When should you change an exercise or workout?

When should you change an exercise?

A lot less frequently than you might have been told before

Progress comes from consistency over time

And it’s very difficult to be consistent if you’re always making changes

With any new plan or movements, you’ll go through a series of phases

1️⃣ Patterning – simply getting used to the movement

How it feels

The perfect setup for you

Performing plenty of reps to practice it

This stage is really important & may take a few weeks to really bed in

But it sets you up to make progress moving forwards

Don’t neglect it

2️⃣ Progressing – making the small, incremental improvements

This will come in a number of forms

Weight progressions

Rep progressions

Execution progressions

And they need not be huge leaps each week

An extra rep, an extra 1kg

Those all add up over time

3️⃣ Plateauing – progress stalling

There will, in all likelihood, come a time when you simply struggle to keep progressing a movement

It’s normal, otherwise we would all be competing in World’s Strongest Man each year

This may be the time to think about a change

That might be a swap for another movement – for a short time, or to repeat the above process

It might be a break from lifting altogether to recover fully

It might be, and this is one that I don’t see used often enough…

Stripping a lift back to basics

As weight & rep progressions happen, there can be a little drop off in execution

Pulling some weight back & re-patterning to go again can be a very valuable tool to use