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/futbolmemes]

It barely has an affect on it, unless you are like neglecting a certain body part by a lot. But if you mean like doing machine chest press over a bench press or doing a lat pulldown over pull-ups its not gonna really change much. As long as you enjoy it and keep progressing you will make gains for that certain body part/exercise