Programming Assistance Exercises
An assistance exercise is an exercise that assists in the progression of a primary barbell exercise. Traditionally, progress is measured by the progression of weight on the bar in the squat, press, deadlift, bench press, and maybe the olympic lifts depending on the lifter’s goals. These exercises are selected because they use a lot of muscle mass over a long range of motion in a way that more effectively develops the lifter’s musculoskeletal system than any other exercises.
When a lifter’s training career begins, no matter their goals, these exercises are just about all they need, maybe some chin ups too. The stress of performing these exercises over a fixed amount of volume is enough to drive progress. Eventually though, this strategy stops working. To continue to make progress, a lifter will inevitably require more stress than doing 3 sets of 5 can provide. In this situation, there are several variables the lifter can change to elicit an adaptation. One is simply changing volume and intensity, either more volume at a lower intensity or less volume at a higher intensity, or both. The lifter can adjust the frequency that the exercise is performed in the program. The lifter can also adjust which exercises are used in the program, or “exercise selection”. This is the variable assistance exercises fall under.
Changing the exercise selection can be a bit more complicated than the other variables. This is because changing the exercise almost always means changing another variable as well. For example, let’s say you are deadlifting a couple of times per week and adding weight each workout. You may decide you need to make an adjustment to your program, and decide to replace one of your deadlift days with a rack pull. That exercise can be used at heavier loads than the deadlift can. It’s also only about half of the range of motion of a full deadlift. This means you’ve adjusted two more variables that affect the amount of stress in a program, not just the exercise selection. It can go the other way too. Maybe you change a bench press day to a 45 degree incline bench press. The weights used on this exercise are lighter, especially if you’ve never done them before. You’ll be learning a new exercise and using weights that reflect that lack of experience in the short term. This doesn’t make either scenario wrong. It just means you have added variables that you have to account for when evaluating programming changes, meaning your program is more complex. Because of this, some coaches avoid using assistance exercises until they feel they become absolutely necessary for progress, for better or for worse. So when programming assistance work, it’s important to understanding when the right time to implement them is. Fortunately, this doesn’t require much precision.
Changing as few programming variables at a time as possible is a good approach. One positive is that it keeps your programming complexity low for a longer period of time. If a program gets too complex too fast, that usually means you aren’t making progress as fast as you could be, so being cautious of this is generally a good thing. This is especially true if you are a coach being paid for your time by a client. Unnecessarily slow progress means you aren’t providing as much value as you could be. Less programming complexity is also good for evaluating the effectiveness of your program. When you make a change to a program, you make an educated decision based on the data you have of your training history and goals. That programming change is more likely to be successful when there aren’t excessive additional variables being changed a long side it. It’s also easier to correct course if the change isn’t successful because you’ll know exactly what variable needs adjusting, instead of guessing between multiple.
There are down sides to this approach as well. First, joints do not like being loaded in the exact same movement pattern for long periods of time. Doing so usually results in an unnecessary amount of inflammation. While inflammation is normal part of the recovery process, it should not be allowed to accumulate excessively. Adding assistance exercises prevents this by adding movement and loading variability to the joints. Avoiding the addition of assistance exercises also means you won’t be adding tools to your strength training tool belt that could become useful in the future. While you may not necessarily “need” a certain exercise at the moment, adding it a little early can pay off later. For example, you may get injured in a way where you can still lift heavy, just not in the same exact movement pattern you’ve been using. Can’t do low bar squats right now due to a shoulder or elbow injury? Maybe you can still do Safety Bar Squats and get some effective training in. For it to be effective though, it needs to be heavy. In order for it to be heavy, you need to have some experience with the exercise.
The alternative is adding lots of exercise variability by adding multiple assistance exercises when you start training or make a programming change. There aren’t many pros to this approach in my opinion. If you have too much assistance work in your program, you are wasting time in the gym. Either you aren’t making progress as fast as you could, or your workouts are longer than they need to be.
Given those two extremes, I think the best answer is to be cautious to add assistance work that slows down your progress unnecessarily, but when an opportunity presents itself, you should try adding some assistance work even if you don’t absolutely “need” it to make progress. A good way to do this is adding an assistance exercise when a light day presents itself in your program. Take the squat for example. In a novice program, the lifter may add weight to the bar three times per week. Eventually, the recovery period must extend as the lifter accumulates stress. This is an example where slowing down progress is necessary. So the lifter may add weight twice per week now. The third workout is a perfect time to add an assistance exercise.
The program started like this:
Mon- Squat 3x5
Wed- Squat 3x5
Fri- Squat 3x5
Then turn into this:
Mon- Squat 3x5
Wed- Front Squat 3x3
Fri- Squat 3x5
Did you need the front squat to make progress? No. You could have just squatted normally, just at 80-85% of the weight you used Monday. Since either way it’s going to be light however, you might as well add a relatively useful exercise to your training. Adding the front squat specifically also sets the lifter up for improving the clean and its variants, something that could be added when the deadlift needs a light day. Maybe the lifter has bodybuilding goals. That light day could be some higher rep belt squats or leg presses. The assistance exercise can even be used to correct form issues the lifter is having. Maybe they are getting loose at the bottom of the squat. That light day could be a paused squat. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter as long as the exercise is relevant to the lifter’s needs, goals, and training advancement.
As you advance, you’ll add, remove, and rotate more assistance exercises while always centering your training around some form of progression in the main lifts. Let’s say you’ve been training for a while a while. You add weight to your squat once per week now, and your squat bar speed starts to slow down indicating the need for a programming change.
MON - Squat 5x5 @280
THU - Squat 1x5 @320, 2x3 @280
As previously stated, for progress to continue, You’ll need more stress. However, The amount of stress packed into this week of training is about at its limit. Attempting to fit more into this week would likely result in overtraining (implementing more stress than you can recover from). So to introduce more stress, you need to spread out the time frame that you add weight to the bar. Doing so opens up more room for assistance work, something that is now increasingly necessary to mange the stress of the program. So your program update may look like this:
TUE - Squat 5x4 @285
FRI - Safety Bar Squat 2-3x5-6
TUE - Squat 2x3 @325, 2x3 @285
FRI - Front Squat 3x3
Or even this:
TUE - Squat 5x4 @285
FRI - High Bar Squat 3x5-6
TUE - Squat 2x3 @325, 2x3 @285
FRI - Belt Squat 3x6-8
I generally like safety bar squats and belt squats here for the average lifter because they give the elbows a break from low bar squatting, but a lot of things will work. It doesn’t have to be these set and rep prescriptions either. They can be normal reps, paused reps, reps with bands, whatever meets the lifter’s needs. This adds additional stress to the program while also regulating the stress of the higher intensity/volume squat days. That’s what assistance exercises are for. As you advance further, assistance exercises may even become the primary stressor in some workouts.
Another important thing to note is rep prescriptions for these exercises. These are highly variable. You may do a pause squat for just 1 heavy single, or do 20 reps of tricep extensions. Like everything else, the reps prescribed for an assistance exercise depend on goals, needs, training history, age, etc. Generally however, the less muscle mass an exercise uses, the more volume should be prescribed per set. For example, A deadlift uses essentially the entire musculoskeletal system and is capable of eliciting a lot of adaptation over a wide range of rep prescriptions, even heavy singles. On the other hand, a preacher curl for the most part, isolates the stress on the biceps and elbows. Because of this, it’s not a great idea to prescribe a rep prescription that is more commonly used on a deadlift where that stress is managed by the entire body. Doing so tends to elevate the injury risk. Joints simply don’t function well in isolation with heavy loads because the body isn’t really designed to function in isolation. Isolation exercises also require more volume to elicit an adaptation anyway since the weights used for these exercises are so low and therefore not very stressful. This is why it’s rare to see a set of curls in a program with less than 8-10 reps prescribed. Obviously there are exceptions to these rules. Experience is king here, but to review, compound movements and their variants are more versatile and can be used over a wide range of rep prescriptions. The closer an exercise is to an isolation movement, the higher the rep prescription should probably be.
