How many exercises should you do per muscle?
- There are several lifters who tends to train their muscles with numerous exercises but how many should YOU do?
- What are the movements required for the best outcomes?
This article below has the details!
The lifters who do various workouts combine compounds, follow diverse movement forms and do isolation exercises to function their muscles from diverse angles.
Such as:
- Pec deck
- Flat barbell bench press
- Incline dumbbell flyes
- Decline chest press machine
- Incline dumbbell bench press
In short, this is all about holistic training.
There is no predefined number of exercised to be done per muscle. Therefore, exercise in surplus certainly won't result in improved outcomes. Every human body react differently to exercises.
Despite that, one should know about the other aspects to consider when making a plan of how many exercises to do per body part. Your training regimen will be more individualized if you take these factors into consideration rather than picking exercises at random.
Let us help you to select how and which movements is useful for each muscle group:
Muscle Anatomy
Few muscles in the body have complex design and have more functionality. These structurally complex muscles require more exercises to develop completely. A human body has more than 600 muscles. It is very difficult to talk about each muscle movement.
Following is the list of few body parts and muscles that a bodybuilder will focus to develop:
Muscles with single function doesn’t require various exercises. For example, back needs more work than triceps and chests also need more exercises than calves.
Muscle Fiber Orientation
Although muscles have a single name, they can consist of numerous head-shaped clusters of fibres. These heads function together yet can also be emphasized by setting the angle of the limbs.
Some examples for this are represented below:
- Deltoids – anterior, medial, and posterior heads
- Trapezius – upper, middle, and lower heads
- Pectoralis major – clavicular, sternal, and costal heads
The other muscle group that are made up of numerous individual muscles are:
- Hamstrings – biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus
- Quadriceps – vastus lateralis, rectus femoris, vastus medialis, and vastus intermedius
- Triceps surae – gastrocnemius and soleus
Therefore, we say, the more heads and diverse fiver alignments a muscle has, the more mixed an exercise selection is need to be done.
Bi-Articular Muscle Theory
Biarticular muscles are the muscles which are crossed and affect 2 joints such as biceps, hamstrings and triceps etc.
For example, squats can be a mighty leg workout. In the motion of hip and knee, rectus femoris contributes. Vastus lateralis develops due to squats.