A Guide to Exercise Order for Muscle Growth
5 minute read!
“You gotta start with the heavy compounds bro”. Do you?
This advice will probably get you a good chunk of the way to your muscle growth or fat loss goals. But optimal results require more nuance. Optimal, of course, within your own individual constraints.
You want to consider the structure of your training program and how you periodize it. Exercise selection, volume, load, intensity (relative effort), frequency, technique, among others, are important components of your training program. Another component to consider, within the training session itself, is the exercise order. If your goal is to build muscle, or maintain muscle while losing fat, then it’s important to consider exercise order when you’re designing your training program.
Exercise order is pretty self-explanatory and just describes the order in which you complete your exercises during a single training session. You can also broaden this concept out to how you might order your exercises across a single microcycle (1 week of training) for best results. For example, should you start the week with heavy compound exercises and end the week with lighter isolation exercises? Or vice-versa? Or should it be equally distributed across the week? These are important questions and the answer would require a lot of nuance and considerations, but this article focuses on exercise order within a single training session.
Much of the current recommendations out there by governing bodies and fitness coaches is to order the exercises within a session based on how many muscle groups are involved in the specific exercise. Typically the recommendation goes something like “start your session with heavy compound exercises (ie. squats, deadlifts, bench press, barbell rows, etc.) and work your way down to lighter isolation movements (ie. biceps curls, cable triceps pushdowns, chest flyes, etc.)”. You might also find recommendations that say to order your exercises based on the size of the muscle you’re training, whether that is with compound or isolation exercises. This would mean starting your leg sessions with glutes or quads and finishing them with calves. Or starting your upper body sessions with chest and back and finishing them with shoulders, biceps, and triceps.
These recommendations seem to make a lot of sense on the surface and it might be what our intuition would lead us to do naturally. But is it optimal for muscle growth?
There are certain topics within exercise science research on muscle hypertrophy which have a huge foundation of studies to provide really solid guidelines. Currently, as of today, exercise order for muscle growth is not one of those topics, with pretty limited research. The latest research review and meta-analysis published on exercise order by Nunes and colleagues (2023) included a total of 7 studies which directly or indirectly measured muscle hypertrophy. Previous to that, another review that was published in 2012 included only 3 studies looking at muscle hypertrophy and exercise order (Simao et al., 2012).
For strength gains it seems that your best gains will occur in the exercises that you start your session with, whether or not you start with multi-joint (compound) or single-joint (isolation) exercises. Strength goals are typically exercise-specific. So, if your goal is to gain the most strength in a particular exercise then that exercise should be prioritized at the beginning of the training session.
We can derive a lot of good training principles from strength training and translate them to principles for hypertrophy training. But, they don’t always directly carry over. For example, the optimal volume, intensity, and proximity to failure that you use when training for strength are going to differ when training for hypertrophy. Exercise order is similar and the recommendations for strength gains can’t be directly carried over to the recommendations for hypertrophy gains.
The research on exercise order and hypertrophy, although quite limited, doesn’t show any significant differences in muscle growth between different exercise orders. Whether you start your session with compound exercises or isolation exercises, similar hypertrophy is seen across the board.
BIG caveat. Some of the studies were not always measuring the specific target muscle for the exercises being performed. For example, biceps growth was measured during a session that started with biceps curls first and a session that started with lat pull-downs first and found that biceps growth was similar in both conditions. This is able to tell you that maybe the biceps (typically an isolation movement) can be placed at the beginning or the end of the session and grow similarly. But it’s not able to tell you if the lats (typically compound movement) can get the same amount of growth at the start of the training session as it would at the end.
Real world recommendation:
Currently, the best recommendation I can give is to prioritize the muscles that you want to grow the most at the beginning of your training session.
Why?
Fatigue accumulates as you go through the training session. Each exercise not only adds to the local muscle fatigue of the target muscle you’re training, but also adds fatigue to the synergist muscles, the respiratory system, and the nervous system. Heavier compound movements will add more fatigue to the latter 3 than lighter isolation movements. You’re the most fresh at the beginning of your training session and you’ll likely be able to put in the most relative effort for the initial exercise.
When you perform a bench press at the beginning of your session you are fatiguing your chest muscles. You’re also fatiguing your triceps and you’ll probably limit your performance in the triceps exercises that are later on in your session. If you’ve got a big chest and small triceps you might want to consider starting with some sort of triceps exercise and put your chest exercises on the back burner.
A psychological benefit you might get is that you get to start the training session with the exercises you want to do most. That’s right you can throw the biceps curls, triceps extensions, or lateral raises at the beginning of the session if those are the muscles that you want to grow the most. This might not be a benefit though if you have certain muscles that are small because you neglect to train them all together “”cough””cough”” calves.
There are cases where it might not matter much which order your exercises are in. For example, if you have biceps curls and hamstring curls in the same workout does it matter which one comes first? Probably not. The fatigue accumulated from these exercises probably won’t interfere in any measurable way with the growth of your hamstrings or your biceps regardless of the order. If you have deadlift and leg press in the same session however, you’ll want to consider whether glute growth (with the deadlift) or quad growth (with the leg press) is your priority.
So, do you have to start every training session with heavy compounds and work your way to isolations? Certainly you can, and you’ll probably get great results all around. But also you certainly don’t have to, and you can prioritize your exercise order based on the muscles that you want to grow the most.
Later people,
Jamie
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References:
Nunes, J. P., Grgic, J., Cunha, P. M., Ribeiro, A. S., Schoenfeld, B. J., de Salles, B. F., & Cyrino, E. S. (2021). What influence does resistance exercise order have on muscular strength gains and muscle hypertrophy? A systematic review and meta-analysis. European journal of sport science, 21(2), 149-157.
Simao, R., De Salles, B. F., Figueiredo, T., Dias, I., & Willardson, J. M. (2012). Exercise order in resistance training. Sports medicine, 42, 251-265.