When should you change an exercise or workout?
You might be changing things a lot sooner than you need to
When should you change an exercise?
A lot less frequently than you might have been told before
Progress comes from consistency over time
And it’s very difficult to be consistent if you’re always making changes
With any new plan or movements, you’ll go through a series of phases
1️⃣ Patterning – simply getting used to the movement
How it feels
The perfect setup for you
Performing plenty of reps to practice it
This stage is really important & may take a few weeks to really bed in
But it sets you up to make progress moving forwards
Don’t neglect it
2️⃣ Progressing – making the small, incremental improvements
This will come in a number of forms
Weight progressions
Rep progressions
Execution progressions
And they need not be huge leaps each week
An extra rep, an extra 1kg
Those all add up over time
3️⃣ Plateauing – progress stalling
There will, in all likelihood, come a time when you simply struggle to keep progressing a movement
It’s normal, otherwise we would all be competing in World’s Strongest Man each year
This may be the time to think about a change
That might be a swap for another movement – for a short time, or to repeat the above process
It might be a break from lifting altogether to recover fully
It might be, and this is one that I don’t see used often enough…
Stripping a lift back to basics
As weight & rep progressions happen, there can be a little drop off in execution
Pulling some weight back & re-patterning to go again can be a very valuable tool to use
