Maximise your training progam: Exercise selection, order & tempo
Exercise selection, order and tempo are the last three factors in programming, whether you’re working on body composition, strength, or general health / fitness.
(If you haven’t already, check out our first article in the series, on frequency, volume and rest - and our second article on volume allocation and fatigue management.
Exercise selection
Selecting exercises is generally dependent on:
The goal: Strength movements are typically more compound exercise dense programs, while body composition based programs are more varied in movements. If you are pursuing strength in specific movements like powerlifting, your training will be heavily focused around the core lifts.
Individual biomechanics: The way you move will influence what exercises are selected for you in order to stimulate target tissues. If you are pursuing strength in specific movements like powerlifting it will come down to making your mechanics work best for those movements i.e. high bar vs low squat or conventional vs sumo deadlift.
Training age and skill: How long you have consistently trained and the degree of skill you have attained in your movements will be a huge influence on exercise selection. Generally, lower-skilled, less trained people should have a lesser amount of complex movements in their training, compared to highly trained, skilled individuals.
Fatigue demand of movement: Some movements are highly fatiguing, like barbell squats compared to leg extensions. It's important to consider the amount of high recovery demanding movements, to low recovery demanding movements when putting a fitness program together.
Client access: What you have access to in terms of equipment and space will decide what to select in your training. If you don’t have access to cables or machines for example, this will alter the whole approach.
Exercise order
It might be more beneficial to order exercises in one of two ways:
Based on the complexity of the movement and fatigue demand: High complexity movements or high fatigue exercises like deadlift might be best done at the start of the session when fatigue is yet to set in.
Based on your strengths/weaknesses: It might be best, if doing specialist programs for body composition, to place the focus of the workout/program at the start of the session. As the exercise order goes down, fatigue accumulation does too, which may affect performance.
Tempo
Tempo is the time it takes to execute any given rep of an exercise. Traditionally, tempo is broken into three distinct phases of a rep. The eccentric phase, the static lengthened phase, and the concentric phase. More recently, the static shortened phase is being adopted as well.
Example:
4 - 1 - 1
4 - 1 - 1 - 0
Tempo is useful for newer trainees. It helps to build skill by ‘moving slow, learning fast’. It is also a useful way to favour a specific portion of a lift, like the eccentric for example.
When it comes to strength training, tempo is a perfect tool to learn the skills of a lift. Even so, it is not applicable when it comes to maximal and sub-maximal work.
With body composition-specific training, tempo and self-select dynamic tempos (which varies depending on the level of fatigue) seem to produce similar results, providing both tempo and self-select dynamic tempos have reps of under 8 seconds and work to the same rep in reserve (level of effort).
For more on training, programming and all the other factors of getting next-level results, listen to ep 39 of the STCfit Podcast.
