Think of your most stubborn muscle group that’s so painfully small despite how hard you train it. Perhaps, it’s your narrow back, your chopstick calves, or that flat butt your girlfriend teases you about.
One reason it could be so small is your exercise order. Yes, the sequence in which you perform your exercises matters. This should be obvious because the sequence of everything in life matters.
Getting a job before becoming a dad is normal, but becoming a dad before getting a job makes you look like a loser.
Putting cereal before the milk is appropriate. Putting the milk before the cereal makes you a psychopath. Don’t debate me on this one you milk first people. Y’all need a brain scan.
Anyways, you get the idea. Here’s everything you need to know about sequencing which exercises come first, second, third, etc.
First, you need to understand fatigue. Fatigue is one of those things people think of after the workout like when they’re feeling sore, but fatigue is accumulating during your workout as well, even after the first set. And by definition, fatigue will impair your subsequent performance (1).
With every set, your muscles fill with blood and experience micro tears while your brain/nervous system deplete in battery life like Iron man’s suit as he fights off waves of villains.
Thus, after every set, your body produces less force, lose joint support, and impairs your brain’s skill coordination (2-6).
Where am I going with all this fatigue talk? Well because fatigue drops your muscle activation and skill on subsequent sets, the exercises you place earlier in the workout receives the best performance, stimulation, and unsurprisingly, the best adaptations (7,21).
This means you should place what you need the most growth from first in the workout to maximize that exercise’s performance.
For example, many guys would never put machine rows before barbell benching, but that’s what you need to do if your back is weak and tiny.
Same goes for the guys who complain about their calves. Most of them start their leg day with squats, deadlifts, and leg presses before finishing with calves. They train calves as more of an afterthought without realizing plenty of fatigue has accumulated especially in the nervous system. This prevents all muscle fibers from being recruited later (8,9,10).
So if you’re training calves at the end of a strenuous workout, not all muscle fibers are being stimulated and growth is compromised. Somebody desiring bigger calves should train them first not last.
That’s the first rule in understanding exercise order. You should prioritize the most stimulating exercise for your most desired body part first. This isn’t always a compound exercises as plenty of isolation are arguably more stimulating for their respective muscle groups like cable curls are superior for biceps over cable rows and seated leg curls are superior for hamstrings over conventional deadlifts.
However, if you’re not concerned about prioritizing certain body parts or specific lifts for strength, heavy compound first should be the default rule of thumb (19).
Heavier compound exercises require the most skill, coordination, and demand the most from your nervous system and joints. It’s best to do these when you’re fresh.
The later you do a compound exercise, the more it suffers in performance. If you did an isolation prior to a compound, you would get the same muscle growth for that muscle, but because the compound compromised it’s total reps, the other muscles that the compound exercise would have trained don’t get as stimulated (7,11,12,13).
For example, if you did bench press before triceps extensions, you’d get more thorough stimulation.
If you did triceps extensions first, your bench press performance would suffer in favor of more triceps extension performance. The net growth for your triceps would be the same, but because the exercise (bench press) that hits multiple muscles took the sacrifice, you compromised muscle growth for your chest/shoulders.
By doing compound first, you perform more total work or volume load for the same sets which can mean more long-term strength and muscle growth (14-17).
Furthermore, by doing more work, you’re technically burning more calories as well which can aid in minor fat loss, so dieters should do heavier compound exercises first (18).
By doing heavier lower rep lifts first, you also receive less neuromuscular fatigue early in your workout because higher reps are more fatiguing on a set/exercise equated basis. So if you got low rep back squats and high rep leg presses in a workout, the back squats should usually go first.
Lastly, by doing your heavier work first, you take advantage of the phenomenon known as post-activation potentiation (20). This is where your muscle cross-bridges rapidly improve their formation so it increases the potential of more weight/reps performed when you move onto lighter work.
This is why light stuff feels even lighter after holding heavier stuff.
Picture trying to throw a fat pig. After slinging the overweight walking pork chop, if you tried throwing a skinnier version afterwards, it would swing right out of your arms because the contrast makes the lighter pig feel much lighter than it would’ve. That’s basically post-activation potentiation in a nutshell.
But all this to say, you’ll maximize total work performance by doing the heavy lifts first.
Ok, so when it comes to sequencing your exercises, here’s what it comes down to.
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