Keeping Your Workouts Fresh For Continued Gains

Keeping your workouts fresh is one of the best ways to make sure that you continue to make gains. You need to challenge your muscles to improve and adapt by becoming larger and stronger. Sticking with the same workout for months or years at a time will only lead to your gains plateauing. No matter how intense or arduous your workout plan may seem when you first start it, it's an inevitable certainty that your body will eventually adapt to it and the benefits you can obtain from it will decrease and eventually stop. As a result, you should plan on mixing up your workout plan every 4-6 weeks. Any more frequently than that and you won't have given your current plan time to work. Any less frequently and you more than likely will have spent some time stagnating. rnThere are many, many ways to bring variety to your workouts. For instance, you can change the muscle groups you work together. Most people start off working back with biceps and chest with triceps. Try switching things up and working back with triceps and chest with biceps. Not only will this provide variety, it will also allow your accessory muscles (biceps, triceps) to be stronger when you train them because they won't have been weakened by your back and chest moves. You can also switch up your training split in another way. If you're currently working one or two bodyparts per day in a weekly cycle, try doing a full body workout (one exercise per bodypart) a few times a week. Or try an upper body/lower body split, training upper body on some days and lower body on others. There are a ton of possibilities. rnYou can also vary the rep and set schemes. Try starting with a low weight with high reps, then gradually increase the weight and decrease the reps over the course of your sets. Or, go in reverse: begin with a high weight and low reps, then decrease the weight and increase the reps as you go. You might also try keeping the weight the same and decreasing the reps each set, going to failure on each one. As with the training splits, there are often limitless possibilities when it comes to mixing things up within your workout. The important thing is that you *do* mix things up and don't let things stagnate. It takes some thought, but it's well worth it. Try out some of the strategies I've mentioned and keep training hard!