Is your progress real, or is it artificial?
There’s a hard truth when it comes to making significant progress to your physique and strength: you’re going to need to prioritise long-term monotony at the sacrifice of constantly “mixing it up”.
We understand that changing programs every few weeks can provide an acute boost in motivation due to the novel stimuli and subsequent performance progressions. However, it’s important to remember that program progression does not guarantee physique progression.
Don’t jump ship just because you feel slightly bored and have hit a few plateaus. Rather, if your progress is stalling in the gym, chances are you need to invest more time into the proficiency of your lifts, combined with adequate nutrition, mindset, and recovery modalities.
Constantly switching your exercise selection and training regime will ensure that you never truly master a specific approach. In fact, changing programs on a frequent basis could be argued as being “easier”, because you never progress for long enough to truly test your strength potential and reap the hypertrophy benefits as a result with permanent lifts.
This refutes the belief that every few weeks you should “switch-up” your program in order to “shock and confuse” your muscles so they can grow more.
While our muscles may have cells (which can hypertrophy to be huge!), they are vastly different to brain cells, and fortunately don’t get confused.
If anything, keeping an exercise in your program for longer and maximising execution, intensity and strength is the way to go! Also, it might take you weeks or even months (think squats and deadlifts) to nail the movement pattern and start making decent strength progressions.
Typically we’ll keep an exercise in our program until:
▪️Our progression stalls for a significant period of time
▪️The exercise is increasing our risk of injury or niggles
▪️We are genuinely bored of that exercise and want to try something new
▪️We think another exercise could be more appropriate for our goals and circumstances
▪️We’ve changed gym environments and we need to modify the exercise based on available equipment