Go to any gym today and you’ll see people perform seemingly random and meaningless exercises for no apparent reason. People will do overhead presses while balancing on a ball, crunches while punching the air, jumping while pulling on the cable machine. You see this and wonder, what exactly is going through their heads. Even worse, there are even professional trainers that will come up with similar nonsensical exercises because all they want to do is tire their clients out and make them feel like they did something productive.
But the truth is, it doesn’t take much to make an exercise effective and efficient. I came up with the “What Why How” method a few years ago when I was trying to add muscle mass and increase strength.
The method simply relies on 3 questions that you ask yourself.
“What muscle / tendon / body part am I trying to target.”
“Why am I trying to target it?”
“How am I going to target it?”
If you can answer these three questions then it will be very easy to figure out just what you’re supposed to do.
Let’s do an example. Let’s say I want to increase the size of my biceps. The first question is already answered. I’m targeting my biceps. Why? Because I want to grow it. There’s the second question done. How am I going to do it? Well I know what I’m targeting, I know why I’m targeting it, therefore I know that I need to use an exercises that includes elbow flexion, supination and maybe arm adduction (the three .functions of the biceps). I know that I want to achieve muscle growth therefore I want to keep the intensity lower than if I was trying to increase strength, so I know I’ll want to keep the resistance at around 75% of my 1 rep max and work until near failure, which will add up to about 40 seconds (give or take) of time under tension (the active part of the exercise when the muscle is under tension). I will keep the tempo slow to prevent injury and full range of motion to target the entire length of the muscle and get the benefits of stretching the muscle at the start of each rep.
So knowing all that, for me the best exercise to build my biceps is going to be gymnastic rings biceps curls, as they allow for full range of motion in all the functions of the biceps as well as slow and controlled reps and easy adjustment to the load through adjusting the lean angle of the body. All that’s left for me to do is do the work. Ideally I’ll pair it into a superset with another antagonist exercise, so for biceps the antagonist muscle would be the triceps, therefore I might do some triceps extensions before I do the biceps curls. And that’s about it. With enough consistency and weekly volume eventually my biceps will grow.
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