Episode 28: How Often to Change Up Your Workout Routine

Trainer Tips

Jun 14

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To avoid hitting a plateau in your gains and fat loss, It’s important to keep your muscles challenged with novel stimulus. But that doesn’t mean you have to change your workouts up every week!

Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast! I'm Jayd Harrison (@Jaydigains), a personal trainer and wellness coach. I created this podcast to share helpful tips to help you make gains in your fitness journey 💪

In this episode, I discuss the importance of introducing novel stimulus to your workout routine to avoid plateauing.

Our bodies are smart machines. They’re highly adaptable and are geared towards making things you do regularly as efficient as possible. This means that your body will spend less energy (i.e. calories) doing things you do often.

So when you keep the same training and exercise routine over an extended period of time (more than 6-12 weeks), your body will start to burn fewer calories during your workouts. You’ll also build less muscle as a result of your workouts than you did at the start of the program. This is bad news if you want to continue to burn fat or make gains!

So to continue making progress, it’s important to keep introducing a novel stimulus in your exercise routine often. Novel stimulus is anything that challenges your muscles to do something they aren’t used to doing. This could involve adding more reps or weight, changing the type of exercise or stance, adjusting rest periods, or adding more training days.

If you don’t introduce a novel stimulus often enough, it’s easy for your body to adapt to your training and hit a plateau (where your body changes very little or not at all for an extended time).

(00:00):
I used to see this all the time when I worked at a big box gym where I saw them come in, they did the same routine every single day, if not every week, using the same weights, same number of repetitions. They had their routine, they never changed it, and their bodies never changed. Their bodies kind of stuck like reached a certain point and just kind of plateaued, and that's what happens if you don't change anything, if you don't give your body novel stimulus.
(00:35):
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison. I'm a certified personal trainer and I created this podcast to share some tips with you on how to eat better, make gains, and lose weight. In today's episode, I'm going to share a conversation that I had with my Twitch chat when I was live on my Twitch channel, Twitch.tv/jaydigains. Now, this chatter wanted to know how important it was to change up exercises in your workout program to continue making gains. So this episode is all about how to introduce novel stimulus to progressively overload your muscles and continue making gains to avoid a plateau. Now, remember that you can always join me when I'm live on my Twitch channel by following me at Twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you follow me, you'll get notified whenever I go live so that you can ask your fitness questions. Also, make sure to join my email list at Jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com so you can get notified anytime I've got new products and services or when I open my coaching programs to accept new students. Now without further ado, let's get into this episode.
(01:42):
I've heard mixed things. How important is it actually to change up your exercises? Changing up your exercises is not as important as it is to step back and consider the importance of giving your muscles novel stimulus. Novel stimulus is the most important thing for you to continue to make progress. Novel stimulus is when you give your muscles some kind of a new challenge and because your muscles are going to adapt to whatever type of challenge you give it, whatever type of workouts you do, your body at some point is going to adapt to that and it will not respond like it used to when you first started doing that type of exercise. And this is actually a good thing. This is an important system and ability that your body has because if you think about it in the wild, in the wild when humans were hunter or gatherers walking around the savannahs of Africa and we didn't have quite as much food available and we also didn't know what our energy expenditure was going to be on a day-to-day basis.
(02:48):
So our bodies are adaptation machines. They're built in a way that makes whatever type of activity we do on a day-to-day basis and however many calories we eat on a day-to-day basis, our body eventually adapts to that and we'll spend less energy and we'll make it so that we don't have to spend as much energy doing things as we did initially. So the same thing that used to get you to burn a lot of fat is not going to necessarily burn as many calories a few weeks into whatever that routine is than it did at the beginning. Your body is going to adapt and make itself more efficient for that activity. And if you think about it, muscle building is a very inefficient energy expense. You don't want to be constantly building muscle in the wild because you don't know what your food availability is going to be.
(03:47):
So your body doesn't want to be building muscle all the time. It's something that it's going to do in a short period of time and then it's going to rein it in a little bit. If you keep doing the same type of activity, it's going to rein it in and become more efficient at that so that you don't waste precious energy because your body views calories that you take in as precious finite resources as a finite resource. So if you do the same thing all the time, your body's going to slow down the amount of calories that it spends doing that thing, and it's also going to make it so that you don't have to build as much muscle in order to do that thing. So if you want to continue to burn as many calories as you did at the beginning, or if you want to continue to build as much muscle as you did in the beginning, you're going to have to make sure that you're giving your body enough novel stimulus at the right kind of intervals to keep it from slowing down or adapting.
(04:44):
And so it's not really necessary for you to change up your whole workout routine every week, but most people's bodies do actually adapt within six to 12 weeks is kind of the general rule of thumb six to 12 weeks. And that's why when I write programs for my clients, I usually write them to be in six to 12 week chunks and then I change up their exercises or I change up how their workouts are organized. So you don't necessarily have to be changing up your exercises every single week in order to give yourself novel stimulus. I actually would recommend that you keep your workout routine the same for that six to 12 weeks because that allows you to see progress in other ways. Like in the same exercise, if you are constantly pushing yourself to add on more reps or add more weight to the exercise, that's a way that you can give yourself novel stimulus without having to necessarily change your exercises.
(05:42):
You do want to make sure that every time you're training, you're doing something to give your muscles a novel stimulus because eventually your body is just going to get efficient at whatever it was. You'll see people in the gym, I used to see this all the time when I worked at a big box gym. It was usually women, but I saw some guys do this too where I saw them come in, they did the same routine every single day, if not every week, using the same weights, same number of repetitions. They had their routine, they never changed it, and their bodies never changed. Their bodies kind of stuck, reached a certain point and just kind of plateaued. And that's what happens if you don't change anything, if you don't give your body novel stimulus. So what you want to do, I would recommend, and this is how I teach, this is how I program for my clients, settle into a routine of however many days that you want to work out.
(06:37):
Generally speaking, you want to hit each muscle group, 10 to 20 sets per week, and you can split that up however you want. You could do one day, that's all leg stuff. Redoing 10 sets for quads, 10 sets for glutes, 10 sets for hammies, 10 sets for cals if you care about them or you can split them up and every time you train, you do total body. So you do three sets of three sets of quads, three sets of hamstrings on one day that same day. You do a little bit of chest, a little bit of deltoid, you know what I mean? And you mix it up however you want, but you just want to make sure that you hit each muscle group, 10 to 20 sets total. And over the course of each week, you want to be adding on a little bit more each week to push yourself and challenge yourself a little bit more.
(07:21):
Either do more repetitions at each set or add some weight. How do you know whether you should add more reps or add more weight? My general rule of thumb that works really well for my clients is I say, generally speaking, for each exercise shoot for 10 to 15 reps at the beginning of that six to 12 week block. Pick a weight where you feel challenged doing that exercise for 10 reps and then the next week try to add more reps using that same weight. Don't increase the weight, just try to add on more reps. When you reach the point where you're able to do the 15 reps and it's like, it's kind of challenging, but I could totally do more. I could at least do three more reps, then it's time to increase the weight, go back to doing 10 reps, right? Find a weight where that's challenging at 10 reps and then do that again each week.
(08:19):
Try to add more reps, do more reps until you get reached the point where you're doing 15 reps. So that's kind of how I advance my clients. That's a nice little linear progression that you can use. I would say when you're doing that 10 to 15 reps, you don't need to go to muscle failure. Going to muscle failure means going to the point where you can't do another rep. You try and your just muscles will just not move or your body just won't move or the weight falls. And there's a lot of safety concerns when it comes to doing that. One is the weight could fall on your fucking head or you get trapped under the barbell or something fails and then you counterbalance and then you're out of alignment and then you end up slipping a disc in your back or you could pull a muscle or tear a muscle.
(09:07):
So there's high risk when it comes to training a muscle failure, which is why I don't recommend it. For people who aren't advanced in their training, meaning they've been training consistently for two years or more, but even people who've been training consistently for two years or more don't necessarily always train to muscle failure. It's always a good idea to leave one rep in the tank at least if you can. But then also you have to think about the closer you get to muscle failure, the harder it's going to be for you to recover. So you don't want to push yourself so hard to the point where your body can't keep up with the amount of recovery that you have to do because you're only going to get the gains that you can actually recover from. You don't build anything in the gym. You build muscle when you're asleep, when your body turns the food that you've eaten into actual muscle, that's when the muscle gains actually happen.
(09:55):
The gym is just the stimulus the gym is doing, the controlled damage that your body has to heal afterwards. So the amount of controlled damage that you do is only going to be helpful if you can actually do the repairs to that. And so that's another reason why I don't think it's actually necessary to go all the way to muscle failure. And I only have my clients go to muscle failure every once in a while when I'm specifically trying to figure out what weight they need to be using on their exercises or if there's an exercise that they've kind of plateaued at and I'm like really, really trying to push them past that, but it's very, very rare that I'm going to push to muscle failure. You can go to muscle failure when you're doing a competition, right? If you're doing a power lifting competition or a strongman competition, that's the time to reach, right?
(10:40):
But it's not necessary to do what every single training session, every single exercise, it's always best to just leave one or two reps in the tank. If you don't want to stick with the same program for six to 12 weeks to give yourself novel stimulus, you can swap out exercises here and there. So the way that my friend has written my program, he basically told me, I want you doing this number of sets on this muscle group, this number of sets on this muscle group, this number of sets on this muscle group total, and we're adding more sets every week is the idea.
(11:13):
I don't necessarily need to add more weight, but I'm adding more sets, right? So doing another set of the exercise is another way to add novel stimulus and make your body have to reach the whole point about novel stimulus, introducing some kind of novel stimulus on a week, if not biweekly schedule. The National Strength and Conditioning Association recommends a general rule of thumb, what they tell at least in their books, at least in the book that I read. It may be out of date now, but generally speaking, they advise personal trainers or coaches to do a rule of thumb. If you can do the same weight, the same number of repetitions, two sessions in a row, then know it's time to add more, either add more weight, add more reps, et cetera, et cetera, I'm a little bit more loosey goosey with it. I'm always allowing my clients to push more reps to that RPE, right rate of perceived exertion, leave one or two reps in the tank, however many reps it takes to get to that point of fatigue.
(12:11):
And that's going to change each set. And what my coach actually tells me is, if you're doing it right, you're likely not going to be able to do the same number of repetitions in each set, because if you get more and more to fatigued each set, you're going to be able to do fewer and fewer reps ending at the same level of fatigue when you have one rep in reserve, right? Or three reps in reserve in this case. But we call that progressive overload. Progressive overload is when you are either every week, every session, or every two weeks. Just over time, you're adding more of that novel stimulus in some way to your workouts. I personally recommend generally like rule of thumb, add more reps until you can do 15, and then you add more weight. So that adding on more reps over time and then adding more weight and then adding more reps over time.
(13:06):
That's an example of progressive overload. You'd need to add more to your workouts in order for your muscles to continue to respond in order for you to continue burning the amount of calories that you want to burn, and then also for you to continue building muscle. There's a lot of different ways that you can do a progressive overload. I just think that that is to keep things simple, just think of reps and weight reps and weight, doing more reps over time, more weight, or in the case of my program that I'm doing on my own body more sets, adding additional set each week, right? That's a way to do, but this is also a short program. This program is supposed to run for four weeks, so it's a limited amount of time that I'm starting with a certain number of sets for each muscle group.
(13:50):
And then each week I add on another amount, I add in another set for each muscle group, and then by week four, I'm doing a lot of sets and then I restart the program or I do a different program. But then also just changing up your whole workout routine is another way that you can progress or give yourself novel stimulus. I'm a big fan of changing up and training different stances. So if you normally train conventional dead lifts, conventional dead lifts with your feet underneath your hips and a more of a hip hinge, switch it up and start practicing sumo deadlifts with your feet wider. That's another way that you can introduce novel stimulus, and that will actually make you overall more strong in both movements. So changing up your stance is another way that you can add novel stimulus and progressively overload your muscles and increase your overall strength and muscle definition.
(14:47):
Another interesting way to progressively overload, which I've played with a teensy weensy bit in my own training, is playing around with your rest time. Now this you have to be really clear about what your training goals are for power lifting. I want to rest as much as I can to recharge my muscles, get my central nervous system ready to fire, but not so long that I lose touch with my muscles. And it sometimes takes time to learn how much rest you need. Generally speaking, for power lifting, the recommendation for rest is somewhere between two and five minutes after each set. So you do a heavy set of singles, doubles, triples or whatnot, and then you typically want to rest for two to five minutes for that kind of a heavy lifting. With bodybuilding, it's a little bit different because in bodybuilding, your goal is not so much to move heavy ass weight and move as much weight as possible.
(15:50):
Your goal is actually to fatigue the muscles as much as possible so that they get little tiny microscopic tears, and we get those little microscopic tears by building up fatigue in the muscles. So doing shorter periods of rest can sometimes allow you to build up more fatigue in the muscles, which may allow you to build more muscle. So sometimes doing a 32nd rest instead of a one minute rest or a two minute rest can help you build more muscle because you're accumulating more fatigue in each successive set, right? So say I do a bunch of bicep curls and I go until I have only one more rep in the tank, say, say I did 15 on that, right? Then I rest for 30 seconds, I'm not going to have all that a TP fully recharged in my muscles. A TP is the molecule that we break down to give the muscles energy.
(16:44):
It takes about three minutes When you completely exhaust a TP, it takes about three minutes to fully reconstitute it. So I'm not going to let my muscle fully recover, and then I'm going to start my next set, and I'm going to go until I have only one rep in the tank, which on the set second set is probably going to be more like 13 reps, and then I'm going to stop and I'm going to rest for 30 seconds, and then I'm going to do another set, and then I'm probably going to have to stop at like 10, right? Because I'm not letting my muscles fully recover between sets, and then that way I'm accumulating more fatigue in the muscles and allowing the muscles to get more fatigued and creating more of those little microscopic tears in theory, right? But some people who do bodybuilding style training will actually take full two minutes of rest between their sets, but they'll be able to do more repetitions because their muscles are more recovered.
(17:28):
So that's another thing that you can play with and see how your body responds. If you're playing around with your rest and you want to see what the effect is on your muscle growth, I would recommend making sure that you're tracking your body measurements on a weekly basis so that you can see the effect over time of your different rest periods. And this goes for any changes that you make to your program. If you're trying to build muscle, make sure you are measuring, take those measurements every week to see the progress. You'll know whether it's working, adding more reps, adding more weight, adding more sets, changing the modality of the exercise or stance instead of doing goblet squats, then you do back squats, that kind of thing. Or if you do conventional deadlift, change your stance and do sumo deadlift and then playing with your rest periods.
(18:17):
Those are ways to progressively overload. You also can progressively overload by adding more frequency, like adding another training day. If you've been training for three days a week for a long period of time, add in a fourth day, and it doesn't have to even be a whole hour long workout. You could just do a light sort of extra day where you do maybe some accessories. So adding another day, adding more frequency is another way that you can progressively overload your muscles. When I'm in a strength block and once I switch back into a strength block, I'm going to be doing squats progressively more and more frequently because I'm trying to train my legs and trying to develop my legs and trying to get really, really strong in my sumo deadlift and doing squats more frequently is a great way to actually improve your strength in the deadlift without the cost of your CNS, because deadlifts are really exhausting.
(19:08):
You don't need to do them more than once or twice a week, but squats you can do a couple times a week. So anyway, that's one way that I'm going to be increasing progressively overloading when I switch back into a strength block to keep my squats getting stronger, to keep my legs getting stronger, I'm going to add another day, another day of training where I'm going to do some more squats. So that's another way to progressively overload. So these are all ways that you can keep your muscles stimulated, keep them responding so that you are continuing to get stronger. But just keep in mind though, one thing before we move on. When you first start working out and when you first start in the gym, you're going to make a lot of progress really, really fast. This is called newbie gains. It's a lot easier in the beginning to burn fat and build muscle because you haven't done probably if you haven't been working out for six months or more, or if it's been a long time and you've been sedentary and then you start working out, and then you start, you probably clean up your diet, start drinking water.
(20:04):
You're going to see a lot of changes happen really fast, but eventually your body is going to adapt, right? Because their adaptation machines and the gains are going to get slower. And even if you continue to progressively overload by doing any of the methods that we talked about, it's likely that your gains are still going to be a lot slower. You can still make progress, but just make sure you manage your expectations. You're going to reach a certain point. Once you hit that intermediate, right, that intermediate zone you've been training consistently for a year or two, it's going to be a lot harder for you to continue building muscle or continue burning fat at that point just because your body has gotten really efficient at doing this stuff. And so that's where it becomes really important for you to track what you do. Keep a workout journal, track what you do,
(21:00):
Take your measurements and take notes, reflect on your workouts, reflect on your goals, set new goals, and just measure everything, track everything, because once you reach that point where things start to slow down, it can get really hard to stay motivated, and you can start to feel like you're not making any progress, but you are. It's just slower than it was. So measuring that, recording your workouts, recording your measurements can be really, really helpful, especially when you get into that intermediate phase and the gains slow down. It'll also give you the data that you need to be able to pinpoint what might need to change. If you reach a point where you plateau and something needs to change. If you don't have the data of what exercises you've been doing, what weight you've been using, if you don't have that data, there's nothing to analyze, and it's going to be really hard for you to pinpoint what needs to change in order to give you that novel stimulus, right?
(21:58):
So I'm a big fan of tracking, and that's why I created my little fitness journals. Aren't these so cute? They are. Was it four weeks or six weeks? I think it's four weeks, which was a good chunk of time, and you guys can find those on my website, but also, I posted a link earlier. I'll post it again. I got to come out with some new designs pretty soon. But if you use this or some kind of an app for my personal training clients, I use the Trainerize app. That's where I organize their workouts. But just have somewhere where you're keeping that data because that's going to help you also to know when it's time to progressively overload, introduce novel stimulus and what kind of novel stimulus you need to introduce, and then you can test it, see how your body changes as you test that out.
(22:48):
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. I hope that you found it helpful. Make sure to give me a follow at Twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you would like to participate in some of my fitness q and a live streams. If you'd also like to be notified of the new products and services that I'm offering, make sure to join my email list at jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you drink some water, eat your protein, eat your veggies, and take care of yourself. Have a great rest of your day.

Some people try to avoid hitting a plateau by doing different exercises every time they train, rather than sticking to a training routine. There’s nothing inherently bad about doing this. It can keep you from getting bored in your workouts, and it certainly introduces novel stimulus. However, the downside in this approach is that it can be difficult to track your progress over time without the consistent data that following a 6-12 week training program provides.

I usually keep my personal training clients on a consistent routine of workouts for 6-12 weeks, during which we work on the same exercises. I follow a general rule of two when it comes to progressing their workouts and introducing new challenges in their program: if my client can do the same exercise with the same weight and the same number of reps two sessions in a row, then it’s time to add a novel stimulus. For that, I’ll gradually add more reps or weight to the exercise—this approach is called progressive overload (giving the muscles progressively more volume or resistance over time).

It’s much easier to know when to add more weight or reps by keeping the training program consistent over the course of 6-12 weeks versus always doing random exercises every time you train. Otherwise, you can find yourself always using the same weight and reps on an exercise without realizing it—which can in itself cause a plateau.

Regardless of how often you change your workout routine, it’s important to track your workouts (including what exercises you do, what weight you use, how many reps you do in each set, and how difficult each set was) and take body measurements frequently. This will help you to monitor your progress and identify when something needs to change. Check out my Fitness Journals (available on Amazon) to help you track your progress!

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ABOUT JAYD HARRISON

Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media: