The fitness world, especially the one you see in social media, is selling you a product and therefore at times is biased. That product could be a supplement, or a piece of equipment, but more often than not it's selling you that particular person's "brand". Trying to change someone's perspective on how to properly exercise when they see thousands of online influencers doing "the best glute exercise", can be frustrating. While plenty of these people are educated and the exercises may be great, there may not be context on how to implement them in an effective way. I understand a huge chunk of people approach exercise with getting a better body in mind, but that can absolutely be accomplished while also decreasing risks for injury, improving posture, and athletic performance.
The core philosophy behind the term "functional training" is to prepare like we perform. That is why I wouldn't agree with your third chest day this week, or only doing core exercises to get better abs. If our exercise goals consist of increasing muscle mass, decreasing body fat, increasing performance, and decreasing risk for injury, then we need to focus on progressive, multi-joint, multi-planar movements at various loads and speeds. These are the factors I see missing from most gym-goers routines and why they may not be meeting their training expectations, or even causing more problems down the road.
We should almost always approach exercise with movement based training in mind. Movement types consist of upper push/pull, lower push/pull, and rotational movements. Exercises like a squat would be considered a lower push since we are pushing away from the ground, and exercises like a row would be an upper pull as we are pulling an object to our body. Traditional exercises fall into these categories of movement types, but how we program them into our weekly routine is the difference. Basic weightlifting with no structure can be one-dimensional and lead to training plateaus, unnecessary volume, and lack of kinetic linking which is imperative to our performance.
Try programming your workouts with total body in mind and not just individual muscles. My suggestions would depend on how many days per week you are training, but the general format would follow alternating days of upper push/lower pull and upper pull/lower push type movements. This would look like doing movements like a chest press followed by a deadlift, for our primary strength movements, and push-ups followed by stability ball hamstring curls for our secondary movements on an upper push/lower pull day. The amount of exercises, sets, reps, and weight we perform in a single session would depend on our experience and time available. With this design we are able to train not only harder during each session on specific movements, but more frequently due to increased recovery time.
I'm always happy to see someone exercising, even if it's not the most effective thing they could be doing for their goals. So do what you enjoy doing but keep in mind that training movements trains muscles, but training muscles does not train movements. If you need any help or have any questions about your ideal program, please feel free to reach out to myself and the rest of the training staff.