How often should you change up your workout routine?

When I first got started in the gym back in high school, I would constantly change up my workouts. Any one chest workout I did never looked anything like the last chest workout. I was ready to die on the hill that you had to confuse your muscles and that being super sore after a workout meant you had a good workout.

I later learned, I was very wrong.

You normally don’t make any significant adaptations from a single workout. You achieve them by sticking to the same program over time at an increasingly greater difficulty.

With this article, we’ll break down why that is and the nuance to it that you should know about.

Why people think they need to constantly change their workouts

For a while, there was this big idea that you need to “confuse your muscles.” The premise of this idea is that your muscles will “get used to” a training routine and will stop making progress from the same routine.

From what I can tell, there’s really only one reason why people would begin to think this (because there isn’t any research to show this is real). When you do a new workout every session, you end up being sorer than if you did the same workout as last time. This is solely because one of the major contributors to the onset of soreness is being exposed to a new stimulus. If every workout is different than the last, then inevitably each workout is a new stimulus and will make you sore.

There’s two major problems with this way of thinking:

1.     Muscles don’t get “confused”

2.     Soreness is a very poor indicator of the quality of a workout

What you should focus on instead

The most important thing to focus on in your training is a concept called progressive overload. Progressive overload is really just a fancy term to describe doing more over time. The most obvious way to measure progressive overload is simply using more weight over time. Although, there’s plenty more ways to measure it which are discussed in further detail below:

Related: Progressive Overload Explained

The reason for this is that building muscle is simply an adaptation to being exposed to a more difficult stimulus. For instance, it takes more muscle mass to squat 225 pounds than it does to squat 135 pounds.

In order to really optimize the process of progressive overload, you can’t be constantly switching up your workouts. Your body will improve at the activity it is repeatedly exposed to.

So, how long should you be sticking to the same routine?

There’s a few different ways that we can look at this.

The first perspective is by setting specific goals. Let’s say that you can currently bench press 100 pounds for 5 reps and you want to be able to bench press 135 pounds for 5 reps. Assuming you are on a program that is oriented towards improving your bench press strength, you could just stay the course until you hit this goal. At this point, you can switch up your goals and routine or keep going if you have enjoyed the process.

Another perspective is by picking a specific time period that you want to stick to a program for. This would make sense if you want to see how you respond to a program or if you like to periodically change your workouts. The duration that you’d want to stick to a program really depends on your fitness level. If you are earlier on in your journey, it would be wise to stick with a program for at least 4 weeks. If you are more intermediate or advanced, it would be smarter to stick with the same program for closer to 6-8 weeks.