#017 *FAIL* You don't need the Big 3

Welcome back to the 17th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

If you have been following Boats & Logs for a while, you know that I’m not a big fan of Squats, Deadlifts, and Bench Press - also known as Big 3. But I still owe you an explanation that goes beyond a reel on why I am mostly excluding these exercises from my workouts.

So, let’s have the classic Boats & Logs non-BS view on the Big 3.

Most people go to the gym to build as much muscle as possible or stay active and healthy until old age. And if one of these goals applies to you, I believe that you should reconsider doing the Big 3.

Phrased differently: You should probably exclude the Big 3 if you aren’t doing some form of powerlifting or if these three exercises are so fun to you that you would feel significantly less motivated to go to the gym without them.

To understand where I’m coming from, we need to establish a framework for how we rate an exercise. Let’s focus on the objectively most important aspects:
1. Muscle Stimulus
2. Risk of Injury

It’s quite obvious that the main goal of each exercise is to provide a stimulus to our muscles to make them grow. If we consider no further aspects, the exercise that targets the muscle best (most muscle stimulus) is the exercise we should choose.

None of the Big 3 are superior in targeting a specific muscle. Why? Because they are compound movements.

Compound movements, by definition, train multiple muscles. The deadlift, for example, recruits the whole posterior chain. The exercise is great for working many muscles at once but not great at really targeting a specific muscle.

The consequence? Compound movements are a useful tool to work multiple muscles at once while saving time. But we don’t need them to build muscle.

However, the muscle stimulus is not the only aspect we should consider for an exercise. Even more important is the risk of injury.

Every time I make the point that the big 3 have an unnecessarily high risk of injury, comment-boys come at me and claim that this is just due to some people doing them wrong.

And to be fair, they are (theoretically) right. In a world where we are always applying perfect form, the risk of injury is quite low for the Big 3. However, my observation has been that we are not living in a perfect world.

Even if you are trying to apply the correct form and are aware of the injury risk, there is no guarantee that you (I) really are applying the perfect form and (II) never break the form.

The risk is especially high if you apply progressive overload to get stronger from workout to workout. By pushing the last reps, many neglect their form a bit to complete the last reps.

This is fine to a certain degree, but if you only slightly cross the line, you are increasing your risk of injury exponentially. And as the Big 3 are generally the movements we move the most weight with, injuries can happen quite quickly.

We all know people who have been lifting for years with decent form but still have pain in their knees, hips, back, or shoulders. Even for them, most of these injuries come from making small mistakes with the Big 3.

To sum it up, the Big 3 are not needed to build muscle as they don’t provide a unique stimulus you can’t replace with another exercise. Additionally, the risk of injury makes these exercises increasingly unattractive.

But I won’t stop here and tell you that you shouldn’t use the Squat, Deadlift, and Bench Press without providing an alternative. We will look at each of these exercises to see how we can replace them to get the same or better muscle activation while decreasing the risk of injury.

Let’s start with Squats. I have my own backstory with Squats, as I really enjoyed Squats earlier. However, as my knee and hip anatomy are not symmetrical, I always ended up building imbalances between my left and right quadriceps and had pain in my right hip.

As the Squat is a rather complex movement that requires many body parts to work together, having an unfavorable anatomy for Squats is not uncommon. Besides potential problems with the knees or hips, many lifters also start to get back pain, as the Squat puts a lot of load on the back and compresses the spine.

As a compound movement, Squats train many muscles, such as the quads, hams, and glutes. And of course, we could train them all separately, but that would take a lot of time. Instead, I prefer doing another compound movement: