Top 5 Waste-Of-Time Exercises

There are hundreds of exercises that an individual can perform when looking to build muscle and strength. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are completely worthless. To make matters worse, most of these worthless exercises are the ones commonly hyped in fitness mags, YouTube videos, and social media blasts.

Here are our top 5 waste-of-time exercises that you should kill from your programming.

5 Exercises That Are a Waste of Your Time

#1 Box Jumps

Box jumps can be used to develop explosive power, yet they’re typically included in conditioning or HIIT workouts for a high number of reps with limited rest. This is the perfect recipe for injury.

Are you an athlete looking to develop more vertical power? Then perform them properly -- multiple sets of low reps (3-5 reps per set) with LONG rest periods.

#2 Sit-Ups

The most popular ab exercise is also one of the most useless and improperly performed exercises in history. Gym rats crank on their neck and perform high-reps of these in the hopes of burning fat, when all it does is hurt your spine and do little for muscle growth (or fat loss).

#3 Triceps Kickback

The limited range of motion, poor resistance profile, and awful execution of this exercise by most fitness enthusiasts make this exercise altogether useless for “toning” the arms or building horseshoe triceps. You’d be better served by dips, pushups, overhead tricep extensions, and skull crushers.

#4 Front Delt Raises

Of the three heads of the shoulders, the front delts are the muscle group that does NOT need an isolation exercise. They’re already involved in every pressing movement -- push ups, bench press, dumbbell press, overhead press, dips, etc.

If you want to build bigger delts, focus on more lateral raises, face pulls, rear delt flies, etc.

#5 Abductor/Adductor Machine

Another isolation exercise that 99.9% of the population doesn’t need to worry about. If you’re a physique athlete, sure you can improve your legs with this machine, but for everyone else focus on doing squats, lunges, leg press, leg curls, RDLs, and the like before you ever consider hoping on this machine.