Training science

The 18 exercises that build muscle almost for free

In the Forta database there are eighteen movements with a stimulus of 9.0 out of ten and a neural demand of two. Almost all of the hypertrophy stimulus, almost none of the cost to your nervous system. Here is the complete list.

Alfredo Silva · Sports Scientist MSc Physical Education · MSc High Performance Training 18 of 272 movements

In the previous article I showed the expensive side of the ledger: deadlift, Clean & Jerk, Snatch — neural demand of ten, and a return of 0.45 for every unit of fatigue they charge. Today is the other side of the same table.

Out of 272 movements, only eighteen reach 9.0 on stimulus-to-fatigue. And there is something remarkable about those eighteen: sixteen of them have a neural demand of two. The other two have three.

Translated: they give you close to the highest stimulus per unit of fatigue in the entire database, and they barely touch your central nervous system.

The complete list, by muscle

Grouped by muscle group, so you can build the session straight off it.

What these eighteen have in common

Look at the middle column in your memory: cable, cable, machine, machine. Almost every one is an isolation movement performed on a cable or a machine.

That is not a coincidence. An isolation movement loads a muscle without asking the spine to stabilise axial load, without complex inter-muscular coordination, without technical risk under fatigue. The machine or the cable handles the balance for you. The result is that almost all of the fatigue generated is local — in the muscle you wanted to train — rather than systemic.

A squat tires you. A leg extension tires your quadriceps. That is the entire difference.

The bad-day session

This is what makes the list useful in practice. On a day when you slept badly, you are still sore from Tuesday and your score is 45, you do not need to skip the gym. You need to train the cheap side:

A whole session built from this table gives you close to maximum hypertrophy stimulus and leaves your nervous system essentially intact for tomorrow's real work.

The warning this article needs

If you read this as "just do machines," you read it wrong.

These eighteen exercises are hypertrophy tools. They do not build maximal strength, they do not develop technical competence, they do not train the body to produce force in a coordinated way — and an athlete who only does this gets big and incapable. The deadlift is still the best posterior-chain strength builder there is. The clean is still irreplaceable for rate of force development.

The question was never expensive versus cheap. It is paying the expensive one on the right day — and having quality alternatives for every other day, instead of training badly or not training at all.