Is Your Workout Program Suffering from Exercise Redundancy?

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This Week’s Healthy Discussion

1. Maximize Your Gains by Eliminating Redundant Exercises

   a. Common Mistakes

   b. Bad Examples

2. Apply For Coaching

Maximize Your Gains by Eliminating Redundant Exercises

Are you unknowingly wasting time in the gym? Exercise redundancy occurs when multiple exercises in your workout routine target the same muscle groups in a nearly identical way.

The concept of redundancy is that when we already train a muscle in a specific way, then why would add another exercise that does the exact same movement but it’s on a different machine or equipment.

It’s redundant.

Can we train the chest with 2-3 exercises? Yes, but should we train the chest with a dumbbell flat press, a machine flat press, and a pec deck fly? No.

We want to take an honest look at our program and really understand the muscle functions to filter out any exercises that are just repeating what we just did.

Common Mistakes

There are infinite examples however these are a few that I see the majority of the time:

1. Lat Pulldowns and Pull-ups:

   The latissimus dorsi is working in the frontal plane for both of these exercises.

2. DB Curls and Cable Curls

   When facing the cable, this has the same resistance profile as a dumbbell curl would.

3. Lunge and a Bulgarian Split Squat

   These are the same movement for the quads or glutes (depending on how your set up is)

Mistakes are everywhere but once you start being intentional with your choices, avoiding redundancy gets much easier.

Bad Examples

Some misinterpretations I’ve seen of exercise redundancy are:

1. Tricep Extension and a Tricep Dip

   These are both tricep exercises but are biasing different sections of the tricep

2. Lat Row and a Pulldown

   Same concept as the previous example, but for the lats. These are both lat exercises but they are biasing two different portions of the lats as well as working the muscle in different planes (frontal and sagittal).

We can’t just say hitting a muscle twice in a workout is redundant when there are plenty of other cards at play.

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