Are You Wasting Your Time Doing Pointless Exercises in the Gym?

How many times have you got your gym kit ready, made it through the doors and then thought: “Okay, what do I actually do now?”

It’s a familiar situation. You look around, remember an exercise you saw someone doing last week, jump onto an empty machine or try something that appeared on your social feed. You might work hard, sweat and even feel sore the following day, but was the exercise actually helping you achieve anything?

Very few exercises are completely pointless. The better question is whether an exercise is appropriate for **you**, your goals and your current ability.

At Foundry, we want training to have a purpose. That means choosing movements that help you become stronger, move better and build a body capable of handling life outside the gym. Here are three exercises that often appear in gym programmes, plus alternatives that may give many people more value for the time they’re putting in.

Your Exercise Selection

There’s nothing inherently wrong with isolation exercises, machines or movements that target one particular muscle. They all have their place when they’re being used for the right reasons.

The problem comes when your entire workout is built around exercises you’ve chosen without knowing why you’re doing them. If you only have two or three hours each week to train, you want to get plenty from those hours.

For most people, that means building a programme around fundamental movement patterns such as squatting, hinging, pushing and pulling, then adding other exercises where they serve a specific purpose. The basics aren’t particularly glamorous, but they work.

1. Sit-Ups

“If I do enough sit-ups, I’ll eventually get visible abs.”

Unfortunately, your abdominal muscles don’t work like that. You can certainly make them stronger through resistance training, but repeatedly training your abs won’t specifically remove the body fat covering them.

Visible abdominal definition is largely determined by overall body composition. If reducing body fat is your goal, nutrition and your overall energy balance matter considerably more than how many sit-ups you can perform.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t train your core. A strong trunk helps you transfer force, maintain positions under load and control movement. Rather than thinking solely about exercises that make your abdominal muscles burn, think about building strength around your entire torso.

A Better Alternative: The Side Plank

The side plank looks simple until you actually do one properly. Rather than repeatedly flexing through the spine, you’re asking your trunk to maintain a strong position against gravity.

Your obliques and other muscles around the trunk have to work to prevent your body collapsing towards the floor. This ability to resist unwanted movement can transfer into everything from carrying shopping and lifting luggage to running and strength training.

Start with a position you can control properly, keeping your head, torso, hips and legs aligned rather than allowing your hips to drop. As you become stronger, the exercise can be progressed through longer holds, more challenging positions or additional load.

The objective isn’t to hold a plank for eternity. It’s to create tension and maintain a strong position while you do it.

2. Machine Leg Extensions

Let’s clear something up immediately: leg extensions aren’t a bad exercise. They directly train the quadriceps and can be useful within rehabilitation, hypertrophy programmes or as additional work alongside larger compound movements.

But if you’re relatively new to training and only have limited time available, they probably shouldn’t form the foundation of your lower-body programme. The machine supports your body while your knee performs most of the movement, whereas standing exercises require your hips, knees, ankles and trunk to work together.

For someone who wants to become stronger and more capable rather than simply isolate one muscle group, there may be more useful places to start.

A Better Alternative: The Split Squat

The split squat gives you an enormous amount of return for one exercise. It trains the quads, glutes and other muscles around the hips and legs while challenging your balance and control.

It can also be adapted to suit your current ability. A beginner might perform a supported bodyweight split squat while holding onto something stable. From there, you can progress to an unsupported version before gradually adding dumbbells, kettlebells or other resistance.

You don’t need to rush the progression. Good technique now gives you the foundation to stay strong when heavier loads are introduced later. That’s a central part of the Foundry approach: master the basics, build capacity and progressively handle more quality work.

3. Smith Machine Bench Press

The Smith machine gets plenty of criticism, some of which is undeserved. A Smith machine bench press can absolutely build muscle and strength, and the fixed bar path can be useful when you deliberately want additional stability.

Again, context matters. If your goal is to develop general upper-body strength and you’re still relatively new to training, however, we’d usually want you to become competent at controlling your own body too.

That brings us to one of the most underrated exercises in the gym.

A Better Alternative: The Push-Up

The humble push-up doesn’t require a complicated machine or an impressive stack of weights, but it’s an incredibly effective upper-body exercise when performed properly. Push-ups train the chest, shoulders and triceps while requiring you to maintain control through your trunk and lower body.

If you can’t perform a full push-up from the floor yet, that’s absolutely fine. Don’t butcher your way through repetitions just so you can say you’ve done them.

Raise your hands onto a bench, bar or other stable elevated surface. This reduces the amount of bodyweight you need to move while allowing you to practise the same fundamental movement. As you become stronger, gradually lower the height until you’re performing controlled push-ups from the floor.

From there, you can continue progressing through tempo, additional repetitions or external resistance.

Compound Exercises Give You More For Your Time

There’s a recurring theme in the alternatives above: they involve more than one part of your body working together.

Compound exercises aren’t automatically superior to isolation exercises, but they’re incredibly useful when you’re trying to build an efficient programme. Squats, split squats, hinges, rows, presses, push-ups and carries allow you to train multiple muscle groups and develop coordination between them.

This is particularly useful if you’re training two or three times per week rather than spending hours in the gym every day. You can then use more targeted exercises to fill gaps where necessary.

Think of your fundamental movements as the foundations of your programme. Isolation exercises can then be added where they’re useful rather than removed completely.

Don’t Confuse Complicated With Effective

Fitness has an unfortunate habit of making simple things complicated. If an exercise involves a wobble board, resistance band, kettlebell and one leg, it can look impressive, but that doesn’t necessarily make it effective.

Your body adapts when you expose it to an appropriate challenge and progressively increase that challenge over time. Often, relatively simple exercises make this much easier.

If you can perform a movement safely, measure what you’re doing and gradually progress it, you’ve already got many of the ingredients needed to become stronger. You don’t need a new collection of exercises every week. You need good exercises performed consistently.

Technique Comes Before Load

Exercise selection is only part of the equation because the right exercise performed badly isn’t particularly useful either. Before worrying about how much weight you’re lifting, make sure you can control the movement through an appropriate range.

Training at Foundry starts with learning to move well and mastering the basics before progressively increasing the challenge. Squat, hinge, push and pull effectively first, then build the load as your strength and ability improve.

This doesn’t mean every repetition has to look identical or that there’s one perfect technique for everyone. Bodies are different. It means you should understand the intention of the exercise and be able to perform it with enough control to achieve that intention.

Your Programme Should Progress

One of the biggest problems with random gym workouts isn’t necessarily the individual exercises. It’s that nothing connects one session to the next.

If you do one workout on Monday, something completely different on Wednesday and whatever you fancy at the weekend, it becomes difficult to tell whether you’re actually improving. It might make you tired, but being tired isn’t the same as making progress.

A structured programme allows you to monitor that progress. Over time, you might lift more weight, perform more repetitions, improve your technique, use a greater range of motion, complete more quality work or progress to a more demanding variation.

That’s the difference between simply exercising and actually training towards something.

Have A Plan Before You Enter The Gym

The original problem remains the same. You don’t want to arrive at the gym and spend the first ten minutes wondering what you’re supposed to do.

Before your session, know your warm-up, your main exercises and roughly how much work you’re planning to complete. Your warm-up and movement preparation should also relate to the training ahead rather than being a collection of random stretches.

At Foundry, sessions move from focused mobility and movement preparation into strength work, with accessory or conditioning work added according to the individual’s needs. Having that structure makes your training more efficient and makes walking into the gym considerably less intimidating.

Stop Looking For The Perfect Exercise

There isn’t one exercise that everyone should or shouldn’t be doing. There are exercises that are more or less appropriate depending on your goals, training experience, injury history, mobility and the equipment available.

A leg extension isn’t pointless if there’s a reason for doing it. A Smith machine isn’t pointless if it helps you achieve a specific training objective. Even the sit-up isn’t something that needs to be permanently banned from every gym programme.

Instead, ask yourself a simple question: why am I doing this exercise?

If you can’t answer that, there’s a reasonable chance your programme needs more structure.

Make Your Training Count

Most of us don’t have unlimited time to spend in the gym. If you’ve carved three hours out of a busy week to train, those hours should count.

That means focusing on movements that suit your goals, learning to perform them well and progressively challenging yourself as you become stronger. You don’t need endless exercise variety and you certainly don’t need to copy whatever the person next to you happens to be doing. You need a plan that gives your training some direction.

At Foundry, our personal training is built around structured, progressive training rather than random workouts. Our coaches adapt exercises to your ability, help you master the fundamentals and progress your training as you become stronger.

If you’d prefer to train alongside others without disappearing into a large class, small group personal training gives you individual coaching within a group of up to six people.

Getting results isn’t about finding cleverer exercises. It’s about doing the right things consistently, understanding why you’re doing them and doing them well.

Prefer an AI Summary?