The New Rules of Lifting by Lou SchulerEvery weekend over the next few months, I am going to be examining each of the New Rules of Lifting from Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove’s new book. This is rule #1.

The best muscle-building exercises are the ones that use your muscles the way they’re designed to work.

It is hard to disagree with that statement at all. Our bodies are designed to work a certain way, and in general they tend to work in that certain way very well. Exercising in such a way will make it easier to do every day tasks, which in my opinion is the whole point of weight lifting. Isolating your muscles and performing exercises that we haven’t necessarily evolved to do may get you large muscles (if done properly), but you can have big muscles and performance by using things in unison and in a natural way.