Add up all the exercises you see at the gym on any given day, and what is the sum? Two dozen? And you wonder why so many guys at the gym not only look bored, but their bodies don’t look much better than they did a year or two ago.

Maybe you are one of those guys. Maybe you’re doing the same exercises as everyone else, but you’re not happy with your progress. If that describes you, here’s a radical idea: If traditional exercises don’t work for you, or if they worked for a while but aren’t now, then design your own.

“A lot of the traditional exercises were passed down by people who understood the concept that if you lifted a heavy object, you got stronger,” says Doug Brignole, a Venice, California-based personal trainer. “But they didn’t always understand the biomechanics of the movement, so we ended up with a series of inefficient exercises.”

Specifically, Brignole points a skeptical finger at the upright row, the parallel bar dip, the overhead military press, the behind-the-neck press, the behind-the-neck pulldown, and even the good old-fashioned bench press. . Countless men have built tons of muscle doing these exercises: Brignole himself put a few pounds of lean tissue on his own body while he did them. But today he claims that most lifters, those who already have a base of muscle and aren’t looking to add blocks of mass, would be better off doing different exercises. These new exercises would build and shape muscles without putting as much stress on joints and connective tissues.

“Most people bench press because they think they’re supposed to,” says Brignole. “But you’re better off doing a one-arm cable fly,” which is not only easier on your shoulder joints than the bench press, but also allows your chest muscles to fully contract.

And what exactly is a one-arm cable flye? It is a variation of the exercise that Brignole invented, one of the 10 that we will present.

Brignole, now 37, won the Mr. America (upper-middle division) in 1986, but despite having an award-winning physique, his body was a mess. His shoulders, he says, “bought like crazy” from his heavy pre-contest training. It was then that he discovered that he could get the same results from cable exercises that he had been getting with bars and dumbbells, but with less pain and a greater correlation between the exercise and the actual function of the muscle he was working.

For an example of an exercise that perfectly follows the function of the muscle, take a look at the biceps curl. The main job of the biceps is to bend the elbow, and that is exactly what a curl does. On the other hand, the overhead press is supposed to be a major builder of the deltoid muscles. But Brignole feels like he’s just a great builder of the front deltoid muscle; if you want to stimulate the meatier midsection, you’re better off doing lateral raises.

Most guys do dumbbell lateral raises, but Brignole criticizes that, too, because the middle deltoids experience almost no resistance at the beginning of the movement and maximum resistance at the end.

Brignole thought there was a better way to do the exercise, so he transformed it into the lying one-arm cable lateral, an exercise performed while lying on your side with the cable near your feet. Your middle deltoids experience resistance from the beginning of the movement to the end, with maximum resistance at the midpoint. Also, the cable exercise takes pressure off the shoulder joint and focuses only on the deltoids. As with most exercises he designs, there is more resistance where there used to be less, and less resistance where there used to be more.