Why do we change programs every month?
We get this question a lot at Fit House. And right now, when our clients are training with customized at-home programs, we get this question even more. Why can’t we just get a program and stick with it for the ENTIRE pandemic, however long that is?
First, let’s say the pandemic “pause” lasts until May 15th. That’s almost two months with Fit House closed. Two months with no complete gym access. We have clients training at home with just a few dumbbells, some training with decent home gym set ups, some training with just one dumbbell, and some training with no equipment at all.
To account for lack of equipment, we adjust our intensification strategies so our clients can use less weight and equipment and still get a training effect. At some point, however, even these intensification techniques are going to lose their efficacy.
“Let’s say you can press 50# dumbbells in the gym, but you only have 15# dumbbells at home,” explains Kristen Perillo. “We can write a program that will make those 15# dumbbells intense enough to produce results even though they’d normally be easy. But even with those tricky trainer intensification techniques, presses with those 15# dumbbells are still going to get easy as your body adapts to the workout. As we adapt, our workouts have to evolve if we want to keep seeing progress. We can’t add more weight; you don’t have any more to add. So we have to switch workouts. We can reuse those 15# dumbbells in a new way—with a new exercise and with a new intensification technique, and this allows us to keep using those 15# dumbbells in a way that will produce results.”
But what about when there’s not a pandemic and we have all the weight in the world to add to our lifts? Why do we still switch our workouts every month? Why can’t we just keep adding pounds to the bar?
Chris Rombola says, “If it were that easy, we would all be deadlifting 1,000 pounds by next 4th of July.” 🇺🇸
Chris’s approach to programming is pretty typical of what we do here at Fit House: “For the most part, I use undulating periodization with my clients; we alternate between 3-4 weeks phases of intensity (heavier weights and lower volume) and 3-4 weeks of accumulation (moderate weight but more volume). Depending on your training level, it takes about 3-4 weeks before you detrain a quality and lose results; by switching programs before this point, we never detrain something completely.
“Example: you get really strong on bench press for a 3-4 week phase, and then we work on a new 3-4 week phase, building new muscle with the strength you garnered and using different exercises. Within 3-4 weeks, we will be back to the bench press before you start losing much of the strength gains you had previously made. Now we can use methods to increase the strength of the new muscle we built. Think of it as three steps forward, one step back, three steps forward again.”
In other words, we get strong, then we shift gears to use that strength elsewhere, then we come back to get stronger still.
Similar patterns need to happen if your goal is building muscle, too. You can’t just use the same workouts again and again.
“We need to continually challenge our muscles in order to gain muscle,” says Molly Lanham. “Otherwise, it either becomes easy and our bodies adapt, hitting a plateau, or the body senses we don’t need muscle, and therefore we lose. So when a workout becomes less of a challenge as a result of repetition, you need to switch the variables up again, always creating a new challenge to make gains.”
Because of how the body gains muscle, we regularly need new stimuli to produce results.
“There are four different pathways to building muscle, one of which is muscular damage,” says Chris. “Without getting too complex, simply, when you train against resistance, you cause micro-trauma to your muscle fibers, and your body adapts by rebuilding them to be stronger and more resilient so if placed under the same stress again, they will not be damaged to the same degree.
“Did you ever try a new exercise or an exercise you haven’t done in a long time and you were left incredibly sore? In regards to that movement pattern (exercise), your body has very poor intramuscular coordination (your muscle fibers working synchronously together to perform an exercise). This causes damage to your muscles, which your body will then repair and rebuild (building muscle and strength). With time, a very short period of time if you’re more advanced, your intramuscular coordination will improve, and that exercise will no longer cause the damage that was the catalyst for your body to build more muscle. At this point, results will stop.”
Unless you change the program.
In addition, most people will not want to keep using the muscular damage pathway over and over again. Although perhaps the most effective, it is the hardest approach to recover from and not necessarily appropriate for everybody. As trainers, we therefore plan accordingly and use various muscle-building pathways with our clients.
Switching your program isn’t only about physiology, though. It’s also about mental stimulation.
It’s gratifying and motivational to see our bodies getting stronger and changing before our eyes. But “once we hit that plateau, we stop seeing results,” says Alysia Coats, and “once we stop seeing results, we lose motivation, consistency, and interest.”
Gina Rombola agrees. “If my training didn’t switch every three weeks, I would hit a serious mental plateau. The switch of the program helps reinvigorate my brain.”
For many people, training programs become stale, uninteresting , and hard to commit to when they remain the same for too long. And what good is even a fantastic training program if you aren’t looking forward to doing it?
Besides, changing programs every so often is healthy for your joints, tendons, and ligaments, too. Even if you train 3-4 times per week, we cannot hit every muscle group from every angle in every program. And most gym injuries are not sudden, acute ones. Instead, the body will develop chronic overuse injuries, like tennis elbow and other forms of tendonitis. Changing programs every so often allows us to hit every grip, hand position, area of the strength curve, complementary movement pattern, and emphasis so we are less likely to develop injuries.
So why don’t we just do a different workout every time we train? Wouldn’t that keep us from hitting a plateau? You know, muscle confusion?
Muscle confusion is a marketing term. We don’t want our bodies to be confused. We want to give the body a stimulus that will produce specific results; as you get better at it and see results, we change the stimulus so you have to get better again. It’s like playing piano. How will you get better if you don’t practice the same music? Once you learn a piece, how will you get better if you don’t begin learning a more advanced piece?
Good training programs are like piano practice. Our Fit House program address long-term goals and run in macrocycles of anywhere from 12-16 weeks (or longer, depending on your goals). Within that macrocycle, we program smaller chunks of anything from 3-6 weeks, called mesocycles, during which we focus on a small chunk of the long-term goal. We happen to use month-long mesocycles for most of our Fit House clients, but the truth is, those month-long cycles are actually part of a broader plan, a macrocycle, geared toward specific end goals. If we simply program one workout at a time, with no end goal in sight, we can’t give our clients the specific results they want.
There is thus a fine line to walk when we write training programs. They can’t be too long if we wish to avoid plateaus, boredom, and injury, and they also can’t be too short if we wish to see measurable results. For our clients and their goals, switching our mesocycles every 3-6 weeks, with 4 weeks being the average, seems to be the sweet spot.
So if you’re doing different workouts every day, or even every week, you’re exercising, but you won’t get the results you want. And if you’re doing the same program today that you were before the pandemic began in March, you’re risking both your results and potential injury.
There’s hope, though.
Gyms will reopen. Fit House trainers will be able to get our clients back into the gym, back into a program designed to get everyone caught up, soon.
And in the meantime, we’re writing programs for home. Message us. Or contact Chris directly at 716-868-8330. Let’s get your programming done right, right now, so you can see those results soon.
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