This way your body will not adapt to a specific workout length which can only help you to continue to make gains. Additionally, you could alternate between workout lengths within a training week.
Nutrition is a factor that many people overlook when it comes to "changing it up. You must decide when you will be bulking, when you will be cutting, and when you will be maintaining. Therefore, your caloric surplus will correspond with higher-volume hypertrophy training and your caloric deficit will correspond with more cardio and lower-volume training.
This is the single most important issue when it comes to making consistent gains and avoiding plateaus. Simply put, there is no way that you will gain muscle if you eat too little; the same way that it is impossible to lose fat with a large caloric surplus.
While this may seem obvious to many, you would be surprised as to how many people do not make the correct combinations and therefore never make consistent gains.
In order to grow, you must have a caloric surplus, that is, you must consume more calories than you expend. As a general rule of thumb, eating more calories than you expend will help you gain approximately 1 lb of bodyweight per week.
Eating more calories than you expend every day will make you gain about 2 lbs of bodyweight per week. Any more weight gain than that and you are looking at a disadvantageous muscle to fat gain ratio. While bulking, try to eat at least 1. In order to lose fat, you must have a caloric deficit, that is, you must expend more calories through the form of weight training and cardio than you consume. As a general rule of thumb, eating fewer calories than you expend will help you lose approximately 1 lb of bodyweight per week.
Eating fewer calories than you expend every day will make you lose about 2 lbs of bodyweight per week. Any more weight loss than that and you are looking at losing muscle. In a cutting phase, your protein intake should probably be at 1. In general, you should be eating between meals per day and drinking gallons of water.
Protein is the most important macronutrient you need to gain muscle and to maintain muscle. Very good protein sources include: chicken, lean steak, lean beef, pork, cottage cheese, and milk. Carbohydrate intake should be reduced slightly during a cutting phase and increased during a bulking phase. Your main carbohydrate sources should be: rice, pasta, whole wheat bread, muesli, granola, and oatmeal. Also, try to ingest as few calories as possible from soft drinks.
Finally, healthy fat should be ingested as part of a balanced diet. Concentrate on eating enough flax seed oil, fish oils, and nuts such as almonds. Remember to adjust the macronutrient ratios as shown above to fit into each particular phase that you are doing. Your percentages should be based on calories from each macronutrient, not the total grams of each.
Supplementation is also large part of a bodybuilder's ability to make gains. Whey protein, creatine, a multivitamin, and fish oil are the basic staples that help you gain muscle mass consistently.
These are the supplements that can be used year-round for any goal, be it muscle gain or fat loss. However, there are some other supplements that help you more in certain phases than in others, and for this reason should be cycled.
Here are some suggestions from when certain products should be used, although many are interchangeable between cycles. Every time you reach a plateau it is not necessary or even advisable to perform a completely new routine from scratch. Instead of making complete changes because you are not making progress, adjust certain variables such as those listed above and determine whether that helps you break out of plateaus. Change exercises, sets and reps, intensity, or a combination and see if this makes a positive impact upon your training.
One other possibility is that certain body parts are holding back your progress in compound movements. Perhaps your triceps are weak and your bench press has not increased for the past 3 weeks. To solve this problem, avoid bench pressing for weeks and stick to close-grip bench pressing and dips during this time period. This should solve the problem almost immediately and you can go back to making progress. Usually the problem for adaptations is indeed overtraining, so when a plateau is reached, less is almost always more.
This way you can rest your muscles more which can help you "recharge" and ultimately break out of plateaus. What often happens when trainees stop making progress is that they immediately change their training program because they believe it is not effective. However, this is seldom the case, and other variables must be taken into account. Before you completely change your workout program, make an assessment of the variables listed and try to tweak different aspects of your training and nutrition.
If this does not work, then it may indeed be your workout program that you need to change. However, do not perform a completely new routine before making certain that nothing else can work. Most generic, "cookie-cutter" routines can be followed for weeks before changing to another workout plan. A good idea would be to plan which routines are followed during certain parts of the year to get a general idea of what you will be doing throughout your training year.
If you are a bodybuilder that competes regularly, you must have your yearly workout plan set around your competitions. If you compete times per year then your bulking and cutting phases will be shorter but more frequent than those for someone who only competes once or twice per year. A different example is for someone that does not compete but rather follows different routines throughout the training year. In this case, you could alternate various workout programs to prevent adaptation.
Note: This is just a sample. The best routine is one that is customized to your own needs. Your body is constantly trying to adapt to the environment in order to survive. It destroys viruses and bacteria that enter your system, increases pigmentation in your skin in response to sunlight exposure, heals cuts, increases heart rate to pump more blood in emergencies, releases adrenaline in response to give speed and intensity in certain situations, and finally build our muscles in response to work we put them through.
Thus when your body has adapted to the point where it needs to be in order to achieve the work you put it through, it no longer devotes resources to that particular adaptation.
This is where muscle building comes into play, if your body is accustomed to your workout then it no longer needs to devote nutrients to build your muscles.
The nutrients go to storage as fat or excreted out of the body. After all our bodies don't know we want to be bodybuilders. Many people don't know when their body has adapted to their workout routine, and just do the same exercises, with the same amount of sets and reps, expecting their progress to continue just because they are exercising. This isn't the case, as you have to remember muscles only grow because of a survival trait that is programmed in our genes to adapt the body to its environment.
So read on, and learn how to avoid a plateau your workouts; something that could save you months or years of hard work and time. There are various factors one can use to their advantage when alternating their workouts to avoid adaptation.
The two main factors are workout and nutrition related. While it is not necessary to alter every aspect of working out and nutrition in order to avoid your muscles adapting to your workouts, in this case more is better. Below is a muscle adaptation relationship diagram to easily see the different factors that can come into play when preventing a plateau in your workouts, the aspects of working out and nutrition that can be changed. Sets - You can manipulate the amount of sets you do in order to achieve different goals.
For instance if you are currently doing 6 sets for a particular body part, you could do 3 instead, and up the weight. Upping the weight and lowering the amount of sets will train your body to adapt itself for strength, rather than muscular endurance, or size. Reps - The amount of repetitions can be changed in order to switch to a strength building mode or a size building mode. Lower reps range is ideal for increasing strength, and higher reps range is ideal for increasing size.
So if you have normally been doing 15 reps per body part, you might want to look into switching to lower reps and increasing the weight, thus preventing your muscle from adapting to the high rep range. As for these smaller changes, how often should they be made? And what kind of changes should you make? This includes components like:. However, out of everything I just listed, exercises are by far the easiest, most common, and least-likely-to-screw-up changes you can make.
Basically, for most people, similar versions of the same type of exercise are virtually all interchangeable with each other, especially when your goal is building muscle.
You might initially do bent over barbell rows in that spot. Then you might eventually switch it to bent over dumbbell rows, then eventually seated cable rows, then eventually t-bar rows, then eventually a Hammer Strength machine row, and then maybe switch back to bent over barbell rows again.
And many of the exercises I just mentioned can be done with a variety of different grips overhand, underhand, neutral, wide, narrow, etc. My suggestion would be to make yourself a list of a few of your favorite exercises for each muscle group, and then just gradually rotate through them over time by inserting a new one into the appropriate spot in your workout in place of the current exercise… NOT in addition to it while keeping everything else split, set and rep ranges, rest periods, exercise order, etc.
Like I said a minute ago, you could keep the overall template of the workout program the same for quite a while and just occasionally change the exercises within it.
You could then go an indefinite amount of time without needing to change anything else. Once again, there really is no set-in-stone answer. Progress have things stalled, even after deloading? Generally speaking, though, your primary exercises should be changed the least often and your isolation exercises can be changed the most often.
Your secondary exercises fall somewhere in the middle. You can definitely go longer than this before changing them. This is just my recommendation for how long — at the very least — you should stay with the same exercises before considering making changes.
The same goes for the secondary exercises and isolation exercises at the 6 and 3 week marks, respectively. That really sums up most of what you need to know about making changes to your workout routine. As for secondary and isolation exercises, I change those with a bit more regularity though still certainly not TOO often, and typically longer than the 6 and 3 week marks. Meaning, if you only have a reason to change one primary exercise at some point, then you should only change that one exercise… not every primary exercise.
Or if you wanted to replace three secondary exercises at some point but wanted to keep two other secondary exercises… then only change those three. The ideal time to make some of these changes is at the end of a training cycle during the deload period. Don't waste another minute of your time searching for what to do. I've already done the research for you and created step-by-step plans that work.
Select your goal below I Want To Build Muscle If you want to build lean muscle without gaining excess body fat, spending all of your time in the gym, using a diet or workout that isn't customized to you, or doing myth-based nonsense that only works for people with amazing genetics, check out: Superior Muscle Growth I Want To Lose Fat If you want to lose body fat without losing muscle, feeling hungry all the time, using stupid restrictive diets, doing hours of cardio, or struggling with plateaus, metabolic slowdown, and everything else that sucks about getting lean, check out: Superior Fat Loss Facebook Twitter 14 Pinterest SHARES ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jay is the science-based writer and researcher behind everything you've seen here.
Changing exercise order is just one of MANY changes that can be made to your workout to make it somehow different than it has been. So what your saying is not to have a week A and week B workout routine.
Would it really be that bad to switch between 2 fairly similar routines every other week. I was going to wait until have completed 2 months of this program and then make the switch to something more effective and do that for a solid three months.
More about that here. First of all: Your site is awesome. I learned a lot! Now my question: I switched to body weight exercises a while ago. I have two full body routines: one focused on building muscle high intensity, low reps and one focused on muscle endurance lower intensity, higher reps. I keep alternating these workouts troughout the week I train 3 times a week.
Does this frequent change keep me from progressing or is it a good idea? According to Alex Songolo , personal training manger at Life Time 23rd Street in New York City, one of the most significant benefits of varying your workout routine is injury prevention. Overuse injuries can cause pain and swelling, or even damage to tendons, muscles, and bones.
For example, if you run a lot without varying your routine, you could experience shin splints, knee pain, or other injuries.
Varying your workout routine can keep you motivated if the same type of exercise starts to get boring. Research published in shows that mixing up your routine can increase your motivation without getting in the way of results.
If boredom is preventing you from sticking to your routine and giving it your all, try choosing different exercises to keep things interesting. When your body has to adapt to a new stimulus, it can lead to more strength and better performance. Songolo suggests assessing on a case-by-case basis and speaking to a personal trainer who can help you make a personalized plan based on your results and goals.
For most people, though, switching things up by adding or changing movements each week is ideal. There are several ways you can inject some novelty into your workout routine to get results and avoid a plateau. Songolo recommends checking your rest times if your progress is stalling. Often we are taking too much rest when we are training. Playing with your rest times can change the whole game.
If you are trying to push for that personal best with weightlifting, longer rest times can give you the chance to recover more effectively. Similarly, sticking to the same reps, weight, and sets can lead to a plateau. If you are using weights, switch between heavier and lighter. Related Story. Synergee amazon. Long Resistance Band. WOD Nation amazon. Slam Ball. Amazon Basics amazon. Related Stories.
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