How often should you change your workout?
Some people vary their exercises daily, even, believing this creates “muscle confusion” and therefore leads to more microtears.
Changing stimuli
First, it’s worth making this clear, in simple terms: you can change a training program while keeping the same exercises (or at least most of them). What do I mean? 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 dumbbell curls. After 7 days, one group performed the same exercise, while the other performed preacher curls, also for 5 sets of 6 repetitions. The muscle damage markers assessed over the 4 days following 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 to and following a good training program as closely as possible is important, even for tracking your progress (increasing weights, etc.). In future training programs, changing (some) exercises is important mainly for motivational reasons.
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 have that information on hand if you want to fix 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—in other words, time (in seconds)—are ideal for designing hypertrophy workouts. However, we have plenty of ways to vary these stimuli.
Movement tempo in your training 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 cause unwanted injuries.
You don’t need very heavy weights to achieve hypertrophy or fix skinny legs. That’s a myth, and it needs to be debunked! By using your full range of motion and controlling your tempo, you can achieve great results.
You should make sure to perform complete movements in your workouts, because poor exercise form combined with heavy loads can lead to serious injuries during training. And that’s not what you want, is it?
