8 Reasons Compound Barbell Lifts Aren’t the Best Choice for Physique Goals

First of all, this isn’t an article slamming training with a barbell. Barbells can have useful application for performance goals such as pure strength or powerlifting but for the vast majority of people they have way too many downsides to make them relevant choices for muscle growth and body composition goals.

When I encounter a new client, the single most important thing I need to determine regarding training is what exercises best suit their structure and will allow that person to execute them in a way that will target the desired tissue. Matching the right lifts with the right people is step one in the training journey. Get this wrong and you’ll have a long, frustrating battle to get the results your efforts deserve.

It’s like the story of two ships starting from the same point, both travelling north but one of them is half a degree off course. For a while they both seem to be heading in the right direction, but the further they go into the journey, that one ship ends up wildly off course and then has to correct to get back on the right track. This makes their journey longer and less efficient. In training terms, that half a degree error is the equivalent of poor exercise selection. Best case it’s going to take you a lot longer and a lot more effort to get to your destination. Worst case it’s going to send you straight into an iceberg in the form of injury.

I most commonly see this in the application of compound barbell exercises (squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press and bent row) when there are so many better options for muscle growth and improving body composition. Here’s 8 reasons why….

1: Barbell lifts involve a lot of muscles but it doesn’t work any one particular muscle very well. On paper it sounds great, hitting lots of muscles with one lift, but if none of the muscles involved are targeted specifically without the heavy reliance on supporting muscles you are not going to get maximal results and it’s a very inefficient way to go about retaining or gaining muscle.

2: Whatever muscle you think you’re targeting with these exercises, it’s unlikely that those muscles are the limiting factor. Take the bent row for example, I’ll assume you’re doing it to train your upper back but you’ll likely be limited by the lower back or hamstrings or glutes trying to stave off the fatigue of holding the load in the hinged position. It’s basically a really long pause deadlift for those muscles. Barbell lifts find the weak link in the movement and it’s rarely the muscle you are trying train.

3: The barbell really highlights how an individual’s anatomy will effect what they’re working. Let’s say you want to target quads but you’re someone with long femurs and a short torso. There’s no amount of technical manipulation or set up bias that’s going to make a back squat an effective or efficient exercise for quads. Split squats, lunges, leg presses, hack squats or leg extensions would be better choices as their set up and execution can be easily manipulated to target the quads regardless of a persons structure.

4: They all have have a pretty horrendous stimulus to fatigue ratio. The deadlift in particular takes far more from you than it gives back in terms of muscle growth. Muscle growth and retention requires a high degree of mechanical tension in the targeted muscles. This means training to or very close to muscular failure. When trying to do this with a bar it’s almost certain you’ll reach technical failure before muscular failure. You’ll also create a huge amount of fatigue because of the global nature of the lifts. So essentially you’d be be creating the need for lengthy recovery without even creating enough mechanical tension to produce the desired effect on the muscle and that sucks!

5: Barbell lifts have very high stabilisation requirements meaning energy is being leaked to cover stability, detracting from the energy delivered to the target muscles. Ask yourself why you’re doing an overhead press. If it’s to develop shoulders then why choose an exercise that has a standard requirement of high tension in the quads, glutes, abdominals, upper and lower back. There’s a reason more stable exercises are more effective for hypertrophy.

6: Bench pressing isn’t a great choice for pec development. The bar can limit the length in which we’re training the muscle and the fixed arm path doesn’t allow for convergence, reducing the amount of flexion and adduction which are two of the primary functions of the pecs.

7: The overhead press done with a bar is far from optimal for shoulder development. The arm path means you spend very little time in an ideal position for any of the different regions of the deltoids. The overhead press is also highly dependable on the individuals shoulder anatomy.

8: The increased technical demand of barbell lifts, because of their restrictive nature, means individuals spend more time trying to ingrain proper execution of the exercise and less time training the muscles effectively as soon as possible. This creates a scenario where we are actually impeding the clients progress.

When muscle growth or retention is the goal, the barbell is like swimming to France. You may get there but there are far safer, more effective, more reliable and more efficient ways to go about it.