Have you become too relaxed or bored with your current workout routine? What changes should you make? Variety can spice up your life, but too much variation can sabotage your health goals in a significant way. Whether it’s due to boredom or a lack of knowledge, switching up your workout program too frequently may be holding you back from accomplishing your goals.
It is essential to know how long you should stick to the same training regimen, how frequently you should change training variables, including workouts, reps, sets, and weights, and how to add variety and keep things fresh.
REPETITION EQUALS PROGRESS
One thing to consider about exercise is that repeatedly doing the same thing works. The more you perform a specific activity or regimen, the better you will get at it. The more you squat, the stronger you become. The more frequently you run, the faster you will become. To get good at discipline, like an exercise, you must do it repeatedly until it becomes second nature. Consider training to be a skill, not a task. If you wanted to improve your guitar skills, you’d practice daily. You wouldn’t expect to sound like Jimi Hendrix by playing guitar one day, piano the next, and trombone the next; this is because our bodies adapt to exercise using the principle of increasing overload. Lifting more weight, doing an extra set, or doing a few more reps consistently over time helps us develop strength and build muscle. When we routinely run longer or at a slightly quicker speed, we get faster, our lungs get better at utilizing oxygen, and our heart improves blood pumping to our working muscles.
As our bodies adapt to exercise, it is merely a survival mechanism. We voluntarily subject our bodies to stress by working out. Our bodies then respond, “Wow, that was tough.” “We may not survive a second time unless we gain some muscle here and boost our strength there.” But if that stress never returns, our bodies conclude, “Must have been a fluke.” We’re going to cease growing muscle and strength right now!
THE TRUTH ABOUT MUSCLE CONFUSION
Progressive overload is when “muscle confusion” is entirely discredited. Our muscles do not become “confused” if we vary our workouts frequently and never do the same thing twice. Thus, if you’re constantly changing things up, expect a slight improvement in strength, muscle mass, or whatever fitness goal you’re pursuing. Still, it’s hard to use progressive stress because our muscles never get better at any one thing.
Changing your workouts may keep you cognitively stimulated, resulting in a high degree of effort—a vital component for workout effectiveness. Nevertheless, no matter how hard you work out, you’ll struggle to make fundamental changes if you don’t consistently make modest gains in a few activities that become mainstays in your regimen.
THE IMPORTANCE OF INDICATOR EXERCISES
Having exercises that will remain in your training regimen indefinitely is beneficial. Choose workouts that you know will have the most influence on your success based on your fitness goals. Full-body strength training exercises similar to squats and deadlifts will likely be around for the long haul if you want to get stronger. If you’re a runner, keep routines like tempo runs, long-distance runs, and sprints on the menu so you can aim for ongoing development.
Write down everything you did in a notepad each time you do it: sets, reps, weights, and any important notes. Keep track of your progress with whatever you choose for your indicator exercises. Long term, your goal is to perform more than you did previously: increase the weight on the bar you lift, do more sets or reps, complete the workout in less time, and so on.
WHEN TO MIX IT UP
How dull would working out be if you kept everything the same? If you become bored with your workouts, you won’t make the necessary effort to improve, so changing them now and again is essential. Maintaining a routine long enough to improve is required, but so is remaining motivated and interested.
Outside of your indicator workouts, vary your motions on a semi-regular basis. Changing your strength-training exercises, stretching movements, jogging regimen, etc., every 4-6 weeks is a reasonable plan for most people. When we say alter things up, we don’t mean change everything all at once to the point that the routine is unrecognizable compared to your old one. We’re talking about modest modifications—just enough to keep things fresh while advancing you toward your goals. For instance:
Change from reverse lunges to walking lunges.
Move from pushups to dumbbell bench presses.
Go from traditional static stretching to a guided yoga workout.
Go from treadmill to outdoor running.
In all these cases, the workout category is the same but slightly modified to keep things interesting.
We want to tire out a specific muscle group or do high-intensity interval training (HIIT) to finish our workout. These choices might change from activity to movement because we’re not necessarily trying to get better at these exercises; we’re more interested in pushing hard and putting ourselves through pain. For some of us with exceptionally short attention spans, ending each workout with some form of “finisher” that differs daily can satisfy our need for variety without delaying our development.
Assume you want to finish your triceps. You may do cable triceps pushdowns one workout, close-grip pushups the next, and dumbbell skull crushers. It doesn’t matter whether you change the exercise each time if you properly exhaust your triceps. For example, as a muscle-building finisher towards the end of a workout, you could choose an exercise for a specific muscle group and strive to achieve 100 reps in as few sets as possible.
As an example of HIIT, suppose you wish to do five cycles of 20 seconds of effort and 20 seconds of rest. You could do any high-intensity movement, such as stationary bike sprints, kettlebell swings, medicine ball smashes, etc. You might modify the activity every workout, but as long as you push yourself to your limits, you’ll gain the fat-burning benefits.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Here are some upper- and lower-body strength training regimens to help you visualize how often you should switch exercises.
UPPER BODY
Bench press: continue continuously, attempting to increase the weight with time.
Lats: alternate exercises every 4-6 weeks (i.e., pulldowns, pullups, etc.)
Rows: alternate workouts every 4-6 weeks (i.e., dumbbell rows, machine rows, etc.)
Finisher: alternate every workout, alternating muscular groups each time (i.e., biceps, triceps, shoulders, etc.)
LOWER BODY
Squat: continue endlessly, attempting to add weight with time.
Rotate hamstring exercises every 4-6 weeks (i.e., deadlifts, leg curls, etc.)
Rotate abdominal exercises every 4-6 weeks (i.e., front planks, side planks, etc.)
HIIT: alternate every session, alternating workouts each time (i.e., bike sprints, kettlebell swings, etc.).
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