How often should you change your workout?
Some people vary their exercises as often as daily, believing that this creates “muscle confusion” and therefore leads to more microtears.
Changing the stimulus
First, it’s worth clarifying, in simple terms, that you can change a training program while keeping the same exercises (or at least most of them). How? By changing the stimuli (metabolic or tension-based) and adding advanced techniques such as dropsets, rest-pause, etc.
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But back to the topic: In one study, participants performed 5 sets of 6 repetitions of incline-bench biceps curls. After 7 days, one group performed the same exercise, while the other performed Scott-bench biceps curls, also for 5 sets of 6 repetitions. The markers of muscle damage measured over the 4 days after the session showed no differences between the groups!
Conclusion
Randomly varying exercises does not seem to “confuse” the muscle for the purpose of hypertrophy. Sticking closely to a good training program whenever possible is important, even for tracking your progress (increasing weights, etc.). In future training programs, changing (some) exercises is important mainly for motivation.
Get the most out of your workout before changing it
Before changing your workout, do you know the tempo of your exercises? You should—and you should have this information on hand if you want to correct skinny legs…
Remember that weight training is about more than simply pulling or pushing weights at random!
According to several studies, contraction times close to 60 seconds, with repetitions lasting between 4 and 6 seconds—that is, the time in seconds—are ideal for designing hypertrophy workouts. But we have plenty of ways to vary these stimuli.
Movement tempo in your workout split is a more important variable than simply increasing the “weight,” because indiscriminately increasing the load can affect your range of motion and compromise proper exercise form. In extreme cases, it can lead to unwanted injuries.
You don’t need very heavy weights to build muscle or correct skinny legs. That’s a myth, and it needs to be debunked! By using a full range of motion and controlling your tempo, you can achieve great results.
You should always make sure to perform full movements in your workouts, because poor exercise form combined with heavy loads can cause serious injuries during training. And that’s not what you want, is it?
