Your anatomy changes how you perform each exercise, how they affect you (growth, recovery and fatigue wise) and what exercises allow you to lift the most weight. The length of your limbs and torso both affect your leverages in very important ways for programming your training plan. These are significant things once you’re lifting heavy weights since ignoring them can cause platoes or overuse injury. Once you read this article you will know what technique changes to make in specific lifts according to your anatomy and how your anatomy affects fatigue and stimulus from those lifts.

The simplest ways to tell are:

To tell if you have long or short arms, measure your height and then your wingspan. If your height is greater than arm span, then you have short arms, and vice versa.

To tell if you have a long torso, you can test by squatting down and seeing if you struggle to get to depth with an upright torso. Usually if you have long legs you will bend over more and won’t be able to stay as upright.

You can also just use the eye test. Meaning, you look at yourself and see if your legs look too long in proportion to your torso length. The usual proportion artists use is 50/50, therefore you can use that as your baseline.

First, terminology. Torso length – the length from the base of the neck to the hips. Limb length – arm (shoulder to wrist) and leg (hip to ankle). These lengths will determine how you lift efficiently and how good each lift is for your build. Now, technique adjustments to help you lift more efficiently on compound lifts:

Squats

Long torso, short legs – easier to maintain upright posture, go deeper into the squat. Less lower back fatigue.

Short torso, long legs – tend to lean forward, much harder to go deep in the squat. Much more lower back fatigue.

Technique changes

Long torso – maintain upright posture, focus on bracing and letting the knees go forward. High bar is perfect here. Weightlifter squat technique.

Short torso – hinge at the start of the movement. Basically, brace and then make your hips go back before going down to squat. Low bar might be better for you. Also consider a wide stance. Good tutorial for hinging at the squat here. Powerlifter squat technique.

Deadlifts

Long arms – less range of motion.

Short arms – more range of motion, awkward starting position.

Long torso, short legs – awkward conventional deadlift, upright position forces a squat-like deadlift. Forced to turn the movement into a wedge. Test sumo. Tutorial for how to wedge the deadlift here. The dude teaching here has incredible tips for the deadlift.

Short torso, long legs – ideal conventional deadlift build.

Technique changes

Long arms – focus on locking out the lift, as that is the hard part for you.

Short arms – find a good starting position, maybe let hips raise before lifting the weight. That will happen naturally most of the time.

Long torso, short legs – relatively upright starting position, look at strongman deadlifts, focus on the wedge.

Short torso, long legs – conventional basic deadlift. Look at Pete Rubish for how to perform them. He lets the thoracic part of his spine round while keeping his lumbar straight. Not recommended for beginners.

Bench press

Long arms – greater range of motion, greater stress on the shoulders, each set is more fatiguing and stimulating for growth.

Short arms – less range of motion, can often lift heavier, do more volume and train it at a higher frequency due to advantageous leverage.

Technique changes

Long arms – if your shoulders allow it, grip the bar wider. Personally I had to grip just outside shoulder width to combat shoulder issues. Takes a lot longer to recover in comparison to short arms.

Short arms – stay tight as you lift, can bench press more often. Standard technique.

When it comes to pulling movements, your technique will not change much, however the frequency, amount of volume and reps you can do will.

Each body type will perform better on different movements. No body type is totally screwed in every movement.

Long limbs will make any movement that makes you use those limbs to lift more disadvantaged, however they make for a far superior deadlift. Essentially, long limbs – good pull movements. Short limbs give advantage in any movement that involves those limbs lifting the weight, for example squats and bench press. Short limbs – good push movements. A long torso may be better for a more upright squat that is more quad dominant, whereas a short torso might force a wider stance with a slightly bent over squat, which is more posterior chain dominant.

Essentially, any pressing movements will produce more muscle growth if you have long limbs. However with that increased stimulus comes increased fatigue. You cannot do these movements as often as someone with short arms, nor can you do them for as much volume. But you do get more out of the volume that you can do, so just focus on recovering properly and performing everything with intensity.

With short limbs you can do pressing movements for much more volume and frequency. For example, a long armed lifter may only be able to do bench press 2x/week, whereas a short armed lifter might be able to bench as often as 4-5x/week.

These are examples and can be applied to any lift. If you’re weak in that lift after training it for a while, that means you might have slightly worse levers for it. This means you will either have to reduce frequency to increase recovery OR increase frequency and intensity. Only way to truly tell is to experiment and trust your body.

So, with long limbs – do pressing movements less often . With short limbs you can train them more often. Pulling movements are the same, except if you have long legs/arms they are better done more often, whereas with short limbs – they are more fatiguing and can’t be done as often. All things considered, as long as you trust your body and tone down how often and how much you’re lifting when your body starts sending signals (fatigue, joint aches, coordination issues) you will not get injured and intuitively train according to your anatomy. This isn’t one of those topics you can just skip to the summary and get most of the info, sadly.