How Often Should you Change your Workout Routine?
Changing your workout routine is not just because of the risk of boredom, or finding excuses to not workout. Your muscles can become used to your usual workout routine, and consequently, they don’t work as hard as they should.
That’s why from time to time, it’s a good idea to change your workout routine. If you’re wondering how often you should do this, keep reading to learn more.
Training plan: how often should you change your workout routine?
When you go to the gym, your trainer will help you to design a routine incorporating all of the exercises that you need to do each day. For example, one day you’ll be training your upper body, another day it’ll be your lower body, and then another one for cardio. If you train at home, you might be doing a similar routine to the one that you previously did at the gym.
The most common questions from those who exercise are: when should I change my routine? What are the consequences of changing it, or not changing my workout routine?
It’s very important that you change your training schedule every once in a while, to encourage muscle development.
If you make the same movements all of the time, you’re not giving your muscles a chance to “evolve.” A similar process will also happen when you train with the same amount of weights or at the same level of intensity.
Avoiding your muscles becoming used to your routine, is a true challenge. Each person needs more or less time to reach their goal and maintain it. Boredom or tiredness may also play a role in this.
Everyone has a different pace and different goals, not to mention the way that each person accepts or rejects workout routines.
There may be people who are happy doing the same exercises, because they’ve memorized them and learned them.
Others may feel “trapped” if they don’t change their routine regularly. This is obviously negative and can lead to you not enjoying a workout, or even quitting exercise altogether.
Changing your routine: it depends on your goals
We can’t really answer the question, “How often should I change my workout routine?” This is because, it all depends on you. You must workout, be aware of what you want to achieve, and know if you’re getting the desired results.
For example, if your goal is to lose fat on your legs, and you spend one hour on the treadmill or bike, you’ll probably notice some initial results, but you’ll reach a point where your body will “stall,” and you won’t see any more changes.
Then, in this case, you should look for a workout alternative that burns fat on the target areas of your body. You could try squats, lunges or jump rope, etc. With these movements your legs will have to use more strength, and jump into action.
If on the contrary you want to build muscle and you go to the gym, at first you’ll want to start with small dumbbells and watch as your triceps and biceps become toned. But, after a while, if you keep lifting the same weights, your muscles won’t grow.
To achieve your goal of building muscle mass, you’ll need to lift more and more weight. Even if your routine stays the same, you’re changing the weight “variable”. Your muscles will have to make more effort and as a consequence, will grow bigger.
Finally, changing your routine makes you work the other muscles that you may have forgotten. That’s why exercises should gradually become more intense, in order to tackle other areas of your body.
And remember, “If you’re the fittest person in your gym, you should probably change gyms!” If you’re one step above all of your gym mates, maybe the exercises you are doing are no longer challenging.
Go to a gym that challenges you, make a change to your workout routine today!