Fitness Variation vs Progress

They say "Variation is the Spice of Life", but how should we apply variation to our fitness?

With the invention of new methods and fitness products many Personal Trainers are ensuring their clients get a completely new workout every time they train together.

The positives are obvious to the Trainer:

• Show off your expertise and physical ability by demonstrating and teaching new exercises regularly.
• Offer clients the sense of achievement from learning new exercises.
• No need to plan anything because you have a wider range of exercises in your head than the client.
• No need to record anything because you're not going to use the same exercise variables next session.

Each of these points can be justified to an extent as it's important for trainers to demonstrate their expertise and few can spare time to plan or record and store training data.

The negatives exist only for the client:

• If you're learning a new exercise you're not progressing on a more familiar exercise.
• If you're not progressing then you're stuck doing beginner weights and progressions.
• If you're not actually progressing in any particular exercises then you're using less energy.
• If you're using less energy then you're not burning as much fat, let alone asking your body to consolidate any muscular adaptations it's made from previous sessions.
• Doing new movements causes more muscle damage and while you may think more pain equals more gain excessive muscle soreness slows you down and can even bring you down emotionally.

Muscle Confusion Theory
Trainers will often point to the idea that every newly performed workout is more effective than a regularly performed one because the body never gets a chance to make the adaptations which lead to plateaus, hence the muscle confusion theory. 

The problem is that the whole point of fitness training is to stimulate the body to adapt. It's only by adapting to a workout that we can then perform the same movements with higher intensities, weights and volumes.

How to Avoid Plateaus
Fitness plateaus are inevitable if we don't vary our training at all, but so long as we change the reps and weights every 2-3 sessions then it's going to take at least 8 sessions before we hit a plateau. The fastest way people hit a fitness plateau is to either :

1. Keep the Programme Light - This is most common in those who are not interested in exercise and simply expect that by showing up and doing anything they should see improvements.
2. Keep the Programme Heavy - This is most common in those who have the best intentions but lack guidance. 

In order to avoid plateaus and keep our training varied we need a programme which encourages Progressive Variation.


Progressive Fitness Variation
Making non-stop improvements in our fitness really is easy:

1. Whatever exercises you use, start easy. Enjoy the first few workouts of your new programme by completing the prescribed reps and sets at weights and progressions which you can do at 65-70%. The better conditioned you are the harder you should start but the first session should be no higher than a 7/10. 
2. Gradually increase the intensity and volumes, session by session, increasing the reps of each exercise but maintaining the same weight or progression level. This will still feel relatively easy (and fun) but by the end of each session you should notice that you've done more than in previous sessions. 
3. Continue to increase reps every 2-3 sessions for 3 weeks, by which time you're finding the workouts quite tough and unsure whether you'd be able to increase the reps again the following session. 
4. This is when you can drop the reps and increase the weight or progression level. Decrease the reps enough that you get a few easyish sessions with your new weights. This "back off week" is when your body get's a chance to recover from the incrementally hard training it's been doing over the previous weeks. 
5. Repeat steps 2-4 with the new weights and you'll find yourself working up to higher reps with heavier weights and progressions. 

As you can see, the progression and variation lie in the reps and weights, not just the exercises. There are no reasons why you couldn't use this process with 3 workout routines, each with a different range of exercises, which are each performed once or twice a week, on non consecutive days. Using split routines like this add further variation and allow a wider range of movements to be truly mastered, not just learned and forgotten.

How Often should I Train?
If you only perform any particular exercise once a week then you're not going to improve as fast as if you do it 2-3 times a week. If you're only training 2-3 times a week then doing 2 or 3 workout routines is going to mean slower progress at each exercise.

The equivalent could be running once a week, swimming once a week and cycling once a week. You're going to get fitter at each but not as fast as focusing on any one of them.

The same principles work for non gym based exercise, with weights interchanging with speed and reps relating to distances. Increase distance first, then drop it and increase speed. 

How Progressive Variation Works

It's easy to think that light exercise isn't going to get us anywhere and if it's all we do, it won't. But starting light does lead to neural adaptations which prepare the body to perform the same movements under heavy loads down the track. 

Progressing slowly means we get less muscle damage, which enables us to train more frequently without getting injured or having to reduce intensity for fear of causing more pain. Muscle soreness is normal with many forms of training but by minimising it we actually enable more consistent progression.

Isn't Consistent Progress what we want in our Results?

Finding a programme which starts at the right level for you can be frustrating because few fitness professionals have the time or technology to estimate the best weights to lift or speeds to train at. If you'd like affordable programmes which help you progress visit any of these pages on the STS Website:

• Gym Programmes
• Running Programmes
• Speed Programmes
• Back to Fitness Programmes