Article By: Alex Miller
As a coaching group, the Kabuki Strength team are asked, “[What are the] Top accessories or technique for building 1RM strength for squat, for bench, and for deadlifts” on our Instagram Q & A. Obviously; the answer is predictable, “It depends. Without jumping onboard our remote coaching service, where we see and assess videos of your lifts, we won’t know and be able to give you a reliable answer”.
However, I can break down the principles and paradigms I work within personally when making exercise selections for my athletes. Hopefully, that will open the door for you to create a more individually efficacious plan.
I tend towards a very methodical exercise selection process, starting with a visual assessment of a lift. Usually, this is a video, ideally from the side on and from the front. These views allow you to follow and plot out the bar path AND kinematics of a lift. I’ll use kinematics interchangeably with bar path; it’s a little easier to picture it that way, but in the interest of understanding, bar path is literally how the bar gets from A to B. Kinematics is how the whole system moves to get it there.
Regarding assessing both the bar path and kinematics, I lean heavily on the research of Dr Megan Bryanton (her Research Gate profile). Dr Bryanton argues that bar and body movement observation aligned with biomechanical principles can indicate muscle group dominance. In turn, that infers the muscle groups that are limiting a lift.
See figures 1 to 3 above (ordered from left to right); we have 3 Kabuki Strength athletes displaying different bar paths. In figure 1, we see an athlete that’s very new to bench pressing showing strong triceps dominance resulting in a very vertical bar path. Figure 2 shows a seasoned lifter hitting a 575 lb bench with a more minor but somewhat vertical bar path, potentially indicating a slight triceps dominance. Finally, in figure 3, we have an elite bench presser with a diagonal bar path indicative of a balanced profile. Conversely as chest bias, and dominance, appeared, we would most likely see a bar path that followed a more horizontal trajectory. On top of this, we’d expect a similar angle increase or decrease in line with lifter qualification and experience.
Already you should be able to see how this would start informing us of potential developmental and preparatory exercises. However, we must always be careful of locking ourselves into a single way of viewing any problem. Once likely muscular dominance is indicated, a couple of questions work as a good litmus test. We’ll use the squat for this example:
Bearing the answers to these two questions in mind, we can progress with selection.
For the sake of this article, we’ll assume that there aren’t significant movement limitations that need to inform our decisions and that we have an athlete who understands what the movement should look like but can’t execute it under heavier loads.
At this point, it’s worth pointing out that we’d make a few assumptions about how a particular lift should look. Of course, some great lifters will deviate from this paradigm, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean anyone is wrong, and they might be leveraging some extreme body proportions. But could you argue that, for the majority of people, if the load is distributed across more muscles, individual moment arms are shortened, and bar displacement is low, it would be a stronger lift.
With all that explained and the first step down, we can start looking at actual exercise selection. Beginning with some decision heuristics, these give a base where I can make informed decisions. These aren’t guaranteed to be correct, but they are a great starting point.
Below is an example of the exercise selection/intervention hierarchy I use, 1 being the intervention most likely to have a direct carryover to the competition lift and 5 the least.
Intervention Priority |
Methodologies |
Potential Exercise Classifications |
Efficacy |
Notes |
1 |
Technique |
Competition, Specific Developmental |
Critical intervention before the best technique is established. Should be re-visited periodically |
Foot positions, stance width etc. Heavily influenced by biomechanical factors (joint builds, muscle mass, load position, etc.) Potentially most important in beginners and after AAS cycles |
2a |
Partials |
Specific Developmental |
Theoretically Sound. |
Should Start at the point of deceleration |
2b |
Isometrics |
Specific Developmental, Specific Preparatory |
Theoretically Sound, Note, positioning of the "weak point" is NOT a sticking point (See acceleration profiles and Kompf and Arandjelović, 2016) |
Pause for motor learning and control =/= pause at the sticking point |
3a |
CAT |
Specific Preparatory |
More useful for equipped lifting strength curves (doesn't mean it isn't valuable for un-equipped lifting for other reasons) |
Most likely to work with people who have late-phase sticking points |
3b |
Speed Work |
Specific Preparatory |
"Only" works with a minority of individuals (Peltonen H, 2018) |
Most likely to work with people who have early phase sticking points |
4 |
Isolation exercises |
General Preparatory |
Mostly guessing, least transfer, but feasible |
Maybe best realised by noting which muscles don't get sore, visibly smaller, not "felt" in movements, the portions of most contribution in the main lift this muscle is "responsible" for is weak. |
This then layers over two more main factors:
Point 1 is a conversation for another day. Point 2 would ask how a potential exercise aligns with the competition lift (or any movement that is a primary or secondary key performance indicator). There are, however, other heuristics to help you decide on, or add potential layers to, exercise classification and likely dynamic correspondence.
Now, this list is certainly not exhaustive, and you could continue ad Infinium, but for our purpose, it suffices.
We’ve looked at the Bench Press already.
For the sake of variation, and so we can explore more examples, we’ll shift to a competition squat.
Using a Barbell Back Squat, Good Morning with Transformer Bar, Pin Squat – below parallel, and a leg extension as exercise examples for an athlete with a traditional Hip Bias/Chest Fall squat pattern with the goal, as we are generally powerlifters, is increasing their competition squat. Below are some of the answers to the above dynamic correspondence questions for the examples as reference material:
First, let’s look at how these exercises line up within the rubric of our intervention heuristic:
How do they line up within that exercise classification spectrum compared to a Barbell Back Squat?
Does it match with Back Squat? |
Good Morning with Transformer bar |
Pin Squat – Below Parallel |
Leg Extension |
Movement Pattern |
NO |
YES |
NO |
Force Vector |
NO |
YES |
NO |
Load Potential |
YES |
NO (but really close) |
NO |
Now we have a little more information to make a decision regarding how the exercise selection is going to look. We have 1 exercise that matches our 1RM Back Squat (ie. the Back Squat). But this falls outside the original question about accessory/secondary exercise selections. 2 exercises could be excellent because they are second-level intervention choices, and both are close in terms of load potential. However, I’d tend to choose an exercise with matching movement patterns and force vectors over not. In this case the pin squat more accurately addresses the muscular deficiency. In terms of direct improvement, the leg extension comes at the bottom of the pile.
Now we can start talking about the intent and execution of developmental movements. Remember, we’re specifically talking about an athlete with a chest fall pattern derived from a hip dominant bias in the Squat (this is a knee extension deficit). Even when we run through this system, we may still be left with hundreds of choices. On the spreadsheet I use to complete this whole process quickly, I have 20 exercises that match all the parameters for the back squat. Forty-two exercises match all the parameters except load potential (either Very High Load Potential or Medium Load Potential representing a single step away). Then 131 exercises that match pattern and force vector only, and this list are in no way exhaustive. The subsequent decisions are:
After all the above, even when you have selected a movement that biases towards building the deficit, an athlete needs to understand the intent and direction of an exercise. In this example, it’s very easy to let your hips shoot early on a pin squat. If, as an athlete, you don’t understand that defeats the point of the drill, then you aren’t to blame for executing it wrong.
Finally, to show this in action, I’d like to share with you the squat numbers of a lifter I started working with following USPA Drug Tested nationals in preparation for the upcoming IPL World Championships. The point is this isn’t a beginner; it’s an athlete preparing to break a world record.
Occurrence |
Pin Squat E1RM |
Back Squat E1RM |
1 |
314 lbs |
331 lbs |
2 |
314 lbs |
343 lbs |
3 |
314 lbs |
354 lbs |
4 |
316 lbs |
354 lbs |
5 |
319 lbs |
377 lbs |
6 |
322 lbs |
354 lbs |
7 |
325 lbs |
377 lbs |
8 |
325 lbs |
354 lbs |
9 |
325 lbs |
377 lbs |
10 |
325 lbs |
367 lbs |
11 |
325 lbs |
382 lbs |
12 |
329 lbs |
410 lbs |
Pearson's coefficient |
||
0.79 |
This chart represents the cumulation of intelligent exercise selection and all of the processes above. The same progress is happening with the deadlift and bench but remember, it’s not just the result of a single exercise selection. Program design, understanding intent, teaching better foot and bracing mechanics, and a very coachable athlete have all played a role in this.
You can find further information about exercise selection, program design and 1-on-1 coaching HERE.
The writing of this article was prompted by all the social media posts I’ve seen talking about men’s mental health. Apparently November is men’s mental health month. That is unless you’re struggling with your own mental health issues. Then, every month, week, and day may very well be an ongoing struggle. Although throughout this article I’ll be referencing comparative data between men and women and differing demographics, the point is not to prop up men's suffering above women or anyone else for that matter. It’s simply there to elucidate the current state of men’s mental health, which is the central focus of this article. “Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution” (1). This mentality exists in contrast to the current lack of awareness pertaining to the drivers of psychological ill-health. Social media and articles routinely discuss what to do if you’re depressed, anxious, suicidal, etc. But seldom does anyone discuss the complexity of the subject. Unfortunately, without truly understanding the issues that lead to ill-health it’s unlikely to come up with an effective solution and subsequent prevention strategies. Therefore the aim of this article is as follows:
Optimizing exercise range of motion to maximize muscle growth is a popular topic to discuss. As new research emerges, it often leaves you with more questions about the fundamental mechanisms and application of hypertrophy training. Mechanical tension is known as a primary driver of hypertrophy. Therefore it stands to reason that training a muscle through larger ranges of motion will create more tension, resulting in a greater hypertrophic stimulus. Although this makes sense at face value, it’s ultimately an unsatisfactory answer. At deeper levels of analysis, mechanical tension alone (or at least our current model) can not explain some of the observed outcomes we see both in the literature and anecdotally. The aim of this article is to provide a brief review of the topic, provide context to the ROM discussion, and offer practical recommendations to implement into your own training.
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