Balance and Exercise Order
by Chris Shugart

Ian King once wrote: "I don't care what sequencing rules you've been exposed to or have adopted, if it's your weak link or number one priority, do it first."

Here's a summary of Ian's other ideas on this topic:

If you train your chest and back on the same day, whenÕs the last time you worked your back first? How about arms? Do you ever hit the triceps first? Do the lowly triceps get as many sets and reps as the mighty biceps?

On leg day, do you ever train the hammies first? How about the calves? And when you first started training, did you give your legs and back an equal amount of attention as your chest and biceps? Probably not.

Yes, we all know that everything above is a mistake, but it took Ian King to whip our arses into shape and make us do something about it. And if you havenÕt done something about these imbalances, then youÕll likely end up with an injury or at least an asymmetrical physique.

Ian says to look back at your usual training split and simply switch things around. If you always train legs at the end of the week, move them up to Monday and youÕll see better results. Train back before chest and triceps before biceps.

The rule is simple: whatever you train first in the workout or first in the week will get the best results. The problem is that most people train the "fun" exercises and their favorite body parts first. In reality, they should be training the least fun movements and weakest muscle group first in the week and first in the training session.

How long do you have to switch things around? Well, variety is always best, but if youÕve gone two years training the quads before the hams, then itÕs safe to say itÕll take almost two years of priority hamstring training to fix any possible imbalance. Also, if you have a weak limb — say your left arm is weaker than your right (hmm, wonder why, Spanky?) — then you should use unilateral exercises (work one limb at a time) and train the weaker limb first.

A more common mistake is to use a different amount of sets per muscle group. Maybe you donÕt leave out back work entirely, but you perform twelve sets for chest and then just "throw in" a few sets of pull-downs for back. Big mistake. If you do 12 sets for chest, then you should do 12, or close to 12, sets for back.

To help you understand how to divide and balance out your training, Ian came up with a list of major muscle groups that reflects their function:

Horizontal pulling (row)
Horizontal pushing (bench press)
Vertical pulling (chin-up)
Vertical pushing (shoulder press)
Hip dominant (deadlifts)
Quad dominant (squats)

Based on this list, you need to be doing vertical as well as horizontal pushing and you need to be doing the same number of sets for each and keep the rep ranges equal where appropriate.

Let me give you an example of how this list can help you. Before Ian provided this simple list, I did almost nothing but chin-up variations for back training. Sure, I did rows occasionally, but not very often as compared to chins. This was an imbalance. Now I do just as many sets of horizontal pulling as I do vertical pulling and itÕs really helped my back development.