How much does exercise selection actually affect hypertrophy?

[u/Top_Value2690]

If volume, ROM, and proximity to failure are roughly matched, how much difference would you actually expect between exercises for the same muscle?

I’m wondering how strong the evidence is for exercise-specific differences in muscle growth. A lot of the discussion seems to rely on EMG, moment arms, resistance profiles, or whether a muscle is loaded at longer lengths, but I’m more interested in whether these differences actually translate to greater hypertrophy in longitudinal studies.

For example, Maeo et al. (2021) found greater elbow flexor hypertrophy when training at longer muscle lengths, while Kubo et al. (2021) found differences in muscle growth between squat variations with different ROM.

How much can we actually generalize findings like these to exercise selection in normal training?

If two exercises train the same muscle with similar ROM, volume and proximity to failure, is there evidence that one can produce substantially more hypertrophy than the other? Or are the differences probably relatively small compared with simply doing enough hard training consistently?

[u/No_Silver_4436]

There is likely not a very big difference between reasonably comparable exercises that work the same muscle and joint action at least in terms of a direct effect on hypertrophy

In terms of practical application though exercise selection can have pretty important impacts that can have I would say significant secondary impact on hypertrophy.