It is always important to switch up routines every once in a while to keep your body guessing and to shock your muscles into growth.
Did you know that the human body gets accustomed to anything done repeatedly on a daily basis for a prolonged period of time? That’s right and working out is no different.
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Why is it important to keep your body guessing?
Our bodies have something known as muscle memory and performing an exercise repeatedly with the same volume and intensity will get the muscles used to the program. When this happens, you burn fewer calories and build less calorie-torching muscles.
This is why you need to switch things up!
Mix up your routines and keep them interesting and while making sure you attack every muscle group.
How often should you switch up routines?
Switching up routines would vary from one individual to the other depending on the time taken for the body to fully adapt to an exercise. This could be anywhere between 6 to 8 weeks depending on the goal and progress of the individual.
It is always best to go by the FIIT principle which is frequency, intensity, time and type and changing at least two of those factors every 6 to 8 weeks will keep the body guessing and moving in the right direction.
For example, when performing strength training for fat loss, one can increase the number of repetitions or sets for the same amount of resistance or increase resistance with lesser rep range and adding in a couple of more sets without changing the program and still maximize results.
For cardio, one can switch things up by throwing in a little bit of steady state cardio, high intensity interval training, low intensity interval training or sprints to keep the body guessing and spike up the metabolism and EPOC (exercise post oxygen consumption) to a whole new level!
Our bodies are designed to identify a new stimulus and so it’s easy to trick them by allowing only small modifications to programs to achieve the desired response.
