The more you practice a specific move, the better you get at it—but beginners get stronger faster by doing big compound lifts.

We analyzed the available evidence and found that strength expression tends to be movement-specific, meaning your body gets better at the exact movements you practice. However, for people who are new to training, compound movements—like squats, deadlifts, and presses that involve multiple joints and muscle groups—lead to faster initial strength gains compared to training that focuses only on one specific movement. This appears to be due to neuromuscular adaptations, which are improvements in how your brain connects to and activates your muscles, rather than just muscle growth [1]. What we’ve found so far is based on 53 studies or assertions that support this idea, with none that contradict it. These findings suggest that when someone has never lifted weights before, their nervous system responds strongly to complex, full-body movements. This allows them to get stronger across several exercises quickly, even if they haven’t practiced those exact movements before. In contrast, training that isolates one movement early on doesn’t seem to produce the same broad, rapid gains in untrained individuals. This doesn’t mean specificity doesn’t matter later on—it likely becomes more important as training experience grows. But for beginners, the body seems to benefit more from learning how to coordinate large, multi-joint actions. The improvements come from better communication between the brain and muscles, not just from muscles getting bigger. For someone just starting out, this means focusing on basic compound lifts may help build strength faster across the board, even if their goal is to improve a different movement. As training progresses, adding more specific drills could become more useful.