What order to do your exercises in, and why it matters

The exercise you do first in a workout gets your freshest muscles, your sharpest focus and your heaviest weights. The exercise you do last gets whatever is left over. That's not a small detail, it's the whole reason order matters.

Why the first exercise wins

Fatigue builds across a session. Your grip gets tired, your nervous system gets noisy, your form gets sloppier. Studies that put the same exercise first versus last in a workout keep finding the same thing: performing the barbell back squat first allowed completion of more total repetitions. More reps at a given weight usually means more sets that actually challenge the muscle, which is a big part of what drives muscle growth.

The standard advice follows from this: exercises involving large muscle groups should be placed at the beginning of a training session, because you can handle more load while you're fresh. A squat or a bench press asks more of your whole body than a bicep curl does, so it makes sense to spend your best energy there.

What happens to the exercises you do last

An 8-week study on untrained men compared two orders: big lifts first then small ones, or small lifts first then big ones. The group that trained bench press, lat pulldown, triceps extension and biceps curl in that order got bigger gains on the bench press specifically. But the group that flipped the order, starting with the smaller exercises, showed significantly greater strength increases on the other three lifts. In short, whatever you put first tends to come out ahead, and whatever you put last tends to lag a bit.

Whatever you put first in a workout tends to improve the most.

A simple way to order a session

1. 1

   Start with the lift you care about most If getting stronger on squats, deadlifts or bench press matters to you, do that exercise first, while you're fresh and focused.

2. 2

   Do big, multi-joint moves before small ones Squats, presses, rows and pull-ups before curls, extensions and raises, since the big lifts need more total effort and more stable joints.

3. 3

   Train weak points early sometimes If one muscle lags behind, putting its exercise earlier in the session, even ahead of a bigger lift, can give it more of your energy.

4. 4

   Keep supersets for similar-sized muscles Pairing two exercises back to back can save time, but a review of training methods found this can also reduce the weight you lift on the second one, so use it for accessory work rather than your main lift.

None of this means the order has to be rigid. A review of advanced training methods found that pairing non-competing muscle groups, like a chest exercise with a back exercise, can actually raise your total training volume compared with doing them separately, because one muscle rests while the other works. The general rule still holds underneath that: save your most important or most demanding lift for when you're freshest, and treat later exercises as mopping up what's left.

• Put your priority lift, or the biggest compound movement, first in the session
• Expect exercises placed later to get slightly less out of each set, that's normal, not a sign you're doing it wrong
• Pairing two exercises for different muscle groups can save time without costing much performance
• Rotate which exercise goes first every so often if several muscles matter equally to you

If you train the same muscles in the same order every single session for months, the ones you always put last may grow a little slower than the ones you always put first. Swapping the order every few weeks, or simply starting your weakest point first, is a cheap way to spread the advantage around.