I admit it, I am a creature of habit. I know that in my own programming I don’t change my exercises enough. There are a lot of people that suffer from perpetual program hopping where they won’t stick with one program or set of exercises for more than a week, I am not one of those people(I’m still a work in progress).
At the other extreme when training clients I include new and different exercises, maybe even sometimes too often. It’s taken a while, but I’ve realized the error of my ways in programming for both myself and my clients. There are times like this in life when you get a little perspective, but that new perspective is worthless if you don’t apply it, and so I have.
Last summer I decided to purchase a program from another trusted fitness professional, and I can tell you it was probably one of the best things I’ve done for my workouts in a while! There were a couple of incredible benefits that I received as a result of doing so. The first was improving some glaring weaknesses I had in core strength.
I’ve had low back issues for quite sometime and occasionally my back would flip me the bird, and I’d be down and out for a few days. However, once I started this new program my back within a few weeks started to feel much better, fast forward almost a year now, and I have literally zero low back issues. The program had me doing exercises I probably never would have programmed for myself, but since they were written in I felt obligated to perform them and feel much better as a result.
One of the other immediate benefits, was not having to worry about writing my own programs for a while. You see when life gets a bit nuts, and you don’t know which way is up, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of doing the same things for too long and expecting different results, often referred to as the definition of insanity. This approach however, will not only produce subpar results it could even open you up to a higher risk of injury from the repetitive movements.
Lastly, and the one that surprised me the most was how much the new exercises illuminated my imbalances. You see we all have imbalances to some degree, whether it’s being stronger on our right side due to being right hand dominant, or our left quad being more muscular since we blew out our right knee in high school football. Imbalances are found in just about everyone, but if we don’t do something to offset those they can start to snowball and lead to injury just like repetitive movements.
So the take home is be sure you are finding balance when adjusting your programming. You don’t want to be doing the same exercise program for 10 years, but you also don’t want to be a program hopper trying every new workout under the sun. I hate giving general recommendations as I feel they usually just confuse people, or worse yet they feel that it’s gospel and they should do nothing else. That being said I’ll break my own rule and say generally sticking with a program between 8-12 weeks with appropriately built-in progressions/regressions is a pretty good start, at which time you might want to start think about changing things.