One of the worst habits of dedicated trainees – the people who are serious about improving their athletic performance or physique – is changing up what they’re doing too often. This is often because they aren’t progressing as fast as they’d like, but chances are it isn’t the program. Most of the time, people either hope to achieve unrealistically fast progress (maybe based on how quickly they progressed as beginners) or aren’t being intense and consistent enough to reach more realistic goals. Unfortunately changing your program makes things worse because it often gives a false impression of progress.
For example if you’ve consistently been doing a program where your main chest exercise is the flat bench press then you change your program and, along with many other changes, start doing incline bench press instead of flat you’ll probably see improvements in numbers in the first few weeks. Great, progress! Except it’s probably not the progress you were hoping for, what most likely happened was you improved your technique and neural efficiency but your muscles didn’t really get stronger – this can be seen by the fact that if you now go back to flat bench, you’re probably weaker than before you made the change. Not exactly ideal I’m sure you’ll agree, especially if you’re training for hypertrophy.
This doesn’t mean that if you’ve stalled on an exercise you shouldn’t ever switch – this is a useful technique for breaking plateaus, but what it does mean is that if you’re changing your program every 4 weeks, there’s very little certainty that you’re truly progressing. Be wary of this ‘false progression’ if you’re the type of person who feels a need to change their program often.
The best way I’ve found to avoid this trap is to decide how you’re going to train your main lifts for a long period of time (several months ideally) and allow yourself to make small changes to the other stuff that you do, the assistance. This way as long as you’re progressing on the main lifts, which you can be certain of because you haven’t changed the way you train them, you can be certain you’re progressing and not just fooling yourself.
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Simple no-nonsense article but true.
Thing is people are incredibly patient with the gym.
Most guys (especially some who think they’re tough because they’ve played some contact sports before) usually say something like:
“yes, started the gym now. Going to look like Gerard Butler in 300 in a few months, watchout opposition!”
An actual quote taken from one of my facebook friends page lol.
I think bench and incline bench is a poor example – incline bench should have carryover to flat bench.
I think its far more important to be able to look back over 12 weeks or even 16 or better an entire year and see which lifts went up where and why.
You cannot learn that in a 4 week cycle.
Even after 8 weeks it is hard to determine where strength gains came from.
Also, consider swapping to incline bench from flat bench after 4 weeks, then 4 weeks later swapping to dumbell bench. in 12 weeks you will have made progress, your strength will have improved. However, if you had taken one of those lifts and done it for the entire 12 weeks you would have made better progress. Focus and consistency is key.
Doing the same exercise for longer allows you to get better at that exercise, if you are alternating exercises you will not get weaker (contrary to the article!) but you will not get better at the original exercise – (this shouldnt be long enough to diminish your technique or neurological systems, particularly if the exercise is similar – flat to incline bench). By swapping exercises you have disallowed yourself progress. Specificity in a single exercise will yield better gains than different exercises.
Any exercises swapped out in order to break plateaus should be relevant to the plateau – ie if your problem occurs in one part of the ROM of the exercises it would be stupid to change exercise to one which did not work that area.
The majority of people on propane (with exceptions) arent lifting at a level where they need to swapout exercises – flat bench can be performed all year round without progress stalling.
This means that if you train for 6 months, and the only thing that changes in your program is the assistance then you will be able to directly correlate (based not only on retrospective analysis of which exercise used, but also through the experience of which ones helped you) assistance work to gains in the primary exercise.
You should have just gone all out and promoted 5/3/1 : P
-NB I do not personally do 5/3/1, I follow a program outlined by Greg Everett but the premise is the same – you perform your main exercises with assistance work to improve the weaker areas. You can feel which exercises improve your mainlifts and you can also look back and see that when you go this lift up another went up.
You dont realize how quickly youve made progress until you have done something for a long time: it took two weeks to add 2.5kg or 2 and a half months to add 12.5 kg – if your bench was 80kg, 12.5kg is huge progress for a fifth of a year. Progress cannot be seen on small timescales.
so if it takes a month to add 2.5kg to your deadlift progress seems slow, do this for four months and all of a sudden your deadlift is +10kg, for a year 30kg.
Maybe write a more detailed article on training cycle lengths? show how serious lifters plan over years, not months or weeks. ie PLers. or even O-lifters – ie bulgarian teeenagers the next 8 years are planned, not the next 8 weeks
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