Changing Your Workout Routine Too Often: Are Frequent Changes Needed?

Did you ever hear that it’s important to keep changing your workout routine around often?

You know, because you need to “keep your muscles guessing” or “shock your body” into improving or just prevent your body from getting too used to what you’re doing?

Basically, that you need to make frequent changes or else your workout routine will stop working.

Sound familiar?

Cool, because that’s all bullshit.

The Myth Of Workout Variety and Constantly Changing Your Routine

That whole “change things often!!” concept is nothing but a silly myth that probably first started as a way to sell more magazines (“changing your workout is important, so buy the next issue to get a new workout!!!”). It’s complete nonsense.

Granted, there is truth to the idea that your body eventually adapts to a training stimulus at which point that stimulus will stop producing results. HOWEVER, you do not have to CHANGE the stimulus in order to start getting results again… you just need to INCREASE the stimulus.

Remember my article about progressive overload?

In it, I explained that the only “change” the body truly requires is progression. And, as long as some form of progression is being made at something close to a realistic rate, you WILL keep getting the results you want to get.

Really, your body has no idea if you are doing exercise A or exercise B, workout Y or workout Z. It just knows that there is a tension being placed on it, and if this tension increases over time (by gradually increasing the reps/weight being lifted or something similar), your body will have to adapt by making the necessary improvements (more muscle, more strength, etc.).

Meaning, the people who recommend that you change your workout exactly every 3 weeks or every 6 weeks or every 8 weeks or every 12 weeks or every hour or every time you go to the bathroom or whatever other crazy interval of time “OR ELSE YOU WILL STOP GETTING RESULTS!!” are completely and utterly wrong.

And stupid. Really stupid.

If anything, changing things around often just for the sake of changing things only makes it harder to progress consistently because things keep changing all the time.

I mean, how can you progress at what you’re doing when you keep changing what it is you’re doing? And for no apparent reason, no less.

It’s what I like to call the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle.

As long as what you are doing is working, you can (and SHOULD) keep doing it.

In my opinion (and the opinion of MANY others), you’d be quite stupid to go and change something that is presently doing what you want it to do.

It’s just basic common sense. And speaking of common sense…

Hello Program Jumpers!

In addition to the people who change their workout routine (or parts of it) too often because they believe the silly myth that frequent changes are required for getting results (which is just counterproductive bullshit), there is another similarly stupid group I’d like to tell you about.

I like to call them: the program jumpers.

Easily one of my top 5 favorite groups of idiots in the world of diet and exercise (and trust me, there are tons of groups of idiots in this field), program jumpers are people who constantly jump from one workout program to another thinking they have found something better than they previously found.

There’s a never ending supply of these people on every workout related forum there is. One day they post up their workout routine seeking approval, and a few days or weeks later, they’re back again posting some completely different workout routine now seeking approval of that one.

This process then continues until they either give up due to lack of results (constantly changing your workout routine quite much guarantees terrible results), or until someone on the forum catches on, makes fun of them for being a program jumper, and they never show up on the forum again.

Well, until a week later when they just start posting under a different name. So cute.

Of course, these people aren’t entirely to blame for doing this. Hundreds of fitness magazines and thousands of workout related websites are designed to keep you in this mentality.

Every new issue and every new site update contains some new workout routine that sounds amazingly better than the one that came before it.

In fact, it often makes that previous workout routine sound like it’s wrong or bad or just way less good than they made it seem the day/week/month before.

And then a day/week/month later… you’ll experience this all over again with some newer better workout routine. This cycle then goes on and on all the while enticing you to keep changing your routine and coming back again for a new one.

This is fantastic for the magazines/websites, but it sucks balls for you and your results.

Yeah, that is the technical term for it.

In reality, no workout routine will work if you change it before it has time to actually work. This is a KEY point I was sure to make extra clear in my brand new program, Superior Muscle Growth.

Because while these people are busy changing from one workout to another every 2 weeks in search of the BEST one of them all, their results are nonexistent. If only they would have put half the effort they spent looking for the ultimate routine into actually using that first routine, they’d be in a much better place.

So Then When (If Ever) Should I Be Changing My Workout?

Now that you understand that the entire concept of “muscle confusion” is just nonsense, you may be wondering if I think you should ever make changes to your workout routine at all.

The answer is hell yes.

However, it should not be because X number of weeks have passed, or because you believe crap like “bro, I gotta shock my body and keep my muscles guessing” or because your junky sources of training information keep putting some new over-hyped magical routine in front of your face every other day.

It should only be when you have a legitimate reason to.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll explain exactly what those reasons are, what types of changes you should make, and basically cover exactly why, when, how and how often you should be changing your workout routine.

Check it out: When, Why, How & How Often Should You Change Your Workout Routine

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