You only need a handful of exercises to transform your body.

If you pay any attention to the media headlines, or your favorite social media influencer, you might be confused about which exercises are best for your legs, back, arms, or butt. It makes sense; if you’re going to put in the effort to work out, you want to get the best results.

Something I learned from my years of working with Women’s Health, Shape, LIVESTRONG, and Prevention is that in order to keep you interested, they need to inspire you with new and different information each week. Their top goal is to engage you and keep you coming back for more. This always frustrated me because…

Exercise variety isn’t the goal at all when you’re working towards a better body.

In fact, the opposite is true. In order to override your body’s homeostasis, you need consistent stimuli on a repeated basis so that your body adapts. If you’re always doing different exercises with varying reps and sets, you won’t “force” specific movement patterns that cause change within a muscle group.

In this episode of Hot Tea with Holly, you’ll learn three key strength exercises to include in your workouts each week.

The three exercises I selected appear in many of my programs, and always appear in my own personal training plans. These key moves will strengthen many of your major muscles in a way that improves body mechanics and joint stability, and reduces the risk of injury.

Aim to include these 3 exercises in your weekly routine of strength workouts. They can appear in different workouts on different days as part of your body part splits, or, if you’re newer to strength training, they could be done together as a stand alone workout.

While there is an art and science to weight loads, reps, sets, and rest schemes, a good general rule of thumb is…

Aim for 3 sets of each exercise for 10-12 reps, where the last two reps of every set are hard.

Be sure to check out the whole video to learn the most important cues for each exercise.

Exercise #1 Deadlift: This can be done with a barbell or dumbbells. I like to think of doing this move in three phases: 1) Push your hips back in space so that the barbell (or dumbbells) slide down your legs 2) Bend your knees and sit down into a partial squat and 3) Press into your heels and stand up.

Exercise #2 Reverse Grip Pulldown: While there are variations of this exercise that you can do at home with a band, my top preference is to complete this one with a cable machine. If you don’t have access to a cable lat pulldown machine, you can perform the same move with a handled resistance band attached to the top of a door frame. It’s absolutely key to press your shoulders “back and down” so they move towards your hips, and inward towards your spine.

Exercise #3 Overhead Press: This move gets a lot of flack in the press, especially if you’re prone to shoulder issues. But here’s the catch: The reason you have shoulder issues is because you haven't been strengthening the muscles around your shoulder joint! In order to keep a healthy range of motion and avoid injury, you’ve got to be able to perform this move without pain. Again, my preference is to complete this one with a barbell, but you could also use dumbbells. 

Stay strong, friend.