Exploring Exercise Selection and Historical Insights in Bodybuilding

In this episode of Hypertrophy: Past and Present, Jake Doleschal and Chris Beardsley break down Steve Reeves’ favourite full-body routines from the early 1950s. They explore how Reeves trained each muscle with three different exercises, and why this multi-exercise, single-set approach might still be one of the most efficient ways to train if programmed correctly. The episode dives into the physiology behind exercise variation, the concept of neuromechanical matching, and how advanced lifters can apply full-body A/B splits to maximise hypertrophy.

Key topics:

• The difference between single sets per muscle vs. per exercise
• Why muscle hypertrophy and atrophy are muscle fibre-specific (not muscle-specific)
• How neuromechanical matching determines which fibres get trained in each exercise
• How to program more efficiently to achieve more growth with less work