Are you bored with your routine and think you need more variety? Read this

“I think I need muscle confusion”

I have heard these and variations of these statements for years from people who never make much if any progress in their training. The hard truth is that you don’t need endless variety to entertain you, nor is it more effective than mastering basic, time tested exercises.

Staple exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, etc., require a great deal of technical expertise, repetition and frequency to master. Elite power lifters, who’ve done these exercises for years on end, thousands of times, still will tell you they are learning and tweaking their technique.

I’ll give you another couple examples here at the LBC team. If you’ve read Coach Nic’s posts, how many times has he said “The basics and progressive overload are still the foundational principles of my programs.” This is a pro bodybuilder who has been in the game for decades.

What about Coach Beth? How many cleans and snatches do you think she’s done? I’m sure there are days she’d rather stick a pen in her right eye than do another rep of these exercises…but it’s her craft and she wants to master the lifts.

You don’t need to do “yogalaties” one day, a boot camp the next, then a body building type workout the following before finishing up your week with an “abs class”. And then next week you certainly don’t need to “switch it up” and do a Pure Barre class, aqua aerobics class, meet with a speed coach and then finish the week with a golf specific workout offered at your gym.

You don’t need “Workouts”. You need a structured program with addresses a specific set of goals. Hey, I’m all for physical activity, but just bouncing around and goal hoping each week gets you nowhere-even if you are entertained. I’m sure the Beatles eventually wanted to vomit at the thought of playing “Hey Jude” one more darn time, but it certainly brought them a lot of success and continued to deliver.

There is a time and place for variety and varying the training stimulus. No one here is saying someone should stay on the same training program the rest of their lives. But constantly wanting to change things every week or two is peeing in the wind.

You need time to master exercises, progress exercises, and you have to have some indicators of progress. Changing a program has to be thought out and systematized. It has to make sense and there has to be a “why” behind it. There are also ways to build variety into your weekly workouts without completely derailing and overhauling your current program, but that’s an entire post in itself. Yes, there are people-a small minority-who can successfully auto regulate and train instinctively, but these folks are at a level 99% of people are not.

Rant over.