Are the big 3 necessary for optimal gains?

[mdonnelly80]

Reality, bench press wasn't a quality chest-building exercise for me when I was bodybuilding. I had been benching since high school but had very little upper-chest thickness. Incline barbell presses and various barbell DB presses served me much better.

Also, conventional deads build my traps through isometric contraction but they've certainly never helped me put on mass in my lats or mid-back.

[EliKoehn]

Nope. They’re not.

In fact, no one exercise is “necessary”. I fell into this trap myself, thinking the squat, bench and dead are the holy grail of lifting and you must kneel and drink from the cup of the holy trinity of lifting to acquire gains.

The reality is, they’re simply tools. Their popularity is derived mainly from powerlifting, and also due to their efficiency at working a large number of muscle groups at once in a coordinated fashion.

What I do believe is necessary for optimal development, however, is the following:

- Some form of squat (or leg press)
- Some form of hip hinge
- Some form of horizontal press
- Some form of vertical press
- Some form of horizontal pull
- Some form of vertical pull

To Ironface and everyone else with this contention, do you think that barbell lifts accomplishing these same movement patterns are somehow deficient for this purpose? Yes, variety is good and a mindful lifter should learn to incorporate multiple exercises for them all, but why or to what extent is a barbell lift not a valid representative of this on its own?

There's a claim that it's exercise specific, that a guy who can bench 365 isn't "generally" strong with presses, ostensibly because his aptitude is calibrated to a barbell... and that's simply ridiculous.

It's like saying a certain weight in gold for each of these movements actually is "The Holy Trinity of Lifting" and then dismissing the validity of a completely pure form of this redeemable for that same value, in favor of some other kind of exchange with less definite worth and for an undisclosed reason.

[mdonnelly80]

On the flip side of the coin, running a program that revolves around getting strong on the Big Three (or Big Four if you include OHP) isn't a bad way to gain size. You can gain size through the Big Three/Four lifts themselves as well as the assistance and supplementary lifts used to build the core exercises.

[GeneralSerpant]

There's a claim that it's exercise specific, that a guy who can bench 365 isn't "generally" strong with presses, ostensibly because his aptitude is calibrated to a barbell... and that's simply ridiculous.

It's like saying a certain weight in gold for each of these movements actually is "The Holy Trinity of Lifting" and then dismissing the validity of a completely pure form of this redeemable for that same value, in favor of some other kind of exchange with less definite worth and for an undisclosed reason.

That's not really what he's saying though. He's talking about whether they are necessary, and it's not totally a matter of adequacy.