Adding Variety To Your Workouts
Variety is the spice of life. But in training, so is consistency, so here’s a simple trick to use which provides for a balance of consistency and variety in your training.
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You probably have a few major lifts which you love doing - cool, these can stay in the program. BUT track your progress on these, expect improvements in performance from yourself consistently on these lifts. If you love doing them you’re probably good at them and find them fun, use that to your advantage and challenge yourself.
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There’s probably some other movements which just fit the bill really well for your current goal in this training block. Lets say you feel your pecs contract best on a horizontal cable crossover, and pec growth is a focus for this training block. Great, these will go into your program and you will push to improve performance on these EVERY WEEK through the training block. Either move up on weight, or on reps, or increase the frequency that these movements are trained every week through the block.
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Now we get to adding variety - you still want to do this with some sort of plan. Throwing in random stuff is never that productive. What I like to do is program for specific muscles to be hit in a specific way but with free choice of movement, calling these “open movement sets”. Say on back day you might program an open movement set for your lats - say a horizontal row performed as a failure drop-set of 10/10 reps. You now have specifics on which muscle must be hit and how it is to be hit, but choice of movement is free on the day. So today you might do a single arm dumbbell row, next week you may use a back machine you’ve never used, week after you might use cables. This technique works really well to bring variety to your training without it being so random that it loses any function.
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Depending on what sort of person you are you may need more or less variety in your program, and so we use lots of different techniques to accomodate for that. The above is a nice little one you can try for yourself this week :)
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Strength Lab - Personal Training, Body Transformation Coaching and Competition Preparation
Personal Training Hawthorn, Melbourne