BarBend is a site run for strength and fitness nerds by strength and fitness nerds. Our editorial team consists of Olympic weightlifting and kettlebell coaches, certified personal trainers, and former collegiate athletes — gym enthusiasts who, whether they worked here or not, would be sprinting, lifting, and burpee-ing (maybe not) regularly.
We’re also media professionals who seek out answers from folks with more experience to provide you with the answers you search for every day. (You can check out our expert network for an in-depth look at who we partner with.)
Regarding what you do in the gym, we judiciously curate the best advice to ensure your training choices are effective, safe, and tailored to your goals. What we do isn’t a perfect science, but we consider a few factors when doling out training advice to your screens.
What Makes a Good Exercise?
The editorial staff at BarBend understands that the exercises you perform during your workouts dictate the results you get. That’s true for how you build muscle, increase your strength, get flexible, or train for a sport.
Which begs the question: How do you define a good exercise? Good exercises (or workouts) are specific, progressive, and practical. We love finding movements that are all three, but we’ll settle for two from time to time.
It’s Specific
Specificity is precisely what it sounds like; the exercise must directly support the goal. If you want to increase your bench press, the most specific exercise you can perform in service of that goal is…the bench press.
Beyond the obvious, though, are similar movements that support your fitness goals by shoring up weaknesses, working similar muscles differently, or helping you sharpen your technique. When it comes to bench press performance, we’d endorse exercises like…
- The close-grip bench press, to emphasize triceps and shoulder strength.
- The paused bench press, to help you improve your power output.
- The cable flye, to ensure your pecs are strong across all their anatomical functions.
- The face pull, to help strengthen your rotator cuff and stave off injury.
…because they’re directly relevant to the goal. But specificity isn’t everything. A good exercise must also be progressible.
It Can Be Progressed Easily
Your body is smart. It knows how to adapt to the challenges you throw at it. The first time you did a barbell squat, you probably found yourself shaking, sweating, or even buckling under the weight.
But if you kept squatting, that empty barbell that once felt like the weight of the whole world on your back probably now feels lighter than a feather. That’s your body adapting to the challenge of the exercise and signaling to you, “I’m ready for more.”
A good exercise needs to be something you can progressively overload. This means:
- Adding more weight
- Performing additional repetitions
- Increasing your range of motion
- Lengthening the time spent under tension
There are more ways to increase the difficulty of most exercises, some more practical than others. Which brings us to…
It’s Practical
The world’s most well-crafted, scientifically optimized workout routine won’t do you a lick of good if you can’t (or don’t want to) get it done every week. We know that you lead a busy, unpredictable life and that your daily routine probably doesn’t revolve around the gym.
That’s why we value practicality in exercise selection. There’s no sense in prescribing exercises that most of our readers can’t perform because they lack the time, technique, or resources. As such, our real-world exercise and workout recommendations are always:
- Reasonably doable by an average person without needing highly specialized instruction or in-person oversight. Everyone has a different body and their own capacities, so we choose movements that a broad range of athletes can adapt to.
- Movements you can accomplish in an hour or two in the gym. We don’t believe in needing to spend all afternoon in the weight room (even though we’d certainly enjoy the opportunity).
- Possible with the equipment you have in your own home or that most gyms keep in stock. Everyone has different resources at their disposal, which is why we strive to provide variations, alternatives, or modifications whenever possible.
You’ll find that most of the workouts and lists curated by the BarBend staff are made of straightforward, bread-and-butter exercises. Sure, there’s a time and place for niche movements or specialized equipment (and we’ll let you know when those times come).
But at BarBend, we believe that strength is for everyone, which means making strength training accessible to everyone.
How We Select Exercises
Our editorial team has decades of experience in the gym, competing and coaching strength sports, training clients, and striving to lead healthier lives. When it comes to intentionally picking which exercises make their way to our Exercise Round-Ups and the Variations/Alternative sections of our Exercise Guides, here’s what we consider:
Our Personal Experience
It takes much more than top-tier knowledge (which, for the record, we have in spades) to make a top-tier workout. At BarBend, we’ve collectively undergone decades of trial and error. We don’t just know the mechanics of these exercises, we understand their minutiae through days when our favorite pre-workout kicked in perfectly and those dreaded training days when we’ve gotten no sleep. We pass that expertise on to you.
The exercises we recommend aren’t just movements we’ve done two or three times. We choose tried and true lifts that we’ve taught our clients and used in our personal competition prep and training programs.
We know the quirks and tweaks each lift requires to make it work for you. We give you inside tips on our movements directly from strength coaches — ourselves, those we’ve worked with, and those we consult to bring you up-to-date, accurate, user-friendly information.
What the Research Says
There’s not much use in overproducing your workouts. If a particular exercise feels good to you and checks off a couple of the criteria we list above, it’s perfectly fine.
Still, our team stays up to date on modern exercise science literature in the form of peer-reviewed journals, podcasts, and through following some of the best fitness content creators out there. Training is an evolving science, and we like to stay on the edge.
That’s where we’ll find the right exercises for you — not solely based on what’s trendy or so classic that no one questions it. Because we base our recommendations on science, you’ll find our lifts on the pages of reputable research journals and in the gyms of the greats. And when new research emerges to guide our training, we’ll let you know that, too.
Accessibility
All the best exercises in the world won’t do our readers any good if you don’t have what you need to get them done. At BarBend, we prioritize plugging you into the best practices not just for the exercises themselves, but for all the modifications you’ll need to suit the move to your own body and experience level.
Every athlete has a unique body, needs, and capacities, and we choose exercises — and give you modifications and customizations — that meet you where you are. Working out in a home gym that lacks a barbell? We’ve got adaptations for that. Need to accommodate wider hips, longer legs, or shorter arms during your lower body workouts? We choose exercises that let you do exactly that.
