Most People Do WAY Too Many Exercises Per Workout (What Actually Works)

Israetel frames exercise number purely as a tool to accommodate total sets. If a muscle is hit three times a week, you need fewer sets per session, so one exercise can usually provide 5-7 hard sets. If that's insufficient, you can stay at 1 exercise and add a set, or add a second exercise. On a once-a-week split, you may need 10-15 sets, which would be stale on a single movement, so 2-3 exercises become necessary to manage staleness and junk volume. He emphasizes that the question of how many exercises must always be answered by first asking, 'How many sessions per week do you do for that muscle?' This frequency-first logic is the core of his system.

Israetel explains that the first few sets on an exercise often involve refining technique—foot position, grip, mind-muscle connection—so sets 3 and 4 are often the best ones. If you change exercises at set 3, you sacrifice the peak sets. He likens it to staying in a comfortable position during intimacy: if it's working brilliantly, keep going. The decision to switch should be driven by genuine staleness or the need to hit a different muscle component, not by a preconceived checklist of exercises.

Israetel argues that the fourth exercise in a session is almost certainly redundant or so fatigued that it’s junk volume. He points out that gym-goers who do 4-5 exercises often walk around a lot, waste time setting up, and end up with poor performance on later movements. By restricting to 3, you can stay focused, maintain quality, and still hit all the necessary functional components of the muscle. If you feel you need four exercises, it's better to add a second day for that muscle and split the exercises across the week.

Israetel uses the deltoid as the clearest example: front, side, and rear delts are biomechanically antagonistic or do completely different actions, so they need separate exercises. For back, he notes that doing four different rows in one session is redundant; instead, pick one row, one vertical pull, and optionally one lat prayer (pullover) to cover width and thickness. He emphasizes that you don't need to cover every angle in every session—if one day emphasizes width and another thickness, the muscle keeps growing overall. He also warns that social media workouts showing a list of 5 back machines encourage this redundancy and that elite trainers sometimes fall into the trap.

Israetel uses the metaphor of eating off many small plates versus one big plate—the food is what grows you, not the number of plates. Washing extra plates (i.e., switching exercises unnecessarily) just adds work. He concludes that keeping exercises to 1-3 per session and distributing total sets across those is efficient and equally effective. He draws a direct line to the bedroom analogy to drive home that doing more different things doesn't inherently make the experience better; it's the quality and consistency of the work that matters.

Israetel argues that the primary growth driver is total hard sets per week, not the number of exercises. When frequency is high (3+ sessions), volume per session can be modest—often 5-7 sets—so a single well-chosen exercise can deliver all the needed sets. He notes that adding exercises when you aren't stale and don't need new angles just wastes time and variation. The constraint of staleness after 5-7 sets is the real trigger to add an exercise, not a blanket 'more is better' mindset. He gives the example: 'If I do biceps Monday, Wednesday, Friday, then I do one kind of bicep curl on Monday, one kind on Wednesday, and one kind on Friday.' Over the week, variation is still present, but each session is simple and maximally efficient.

Israetel explains that the capacity to keep an exercise engaging and productive varies widely. Some trainees get stale after just 3 sets, others can do 10x10. For most, 5-7 sets is where freshness fades. He advises that if you still have sets to do, switching to a different exercise can restore psychological drive and mechanical advantage, improving stimulus per set. He notes that this isn't about boredom alone—joint stress and eroding technique also signal it's time to move on. The decision to change exercises is thus a tool to maximise the quality of the remaining volume, not an arbitrary requirement to hit a target number of movements.

Israetel uses the metaphor of the first 30 minutes of intimate activity being great, but the last 30 minutes being pointless repetition—energy is low, connection is lost, and nothing is being gained. In training, after 10-12 hard sets, you become so weak and disconnected that the tension delivered to the muscle is minimal and you're far from failure. This means those extra sets aren't contributing meaningfully to growth. He argues that if you have planned 5 exercises with 5 sets each, you'll likely crash before completion; it's smarter to cap exercises at 2-3 per session and keep all sets within that productive range.

Israetel explains that most gyms offer only 4-6 genuinely good stimulus-to-fatigue ratio exercises for a muscle. If you burn through 4 of them in a single session, you have nothing new to substitute when you stall in 2-3 months. He advocates splitting exercises across the week or across mesocycles so that each block has at least one fresh movement to inject as a novel stimulus, which reignites progress. He warns that if you've been using the same 5 exercises for years and 3 are stale, you're stuck because your program demands all 5 every time—whereas dropping to 2-3 per session and rotating them keeps the ‘novelty tank’ full.

Israetel highlights that doing one set of bent rows, one set of dumbbell rows, one set of machine rows, and one set of cable rows in a single workout is a classic mistake. All are horizontal pulls that could be consolidated into 2-3 exercises with more quality sets each, preserving freshness. He gives the green light for using two rows if grips, loading, or rep ranges are very different, but urges restraint. He also mentions that elite trainers sometimes post such workouts online, reinforcing the misconception that stacking similar movements is sophisticated.