EUGENIZATION.

Does the exercise order in a workout matter? Yes.

You have more energy at the beginning of a workout than at the end, so you will tend to do best on exercises that come sooner in the routine.

Case in point: A trainee who always starts his routine with bench press and always ends with leg extensions will almost inevitably develop greater strength and size in his pectorals, delts, and triceps than in his quads. Questions of motivation aside (i.e., the trainee obviously is more interested in how his chest looks than his quads), from a physical standpoint, the trainee has more to give at the beginning of his workout (when he has more strength, energy, and mental fortitude) than at the end (when all he wants to do is chug his protein shake and go home).

I can think of three methodologies for determining the order of exercises in a workout/routine:

1. Functional emphasis: Most training programs fall under this category. With a functional emphasis, exercises are arranged in such a manner as to maximize the outcome you’re looking for. Some examples:

a. A Brazilian Jiu-jitsu fighter wishes to improve his general conditioning outside of mat time. His strength coach arranges the fighter’s routine in a circuit fashion, alternating between lower and upper body (both to allow for local recovery but minimize systemic recovery and to take advantage of cardiovascular effect of quickly shifting blood from upper to lower body and vice versa - “Peripheral Heart Action”).

b. A competitive swimmer finds that he lacks shoulder stability (shoulder feels “wobbly” in the butterfly). We arrange his program so that:

1. Upper body work is “interrupted” by lower body work every couple of working sets so as not to overtax his already weak shoulders,
2. upper body muscles that he needs for maximal performance are worked earlier in the session (i.e., lats), when the shoulders are at their full strength, and
3. he performs shoulder stability work (rotator cuff exercise, etc.) at the end of the training sessions (when he will no longer need to use his shoulders for upper body exercise).

c. A football coach training his running backs decides to arrange their training so that they perform the most demanding exercises first, followed by less demanding work (power exercises like the clean first, then deadlifting, then shoulder pressing, then mobility work).

In general, you should work larger muscle groups first in a workout, followed by smaller ones (since you don’t want fatigue in smaller muscle groups to inhibit progress in exercise for larger groups).

2. Anatomical emphasis: Why would you ever not arrange a program according to training priority? One reason would be if you have a pre-existing condition (e.g., injury) that requires an additional warm-up or some other intervention.

A classic example (well, classic to sports training geeks like me) is a runner who has cartilage degeneration in her knee (chondromalacia patella, for instance). If I want this person to perform a lower body push, such as a squat or leg press, it would be a good idea to first perform some sort of knee flexion (such as leg curl, or a dynamic warm-up involving knee flexion). Why?

Without the added lubrication that the knee flexion affords, performing a lower body pushing exercise will be excruciating, since the runner has no cartilage behind their knee cap, meaning their kneecap is rubbing against the surface of their femur - bone-on-bone. By having them perform knee flexion first, they stimulate the joint capsule to release synovial fluid, which acts like WD-40 for joints, making lower body pressing tolerable.

This scenario (warm-up injured joint, then provide exercise for it) is the most common example of an anatomically-based approach to program design, but other examples include:

a. An athlete has trouble locking out a maximal bench press (i.e., fails more than three tries in a row at the same weight). He knows this is due to relative weakness in his triceps, so he rearranges his routine to focus on triceps strength.

b. A bodybuilder notices his calf development lags behind the rest of his physique, so he performs calf exercises first in his routine.

3. Random: This, sadly, is how most people train. Some variation workout to workout is okay (things happen), but a systematic approach where you apply specific workloads with specific exercises in a specific order is the best approach for achieving and tracking real results.

There’s a reason it’s called a workout program and not a workout “random.”

*end tongue in cheek rant for the day.