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How Often to Change Your Exercises in Your Workout Plan (Ep 28)
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To avoid hitting a plateau in your gains and fat loss, It’s important to keep your muscles challenged with novel stimulus. But that doesn’t mean you have to change your workouts up every week!
Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast! I'm Jayd Harrison (@Jaydigains), a personal trainer and wellness coach. I created this podcast to share helpful tips to help you make gains in your fitness journey 💪
In this episode, I discuss the importance of introducing novel stimulus to your workout routine to avoid plateauing.
Our bodies are smart machines. They’re highly adaptable and are geared towards making things you do regularly as efficient as possible. This means that your body will spend less energy (i.e. calories) doing things you do often.
So when you keep the same training and exercise routine over an extended period of time (more than 6-12 weeks), your body will start to burn fewer calories during your workouts. You’ll also build less muscle as a result of your workouts than you did at the start of the program. This is bad news if you want to continue to burn fat or make gains!
So to continue making progress, it’s important to keep introducing a novel stimulus in your exercise routine often. Novel stimulus is anything that challenges your muscles to do something they aren’t used to doing. This could involve adding more reps or weight, changing the type of exercise or stance, adjusting rest periods, or adding more training days.
If you don’t introduce a novel stimulus often enough, it’s easy for your body to adapt to your training and hit a plateau (where your body changes very little or not at all for an extended time).
Some people try to avoid hitting a plateau by doing different exercises every time they train, rather than sticking to a training routine. There’s nothing inherently bad about doing this. It can keep you from getting bored in your workouts, and it certainly introduces novel stimulus. However, the downside in this approach is that it can be difficult to track your progress over time without the consistent data that following a 6-12 week training program provides.
I usually keep my personal training clients on a consistent routine of workouts for 6-12 weeks, during which we work on the same exercises. I follow a general rule of two when it comes to progressing their workouts and introducing new challenges in their program: if my client can do the same exercise with the same weight and the same number of reps two sessions in a row, then it’s time to add a novel stimulus. For that, I’ll gradually add more reps or weight to the exercise—this approach is called progressive overload (giving the muscles progressively more volume or resistance over time).
It’s much easier to know when to add more weight or reps by keeping the training program consistent over the course of 6-12 weeks versus always doing random exercises every time you train. Otherwise, you can find yourself always using the same weight and reps on an exercise without realizing it—which can in itself cause a plateau.
Regardless of how often you change your workout routine, it’s important to track your workouts (including what exercises you do, what weight you use, how many reps you do in each set, and how difficult each set was) and take body measurements frequently. This will help you to monitor your progress and identify when something needs to change. Check out my Fitness Journals (available on Amazon) to help you track your progress!
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