The Science of Exercise Order: How to Optimise Your Gym Sessions

When it comes to structuring a gym session, the order of exercises matters more than you might think! To effectively target multiple qualities—like skill, speed, power, strength, hypertrophy, endurance, and conditioning—you'll want to follow a strategic flow. You are unlikely to be developing every quality listed in a single session, or may exclude some qualities almost entirely, however, this guidance should help you to have an idea of what order to train what quality

General guideline for Training Quality order:

↓ Skill: Start with high-skill movements. These require precise technique and coordination, so tackling them first helps ensure you're fresh and focused.

↓ Speed: Next, move onto speed drills. These demands fast, well-coordinated muscle contractions, and fatigue from earlier exercises could significantly hinder performance.

↓ Power: Position power exercises after speed. As they sit in the middle of the force-velocity continuum, they still require high output, and can heaviliy be affected by earlier fatigue.

↓ Strength: Your strength work comes next. While strength can be impacted by fatigue, it’s generally less so than the faster elements of training. Strength work will create a larger amount of fatigue, so less important qualities to your training or those less impacted by fatigue should follow.

↓ Hypertrophy: After strength, we move to hypertrophy training. Here, you can still implement methods for muscular development (mechanical tension, muscle damage and metabolic stress) after some fatigue from strength work has set in.

↓ Endurance: While endurance activity can be influenced by prior done work, endurance training can be done towards the end when your overall fatigue level is higher. This quality relies less on freshness than the previous qualities.

↓ Conditioning: Finally, finish with conditioning. This can be an excellent way to build your cardiovascular fitness and overall work capacity without the same technical demands as earlier exercises.

⚠️ Caveat: Always remember, this is a general principle! Your specific goals and the training block’s focus can shift this order. For instance, if you have a competition or athletic event approaching, you want to prioritise certain qualities. Adjust based on your needs. Some advanced training methods including, complexes, contrast training and supersets which help save time, may also blur these lines somewhat. You may also likely be seperating qualities, such as conditioning, into dedicated sessions.