Why Your Favorite Exercise Might Be Useless For Muscle Growth
In a Nutshell
Many exercises fail to stimulate target muscles effectively for people with non-average builds like short torsos, long femurs, or long arms, leading to wasted effort and joint stress. The solution is matching movements to your specific proportions through stance adjustments, grip changes, and equipment modifications, or replacing mismatched exercises with better alternatives like belt squats, chest-supported rows, or pull-ups. No exercise is mandatory—individualization through testing and tweaking over full training cycles is essential for optimal muscle growth.
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The idea in the hypertrophy world is that exercises target the specific muscles you're trying to train, but your build doesn't always match the exercise as well as desired. People who are much taller or shorter than average, those with legs that are longer or shorter than average for their height, people with arms that are much longer or shorter than average, and those with torsos that are longer or shorter than average by a significant margin can experience a substantial mismatch where the target muscle isn't the muscle being stimulated the most. This mismatch can occur even with common exercises that are considered hardcore basics supposed to work well for everyone.
People who don't have a great match to the exercise can spend weeks, months, or years performing weight exercises that they could have either modified or replaced to get a better workout. The consequences include the exercise not hitting the target muscle well, hitting other muscles instead, causing joint stress, and creating high systemic overall fatigue from having to push hard due to poor efficiency.
If you have a short torso, squats can be really hard. The way to tell is you have to bend over a significant amount and essentially good morning the weight, and you don't feel anything in your quads. Because your short torso has to compensate so much for how much longer your femurs are than they are relatively in other people, the center of gravity can't be adjusted without falling forward or back. In order to maintain a center of gravity over your feet, if you have an incredibly short torso and relatively long femurs, you're going to have to lean over.
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