Articles THE TRAINING ROOM Variety is the Spice of Life... Is It Also the Spark for Your progress?
When it comes to training I believe too many
people fall victim to getting into a comfortable routine or habit. Yes routine can be a good thing when you're just getting started or are trying something new for the first time. A good routine allows you to stick with something new and to be able to see progress and results, but as they say too much of a good thing isn't always good.
Once you have settled into a routine your body will eventually adapt to the routine and become very efficient in it, sounds great right? Well normally efficiency is a really great thing for your body, but when it's not being forced to adapt and change progress can really be affected and slowed down quite a bit.
Not only will your progress slow down, but you will begin to develop imbalances and deficiencies in your muscle. Why?.. Because your body will get really good at performing certain movement patterns and really bad at performing others. The muscles required for movements and exercises that you're not performing will become weaker and less efficient. Also your stronger muscle groups will try to step in and handle the load for the weaker ones creating even larger imbalances and increased potential for injuries to occur.
So what can you do to keep this from happening to you? Well first you can ensure that you are using a variety of exercises, repetition schemes, and varied set modifiers (drop sets, super sets, giant sets, forced sets, negatives, and more). Also if there are specific exercises you don't regularly perform (because you just you don't like them, not because of injuries or other issues) then these are probably exercises you need to start putting back into your workouts to help ensure muscular balance and symmetry.
Now that's a great start to adding variety back into your workouts, but you can even take it a step further. You can include different styles of training into your workout programs to really keep your body adapting and growing. I'm talking about gymnastics and martial arts training to improve coordination and balance. Power lifting routines and plyo-metrics to improve power and explosiveness. Crossfit and Track & Field workouts to help with increasing your endurance and stamina. Yoga and Pilates to improve your range of motion and overall flexibility. Even participating or playing other sports you enjoy can help contribute to your bodies overall health and balance.
If you find yourself lacking in variety of your routine and progress then depending on your overall goals I suggest you start mixing things up a bit. Go ahead step out of your comfortable little box and routine and into some new progress and growth!
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