A lot of research has been done in the last 10-15 years that has shown that our bodies are just amazing adaptors. So if you’ve been working out for a while and you do the same routine every time, particularly if you go to a gym and start on a certain machine and do it in the exact same order each time, your body has probably got 90% of it. the results and improvement you can by doing it that way. Our bodies adapt specifically to what we’re doing, so if you’re weight training, you have to change up your routine all the time. You need to change your angles, you need to change the direction that you’re doing it. There are all sorts of ways to keep your body guessing, but it’s important to keep it guessing and not get into a set routine that you never change.
It has been shown that if, for example, marathon runners, who we all think of as extremely fit people, were to get into a pool and were told to swim, within 2-4 laps they would run out of breath, which is hard to tell. imagine. However, since their bodies are specifically trained to run, swimming is foreign to the body and their bodies are not trained to do it. It is very important that if you are going to choose certain things to train, you think about changing a little, so that your body varies and continues to progress and grow. It will be what is called “cross training”. You will be specifically trained for many different types of things.
If you want to be an excellent hiker, of course you should hike, but it would also be a good idea to ride a bike, climb stairs, do weights, and maybe swim. Mixing it up is one of the best things you can do to encourage consistent and consistent progress. Our bodies have no ceiling, there is no limit to how strong we can become, how fit we can be. It’s just a matter of keeping things fresh. Change them whenever you can.
Now, how often do you change your routine? I would say no less than once a month. I personally change my clients’ routines and mine every time we train. Some people work out with me once a week, some people work out with me 3 times a week, and the routine is different all the time. I’m a true advocate of keeping it interesting, keeping it fresh, and keeping your body guessing.
Some of the ways you can change up your routine to keep it interesting and keep your body progressing is to do different types of exercises when you train. There are many types of workouts, and what I mean by that is different ways of doing the same thing, but in a different way.
Circuit training is a wonderful way to give your body a little curve. What I would do is warm up for 6-9 minutes on any cardio equipment. If you have a lot of pieces at your disposal, like in a gym, you’ll want to change them every time you return to cardio. Circuit training is interval training; you can set any interval you want. One I particularly like is that after you warm up, you do 1½ minutes of weight training, then do bicep curls for 1½ minutes, then go back to the cardio equipment and do another 3 minutes. You would continue like this over the course of an hour. So every time you weight train for a minute and a half, you’ll switch muscle groups. The next time you go back to weight training, you’re going to do, say, triceps. Then you would go back and do 3 more minutes of cardio. You want to alternate back and forth like that, and make sure you’re switching muscle groups the whole time, so you end up with a full body work and probably at least 30 minutes of cardio. This is a great and efficient way to train your body. You are killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Both are burning fat, using their aerobic system, and are training their body muscular, using their anaerobic system. This is just a great program.
Also, you can do what I would call negative workouts, positive workouts, pyramids, reverse pyramids, slow or ultra-slow. I’m going to go into detail about each of these in terms of their weight training routines. Here are ways to mix it up for your weight training routines.
Negative training is basically slowly going through the most difficult part of the movement, so if you were to do bicep curls, when you are coming up it is considered the positive side of the movements. I would go up on 1-2 counts, then slowly back down for 5-10 counts. That is the negative side of movement, and when you fight gravity the most. This is a really effective way to break plateaus. However, you can change that and do what we call positive training. You can go slowly on the upward part of the movement, with a normal release of 1-2 counts. That is considered a positive workout, and you would do it with all the different muscle groups in your body.
The pyramids are basically 3 set pyramids or 5 set pyramids, whatever you have time for. I usually do 3 set pyramids, because they are the most time efficient. A pyramid is setting your first weight to a weight you’ve done before successfully with, say, 8-12 reps. Then on your second set, you’re going to raise 20%. It’s quite possible that it’s a weight you’ve never done before. You are going to do as many repetitions as you can. It’s unlikely that you’ll get a full set, but you can, depending on whether or not you were ready for an increase here. Then on your third set you go back to the weight you were using the first time around, or maybe a 10% increase. That would be a pyramid.
A reverse pyramid would be starting heavy, a weight you’ve never done before. Then, you go to a weight that you made in the second set. Then in the third set, you come back to a weight you’ve never done before, a heavyweight. You are going to fail in all this. You want to do enough reps that you can’t do another one without breaking form, without losing the really fine form that you should be maintaining, and that’s your stopping point.
When you do ultra-slow or slow exercises, you’re using whatever exercise you’re doing, for example, a bicep curl. As you get to your contraction, you will count to 5, then relax on 5 counts as well. That is considered slow. Then you can do an ultra slow move, where you go up in 10-15 counts and down in 10-15 counts.
These are all ways to mix it up, keep it different, keep your body guessing and very, very important if you want to keep your progress steady and your body growing stronger and stronger all the time.
