effective exercises and - most importantly - progressing them consistently. Bench presses, shoulder presses, pull ups, rows, squats, deads, etc. if you master these and consistently increase the amount of weight you can lift, you don’t really NEED much else.

But once you’ve got your newbie gains, it becomes really hard to consistently increase the amount you can lift. Using variations of these lifts and adding isolation and machine movements can then be really helpful for adding muscle (adding muscle and getting stronger are not the same thing), addressing imbalances, targeting specific weaknesses and lagging muscle groups, etc.

Lat pulldown’s a great exercise, especially for developing lat strength and hypertrophy, especially if you aren’t at the point where you can rep out enough pull ups to have the time under tension necessary to increase lat size. I’ve never been all that convinced that it develops pull ups very well though. I also think assisted pull-ups are a waste of time, but that’s just my opinion. My experience is that to get better at pull ups, you’ve just gotta do a ton of pull ups and do them like every day for a month.