The fitness community is a very large bubble where sharing of information is always expanding across various spaces, sports, clubs, hobbies, and schools of exercise. The gym however, is one of the best markers of where fitness is. People who have used a gym for even five years can notice the different trends with new exercises becoming more common while machines are designed to replace tried-and-tested legacy moves. The gym also mirrors the latest most popular thing to do: CrossFit and Hyrox being two examples of how a popular form of exercise took the world by storm.
There are some exercises which are irreplaceable of course, and they are done irrespective what kind of athlete you are. The bench press, the pull-up and push-up, the lat pull-down, the deadlift, the leg press and some others which help build the foundation of strength, size and endurance. But with fitness enthusiasts being more careful than ever about form and technique and injury prevention, even some of the old favourites are now being done with safer but equally effective choices.
Barbell bent-over rows
Possibly the easiest exercise to find alternatives for is the barbell bent-over row. Hinging at the hip and placing an isometric load on the lower back while you make sure of the right range of motion and momentum is a difficult task. If you are a beginner and don’t want to overload your lower back then it’s safer to use cables and rowing machines to do the same exercise in a safer position.
Even better are chest supported rows, which also have machines which can be loaded with enough weight. I wrote a piece on Lounge on why you should do more chest supported exercises and most of them are made to take the weight off the spine. Spending more time on learning how to do a pull-up and using more cable machine exercises like lat prayers or single-handed lat pull-downs could be more rewarding.
Upright rows
The shoulder is one of the most commonly injured joints and the upright row is a high-risk exercise, along with behind-the-neck overhead moves and heavy overhead presses. Upright rows, whatever equipment they’re performed with, put the shoulder tendons in a position of discomfort. It’s just not worth it. If you have aced the form and swear by the exercise, then the safest way to do it is to use dumbbells. Using cables for face pulls is clearly the better choice here along with some inverted rows on a smith machine.
Dumbbell bicep curls
There is nothing wrong with this exercise but using the strength you learn from this needs to be transferred to other bicep moves for overall development. Chin-ups is the skill to keep working on while adding hammer curls, single-hand cable curls, EZ-bar curls and wrist curls is the variety you need to add if you’re struggling to overload on bicep curls.
The standard curl position makes it easy for the body to compensate with momentum, shoulder and back muscles when the bicep fails. The bicep is a small muscle and fatigue is reached at an earlier point. So, it’s better to choose another exercise than continuing to push too hard with basic curls. Another great alternative are small barbell curls with wall support which can help reduce momentum and stop you from cheating.
Barbell front squats
Fitness blog Empire Barbell has one of the best descriptions of the barbell front squat: “Everyone knows front squats are good, but few do them religiously. Maybe the technique is intimidating. Maybe they aren’t sure about how to program them in. Maybe they just don’t like pain. I mean, squats are hard enough when taken to the limit, but front squats feel like you’re doing a set of lunges with an anaconda around your neck,” says the blog, titled Everything You Need to Know About Front Squats.
While it’s one of the best exercises for overall development with multiple advantages over other squats, it is too advanced a move for fitness enthusiasts who don’t want to crush PRs. There are many alternatives, especially with machines: the hack squat, the leg-press, and the pendulum squat machine.
Seated calf raises
The seated calf raise machine is still a popular fixture in gyms because it is excellent to train the soleus muscle. However, research, backed by simple muscle-building science which says the greater the stretch, the more the muscle grows, points towards focusing on standing versions for better hypertrophy. Bending the knee during raises makes sure the soleus muscle is worked. But, as per a paper titled Triceps surae muscle hypertrophy is greater after standing versus seated calf-raise training: “…the changes in muscle volume were significantly greater for the standing than seated condition leg in the lateral gastrocnemius (12.4% vs. 1.7%), medial gastrocnemius (9.2% vs. 0.6%), and whole triceps surae (5.6% vs. 2.1%) , but similar between legs in the soleus (2.1% vs. 2.9%, p = 0.410).” All the muscles mentioned are different parts of the calf.
Pushing a sled, and doing different variations of the standing calf raise, including the weighted single-leg version, is a smarter way to target them.