The Importance of Constants in Your Training

A really common mistake people often make with their training is changing their exercise selection TOO regularly without much consistency from week-to-week.

For instance, they might do a regular squat one week, a pause squat the next week, a split squat the next, etc, all with different weights and rep ranges.

Now this is all well and good if you’re just getting started in the gym and you’re just finding your feet. If you’ve never done any gym-based exercise before, then it’s a great idea to give a bunch of different exercises a go to find out what you like.

However, I often see people falling prey to this mistake who’ve been working out for months or even years - and if this is you, you should know it can be a major limiting factor on their ability to make progress.

Very often when people do this, it’s due to a popular but slightly misguided idea about so-called 'muscle confusion' - the idea that by throwing different random stimuli at your muscles, you can 'shock' them into growing more.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that.

Muscles don't have brains. They don't get confused.

When it comes to building strength and muscle, the number one most important thing is progressive overload.

Progressive Overload, in a nutshell, is 'gradually increasing the amount of work you make your muscles do over a period of time'. 

You take an exercise, work hard at that particular exercise, and then the next time you do it, work harder than you did last time. Each time you do this, your body responds to these incremental increases in difficulty by getting incrementally stronger in order to cope.

Over a long period of time, those tiny incremental increases in strength add up to some serious progress - and that, in a nutshell, is how strength training (and all forms of exercise, for that matter), works. 

A really simple example of progressive overload might look something like this:

We can clearly see that this person has made good, quantifiable progress - in four weeks, they’ve gone from squatting 50kg for 6 reps to squatting 55kg for 6 reps, first by adding reps and then by adding weight once they felt ready. Lovely stuff.

Now, compare this to someone who doesn’t have any consistency in their workouts, and just does whatever they feel up for on any particular day.

Has this person made progress? Maybe - but I couldn’t tell you either way. Without some form of constant, it becomes basically impossible to say objectively whether we’re actually moving forwards in our training or not.

An all-too-often overlooked component of strength training is that strength is a skill that needs to be practised in order to develop. While all the exercises listed above share some similar characteristics and target the same muscles (to slightly different extents), they are NOT the same exercise. Slightly different skills are required for each of them, which means that our progress in any one of them will be limited if we switch back and forth between them too regularly. Repetition, as they say, is the mother of skill.

Now, with that being said, that does NOT mean you always need to do all the exact same exercises every single time. That would be boring, and boredom is consistency’s worst enemy.

So as a compromise, have a few 'main' exercises on each day of your routine that rarely change. These will usually be your bigger, heavier, compound movements like squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, etc. I would usually do these first, after any warm-up stuff you like to do of course.

Use these exercises as your measure for whether or not you are making progress, whether that be by adding weight, adding reps, improving form, decreasing rest, or a combination of some or all of the above.

For your smaller, lighter, isolation-type exercises (dumbbells/machines/bands etc) you can be a lot more flexible. For exercises like bicep curls, tricep pushdowns, glute kickbacks and hip abductions, we don’t expect to see nearly as much weekly linear progress as we do with our large compound movements (try increasing your weight on bicep curls every week and see how far you get). 

The purpose of these exercises is much less to do with adding weight each week, and more simply to provide extra stimulus to muscles that either (a) will support our main lifts, (b) we feel are lagging behind others, or (c) we just enjoy training. So provided you’re getting the stimulus you want to the muscles where you want it, you have a lot more freedom when it comes to these ‘secondary’ exercises.

Now, that doesn’t mean progressive overload doesn’t matter on those exercises - it does, and you should still try your best to add weight/otherwise increase the difficulty of these exercises whenever you can. BUT because they’re not as important as your main lifts, you can play around a bit more and change them around a bit more regularly (every couple of weeks or so, if you like) to keep things fresh and to keep you engaged and enjoying your training. 

Ultimately, that engagement is going to be what keeps you training and getting results for longer - and that’s the most important thing. 

If you want to build strength, muscle and confidence, then drop me a message to arrange your FREE consultation and Taster session.