EXERCISE VARIATION:
WHY FEWER IS BETTER

In short: More exercises is not better training. A short, focused list of exercises — each taken close to failure — beats a long menu that leaves you either under-stimulated or over-fatigued. And keeping the list short saves fresh exercises for later.

First, the building blocks of a plan: micro, meso, macro

Training is usually organised into three nested time blocks. They sound technical but the idea is simple — they're just units of training time, grouped so that a series of small adaptations adds up to meaningful change:

• Microcycle — the shortest unit, usually one week of training.
• Mesocycle — a block of several microcycles, typically 4 to 8 weeks, built around a specific focus.
• Macrocycle — the big-picture plan, often several months up to a year, made up of multiple mesocycles.

You don't need to overthink these as a beginner. The useful takeaway is just that training is planned in blocks, and within each block you make a focused set of choices — including which exercises you'll use. That last point is where most beginners go wrong.

Fewer exercises per session, not more

Here's the core principle: each workout should have fewer exercises, not more. Wherever you can make a session simpler, do.

It's tempting to think a workout with ten exercises is more thorough than one with four. In practice, the opposite is true — a ten-exercise routine almost guarantees that many of those exercises are redundant or counterproductive. Here's why.

Doing 3–5 exercises genuinely close to failure already produces a large amount of fatigue. That's the real cost of stimulating training. So if a workout has ten exercises, only one of two things can be true:

• Each exercise was stopped well short of failure — spreading effort thin so nothing was taken far enough to actually stimulate growth, or
• The later exercises were done after you were already exhausted — piling on work past the point where you can recover from it.

That second case has a name from the earlier articles: junk volume. It's work that adds fatigue and lengthens recovery without adding meaningful stimulus. Either way, the ten-exercise workout loses. You can drive a real stimulus, or you can do lots of exercises — you can't do both well in one session.

Keep some exercises in reserve for later

There's a second, subtler reason to keep the list short — and it connects to a theme from the training-phases article: novelty is a resource you can run out of.

Every exercise you haven't done much of is a fresh stimulus waiting to be used. If you cram every exercise you know into your current training, you spend all that novelty at once.

Think of it like cooking dinner. Imagine that every single night, you cooked every dish you knew how to make. Despite having a huge repertoire, every meal would be identical — the same enormous spread, night after night — and the novelty would vanish completely. You'd have nothing new to look forward to. Training is the same: use every exercise all the time, and you've got nothing fresh to introduce later when you actually need a new stimulus to keep progressing.

By using only a handful of exercises in a given block, you keep the rest in reserve — ready to feel genuinely new when you rotate them in for the next one.

What to actually do

Putting it together, here's the approach for a beginner:

• Pick 3–6 exercises per session. Enough to cover what you're training, few enough to do each one justice.
• Take each one close to failure. This is where the stimulus lives — better to do fewer exercises hard than many exercises half-heartedly.
• Choose based on a priority, not on covering everything. Decide what this block is for — what you most want to develop — and select exercises that serve it, rather than trying to train everything equally hard at once and spreading yourself thin.

That last point matters most. You can't prioritise everything — trying to means nothing gets your best effort. Pick a focus for the block, train a short list of exercises hard in service of it, and save the rest for the blocks to come.

This is educational information to support your training. It is not medical or personal training advice.