If you only had ten exercises for the rest of your lifting life, these are the ten you'd pick. Compound lifts work multiple joints and muscle groups at once. They build the most strength per minute, the most muscle per session, and they teach the body to move as a coordinated unit instead of a collection of parts. Get these right and you do not need much else.
The fitness industry has spent the last twenty years trying to convince people that the answer to better results is more variety, more machines, more isolation, and more "muscle confusion". The answer has never changed. The answer is to get stronger at a small set of compound lifts and add accessories to fix what those lifts do not cover. That is it. Every successful programme in history is built on this premise, and almost every plateaued lifter is plateaued because they have drifted away from it.
What follows are the ten compound exercises that produce the most return on your training time. We have ranked them roughly by carryover, with the caveat that the order matters less than the quality of execution. A perfect tenth-ranked lift will do more for you than a sloppy first-ranked one.
1. Back Squat
The single most productive lift you can do. The back squat trains the quads, glutes, hamstrings, lower back, and core under load through a long range of motion, and it carries over to almost every athletic and aesthetic goal. Tall lifters, short lifters, women, men, novices, advanced lifters, the squat works for all of them when programmed honestly.
Set the bar in the high-bar position (resting on your traps, near the base of the neck) for a more upright torso, or low-bar (across the rear delts) for a stronger pull from the posterior chain. Step under the bar, brace your core hard, walk it out in two or three steps, set your feet just outside shoulder-width with toes turned out roughly fifteen degrees, and squat down by sitting between your hips. Aim to break parallel, which means the crease of the hip drops below the top of the knee at the bottom.
Programme as: 3 to 5 sets of 5 to 8 reps for strength, 3 to 4 sets of 8 to 12 reps for hypertrophy.
2. Conventional Deadlift
The deadlift trains everything from your grip to your traps. Posterior chain dominant, but the demand on the lats, mid-back, and core is what builds the iconic look of a strong lifter. It is also the most honest lift in the gym. The bar is on the floor or it is not.
Stand with your mid-foot under the bar, shins about an inch from the bar. Hinge at the hips, bend your knees until your shins touch the bar, grip just outside your knees. Pull the slack out of the bar, take a deep breath, brace, and push the floor away while pulling the bar up your legs. Hips and shoulders rise together. Lock out at the top with the hips fully extended, do not lean back.
The deadlift is taxing. Most lifters can only run heavy deadlifts once a week without recovery cost.
Programme as: 1 to 3 working sets of 3 to 5 reps for strength, or 3 to 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps for size.
3. Barbell Bench Press
The classic upper-body strength lift. The bench press primarily trains the pectoralis major, anterior deltoids, and triceps. Done well, it carries over to overhead pressing, push-ups, and any sport requiring upper-body push power.
Lie on the bench with your eyes directly under the bar. Grip the bar slightly wider than shoulder-width. Pull your shoulder blades together and tuck them down into the bench, creating a slight arch through your upper back. Plant your feet flat. Unrack the bar, lower it under control to your mid-chest, and press it back up in a slight arc towards your eye line. Keep your elbows tucked at roughly forty-five degrees from your torso, not flared out at ninety.
Programme as: 3 to 5 sets of 5 to 8 reps for strength, 3 to 4 sets of 8 to 12 reps for size.
4. Standing Overhead Press
The overhead press is what built the shoulders and traps of every strongman before specialised bodybuilding programming existed. It is also the most honest test of total-body strength behind the deadlift, because you cannot cheat it. The bar goes overhead or it does not.
Stand with the bar racked across the front of your shoulders, hands just outside shoulder-width. Brace your core and glutes hard, take a small breath, press the bar in a straight line overhead, finishing with the bar over the back of your skull and your biceps next to your ears. The body has to drift slightly forward as the bar passes the head, otherwise you bang your nose. Keep the ribcage down, do not let your lower back hyperextend.
Many lifters stall on the overhead press first because it has the smallest pool of muscle driving it. Patience and slow progression matter here.
Programme as: 3 to 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps. Add a push press variant once or twice a month for overload.
5. Pull-Up
The single best back-builder bodyweight or otherwise. The pull-up trains the lats, mid-back, biceps, forearms, and core. It is also a brutal honesty check, because most lifters cannot do as many strict ones as they think they can.
Hang from the bar with hands slightly wider than shoulder-width, palms facing away. Start from a dead hang. Drive your elbows down and back, pulling your chin over the bar. Lower under control until your arms are straight again. Most lifters skip the dead hang at the bottom and use momentum, which cuts the range of motion short and reduces the training stimulus.
If you cannot do a strict pull-up yet, build up using lat pulldowns, band-assisted pull-ups, or eccentric-only pull-ups (jump to the top, lower for five seconds). Once you have one pull-up, the second comes faster than you think.
Programme as: 3 to 5 sets of as many reps as possible. Add weight via a dipping belt once you can do twelve clean reps.
6. Barbell Row
The horizontal pulling counterweight to the bench press. The barbell row builds mid-back thickness like nothing else and addresses the postural deficits caused by modern desk-and-phone life. Most lifters are weaker on the row than they think because they cheat it with body english instead of pulling cleanly.
Hinge at the hips with your torso roughly forty-five degrees from horizontal, knees soft, bar in front of your shins. Grip slightly wider than shoulder-width. Pull the bar towards your lower chest, driving the elbows back and squeezing the shoulder blades together at the top. Lower under control. Resist the temptation to bounce the bar off your hips.
The Pendlay row variant resets the bar on the floor between every rep, which removes momentum entirely and forces honest strength development.
Programme as: 3 to 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps. Match your row volume to your bench volume across the week.
7. Romanian Deadlift
The single best builder of the hamstrings and glutes. Where the conventional deadlift starts on the floor, the Romanian deadlift starts at the top, lowers the bar to roughly mid-shin or just below the knee depending on flexibility, and reverses. The result is constant tension on the posterior chain through the entire range of motion.
Set up by lifting the bar from a rack at hip height, or by completing a conventional deadlift first rep. Stand tall, knees soft (not locked, not bent), bar against your thighs. Push your hips back as if reaching for a wall behind you, letting the bar slide down your legs. Your torso angles forward as your hips travel back. Keep your back flat. Reverse by squeezing the hamstrings and glutes to drive the hips forward.
If you feel this in your lower back instead of your hamstrings, your hips are not moving back far enough.
Programme as: 3 to 4 sets of 8 to 12 reps. Lower than 6 reps is rare for this lift, the goal is hamstring stretch under load, not maximal strength.
8. Front Squat
If the back squat is the king, the front squat is the prince. The bar racked across the front of the shoulders forces a more upright torso, which shifts the work to the quads and the upper back, reduces the demand on the hips and lower back, and builds the kind of trunk strength that carries over to every other lift. Most lifters who stall on the squat respond well to a six-to-twelve-week front squat block before returning.
Set the bar in a clean rack position (fingertips under the bar, elbows up high) or in a cross-arm rack (arms folded across the bar). Keep the elbows pointing forward through the entire rep. Squat down keeping the torso vertical, drive up through the mid-foot.
Programme as: 3 to 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps. Use sub-maximal weight until the rack position becomes comfortable.
9. Dip
The squat for your upper body. The dip trains the chest, anterior deltoids, and triceps through a long range of motion under bodyweight (or weighted) load. It does what the bench press does, in three dimensions, and it does it cheaper. A 100 kg bench press lifter who has never dipped is leaving size on the table.
Support yourself on parallel bars, arms straight. Lean your torso forward roughly fifteen degrees for a chest emphasis, or stay vertical for a tricep emphasis. Lower until your shoulders are below your elbows. Drive back up. Avoid letting the head drop forward as you fatigue.
Build up using bench dips or assisted dip machines if needed. Add weight once you can do ten clean strict reps.
Programme as: 3 to 4 sets of 8 to 15 reps, weighted or bodyweight.
10. Walking Lunge
The most underrated lift in the gym. Walking lunges train one leg at a time, which exposes left-right strength imbalances and forces the hips, glutes, and core to stabilise through every rep. They are also kinder on the spine than heavy bilateral squats, which makes them a useful tool for high-volume leg training in older lifters or anyone with back history.
Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides. Step forward with one leg, lowering your back knee towards the ground until it is an inch from the floor. Drive through the front foot to bring your back leg through, planting it forward and lunging again with that side. Continue alternating across a defined distance or rep count.
The lunge is humbling. A 60 kg lifter often needs only 15 to 20 kg dumbbells to feel a hard set of twenty steps.
Programme as: 2 to 3 sets of 12 to 20 steps total, holding dumbbells.
How to Use This List
The mistake is to think of these as a buffet. They are not. The smartest training plan picks four to six of these lifts, runs them as the anchors of a programme for at least 12 weeks, and adds isolation and accessory work to address weak points. Trying to do all ten lifts heavy in a single week is how lifters end up overtrained, beaten up, and progressing on none of them.
A simple, productive weekly structure for an intermediate lifter might look like this:
- Monday: Back Squat (anchor), Romanian Deadlift, accessories.
- Tuesday: Bench Press (anchor), Barbell Row, accessories.
- Thursday: Front Squat or Walking Lunges (anchor), accessories.
- Friday: Overhead Press (anchor), Pull-Up, Dip, accessories.
That is a four-day programme that hits eight of the ten lifts on this list every week, with full recovery between sessions. You can run that for a year and progress on every lift if you eat and sleep enough.
Compound vs Isolation: The Honest Trade-Off
Compound lifts give you strength, size, and athletic carryover. Isolation lifts give you targeted volume on muscles that compounds undertrain. You need both, but the ratio matters. As a rough rule, compound work should make up 60 to 70 percent of your total weekly volume, with isolation accounting for the remaining 30 to 40 percent. Lifters who flip that ratio (heavy isolation, light compound work) almost universally stall on size and strength alike.
Build the compound lifts. Then add isolation to chase weak points. Not the other way around.