimenting with their training, right? Because they don't have to put on 50 pounds of muscle mass to get where they want to go. If you're someone who is looking to compete at a regional bodybuilding show and you need to get bigger fucking everywhere, like you just need to gain muscle and you're worried about whether this specific variation targets your lateral head or your medial head of your triceps and you're trying to take, you know, 10 minutes to set this exercise up, bro. You have better shit to fucking worry about, right? Same thing for women. And again, this will be something I'm sure that will hammer home with the glutes talk.
Yes, there are certain movements that can, if you set them up and execute them in the right way, preferentially target your upper glutes or your lower glutes, right? It is possible in the theoretical sense, okay? Again, what is the practical value of this? Especially for 99.9% of people. You're going to get so much more out of just setting up hip thrust, setting up RDLs, setting up split squats in a way that best targets best biases, your glutes, and then learning how to just train fucking hard and then progressing yourself over time and keeping very close track as, as the volume load increases. You're going to get so much more out of that than you would trying to set up this super fucking ridiculous looking like glute kickback from a quadruped stance with like three bands attached to you and like someone smacking you the back of the head. But the thing is bro is like you know, you've seen this type of shit.
It's so sexy to look at because again, everyone feels like they're so close to having like Miss Olympia level glutes and they're just missing that 15th band step out variation, right? If we just add one more band, well, that'll be the difference. But it's like, focus on the things that actually are going to matter. If you have small glutes, adding another band is not gonna fucking give you big glutes.
It's not if you already have fucking jacked glutes and you're on a Miss Olympia stage and you have a little tiny ass divot in your upper glute and the judge is like, hey, maybe fill in that ass divot. What do you have to lose? Right? Like you like you can go do the you can go fucking do lunges twice a week and maintain your glute mass because you're doing everything else perfectly. And you're at that point taking PEDs. You're eating a ton of protein. Your training is optimized. You're getting a lot of sleep. Your glutes aren't going to go anywhere.
Chris Beal (1:00:44)
Right, right, right.
Bryce (1:01:01)
So you're not missing anything by just experimenting with that stupid looking exercise, right? But there is a huge opportunity cost for most people to get caught in the weeds with these stupid exercises or the exercises that might have application for the absolute highest level, but have less than zero against opportunity costs. So it turns it into a negative. If you start focusing on the wrong things.
Chris Beal (1:01:27)
Yeah, I agree. I think it's a really good cliffhanger to leave everyone because I like all this glutes talking is getting fucking hot. And I'm like, that's right. Come back next week, bitches. Sweet. Well, that's what we'll do. We'll grab part two next week. We will cover chest, erectors, calves, hamstrings and glutes, which will be fun. So we will see you next time. Let us know what you think about this episode. Let us know if you have movements that you think we left off the list and.
Bryce (1:01:27)
That's all I want to say.
Chris Beal (1:01:53)
We'll take that into consideration. Maybe we'll address a couple of them. Talk to you guys soon. Just leave glutes off, like to get to like calves and be like, all right guys, see you fucking later. Go ahead and stop this.
Bryce (1:01:56)
We're just not gonna do glutes. We won't do glutes. We'll just leave that one off.
DISCLAIMER: Bryce Calvin is not a doctor or registered dietitian. The contents of this document should not be taken as medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health problem - nor is it intended to replace the advice of a physician. Consult your physician on matters regarding your health. Materials in email transactions are not to be shared.