OK, it’s going to be just one aspect of how i design my workout, but it’s an important one.
Think of training as painting where every exercise is like a stroke of a brush - some exercises are large brushes and some are small brushes. A painter will always start with large brush and finish with small one. You will start a portrait by framing the head and shoulders with a large brush and finish by adding some sparkle to the eye and the ear ring with a tiny brush.
a deadlift is like using a big brush to define where the subject will roughly be located on the canvas. nautilus machine concentration curls to get a pump in the bicep peak is like using a tiny brush to put that sparkle in the eye at the end.
in training you must move from big to small, and i don’t necessarily mean chronological order but rather the order of priorities and thus the order in which you plan the workout.
so like in a painting you might use the outline of head and shoulders or horizon to sort of anchor the image to the canvas before you begin working on it and in training you have to identify those big fundamental central exercises that everything else will revolve around …
so what makes an exercise fundamental ?
we need to think back to evolution and physics. your center of mass is roughly around the navel for a man or pelvis for a woman. the main point of contact with external world is your feet, with hands being secondary. the main purpose of muscle is locomotion. furthermore the way your body is designed is all muscles are supposed to work together as a symphony, not individually.
so the most fundamental exercises will be ones that work large numbers of large muscles working in harmony to transfer forces between your center of mass and the feet or the hands. running, squats, deadlifts, kettlebells, olympic lifting etc. for the feet … chins, dips, swimming etc. for the hands.
any exercise in which you are seated or laying down is second rate because in real world you rarely if ever develop power while sitting or laying down. any power you can develop on leg press or bench press will be hard to put down in the real world.
you can quantify the “size” of exercise by the amount of “work” being done per rep, that is weight being lifted times the vertical component of distance it’s being lifted through. so for example squat is a big exercise because some people can move 1,000 lbs through about 1 meter vertically, so 1,000 pound-meters so to speak. likewise something on Olympic Lifts some people can move about 500 lbs through about 2 meters for roughly the same 1,000 pound-meters. Curls ? Not even close. Leg Press ? The way most guys do it the vertical component of the weight moving is maybe 4 - 6 inches. Even if you put 2,000 lbs on a leg press your work per rep is less than squatting just 200 lbs once you add the weight of your upper body to the weight being squatted, assuming you go ass to grass.
please note i am NOT saying that if you can squat 200 lbs that you will be able to leg press 2,000 lbs. not at all. i’m just saying leg press is a crap exercise. no amount of power you develop on it can be transferred to the real world.
Olympic Lifting has the best transfer to the real world because it is the most “messy” … in the real world things are messy. OL is the opposite of leg press in that it’s all about speed, balance, coordination etc. whereas leg press has none of those things.
Running of course has direct 100% transfer to real world so if i was as lift it would be a better lift than OL. Only problem with running is you can’t set PRs measured in pounds. Running of course always was and always will be the king of all exercises because speed is always an asset, and also because Running uses arguably even more of your body than OL.
Running may not use Arms and Shoulders but it uses heart and lungs and also Running has a twisting load on the torso that OL does not have. Anyway it’s not a pissing content - any good military training facility will be equipped for both because both exercises have massive transfer to real world performance ( unlike curls ).
This is not to say that curls have no value. They do. The main reason you should do curls is because if you don’t you may tear your bicep while Olympic Lifting or even deadlifting !
i must also note that when i use curls to warm up for bigger lifts i always use loose form, just swinging the weights with the goal of loosening up and warming up the muscle. which effectively makes it a different type of exercise than using controlled contraction to get a pump, which is what i do at the end of workout after all important lifting was done. the focus on contraction could actually make your bicep cramp up and if that happens before Olympic Lifting you should abort OL altogether unless you want to tear that bicep.
So you start planning your regimen by identifying these big central exercises and making sure you can fit enough of them in your week, which basically means you should hit them all about twice a week or so.
Then you move on to second tier so to speak exercises like Bench and Shoulder press, Rows etc. and you fit those around the 1st tier exercises. Finally you move on to 3rd tier or what really should be FINISHING exercises like curls and you either just work them in between the other, more important exercises or do them at the end to get that bicep pump you really came for.
In other words - you start with the biggest, hardest exercises that are most valuable but ones that you have always wanted to avoid, like deadlifts. you finish with the small, easy exercises that you really love to do and the real reason you came to the gym - like curls.
WORK BEFORE PLAY
i am NOT by any means suggesting doing serious exercises like deadlifts without warm up. i actually go through ALL exercises ( including MULTIPLE sets of curls ) BEFORE i Olympic Lift - but i go through them quickly and using light weights and NOT going to failure - i just make sure that every muscle is warm before i Olympic Lift so i don’t get injured.
this warmup doesn’t take much time at all because i do it circuit-training style. that is i don’t rest between sets of curls - i do a set of curls then immediately move to do a set of something else and so on - because i am going easy ( warmup ) no rest is needed. and also because it’s just warm up i don’t care what i am actually doing so if some equipment is in use i just use something else. basically 20 minutes of nonstop easy lifting and i’m warm enough to start OL.
then at the END of my workout i AGAIN go though the same exercises but this time when i do curls i actually mean it and go heavier and harder until i get a great pump.
i will also sometimes do curls and other exercises IN THE MIDDLE of my Olympic Lifting session to make sure all my muscles stay warm because when doing OL you sometimes take a lot of rest - like several minutes of rest for a single “rep” which can make some of your muscles like biceps start losing flexibility and need re-warming.
so when we talk about 1st tier vs 2nd tier vs 3rd tier or finishing exercises it isn’t necessarily the order in which we do them, but the order in which we think of them and prioritize them. the order of precedence.
in other words i will NEVER let curls get in the way of my Olympic Lifting. i judge the success of my workout based on how well my OL went. i can always do curls later or even at home. it doesn’t matter at all.
yes if i have time after OL and i haven’t hurt myself i will do the curls to a pump but it’s always an afterthought.
in other words you don’t start to think about putting that sparkle in the eye on the portrait until the portrait is 90% finished.