The barbell row is the standard back thickness exercise. It allows heavy loading, trains the entire posterior chain, and has decades of proven effectiveness. Most serious lifters include it and most serious lifters plateau with it eventually. The plateau often has a simple mechanical explanation: the pronated (overhand) grip and horizontal torso position of the…

The shoulder press machine gets dismissed in most serious training environments. The reasoning is consistent: it is a machine, which means it does the stability work for you, which means it produces inferior results compared to free weights. This reasoning is correct in one dimension and wrong in another. The machine shoulder press does trade…

The barbell curl builds overall bicep mass. The concentration curl develops the short head peak. The incline dumbbell curl does something neither can: it places the bicep in its maximally stretched position at the beginning of each rep, with the shoulder extended behind the body and the arm hanging behind the torso, then performs the…