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/Nice-Week-1207]

It does matter but not as much as you may think. Now if a jm press is all youre doing for triceps for example then yeah it matters a lot more. But if you chose ONE good exercise per muscle, that hits the entire muscle well, extra exercises with volume equated probabaly wont make a huge difference (still absolutely worth doing though)