Do you wonder what the best way is to count sets and reps? Why you shouldn’t skip leg day? We have answers. This is #Gains, Explained, a space for you to ask any and every question about fitness. The Men’s Health team (and other experts) are here for you.
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How often should you mix up your exercises? I do an upper body/lower body split twice a week each, and I generally do two to three exercises per muscle. Should I find two to three that work great and stick to those? Or find five to six various ones and rotate through them on a two- to three-week schedule?
-Maybe Cut Someday
ONE OF THE best parts about developing a fitness plan is the moment you realize you’ve hit your stride. You know what you’re doing when you hit the gym, whether you’re following a program from a trainer, from a trusted source like Men’s Health, or you’ve cobbled together your own routine from your accumulated experience. You’re training hard, knocking down workout after workout, and most likely seeing results before too long. The upper/lower split you describe is a perfect example of this type of smart, focused training.
But after a while, your attention span and ability to focus on the same old sets might start to wander. As much as human beings can be creatures of habit, we can be easily distracted and tempted to shift up our routines to see if there are greener pastures (in this case, more gains) elsewhere.
You might be eager to introduce some new moves just for variety’s sake. A new exercise here, a circuit there—or maybe you see a trainer or influencer you follow on social media bust out a killer maneuver that you’re dying to try. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, (and if slipping a cool new move into the routine now and again is a workout crime, consider me guilty, too). You don’t want to get stuck in a rut, and introducing some new wrinkles to your training can be an effective way to break through a plateau. But if you have very specific fitness goals, switching up the exercises you do on a whim or jumping from one kind of program to another willy-nilly will be a bad call.
So, the first thing you need to ask yourself is what are your goals for your workouts. Are they broad, or more specific? “If your goal is just generally feeling fit and burning calories, then you can mix your exercise up to your heart’s content,” says Men’s Health fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. As long as you’re careful with your form and not trying dangerous social media stunts every other day, you can feel confident that you’ll be okay in the long run.
But in your case, the disciplined, balanced upper/lower split makes me think you’re probably focused on staying active with an eye to general strength and muscle gains. Samuel agrees. “Reaching those goals requires you to progress your lifts on some level. That can only happen if core lifts are being repeated pretty frequently,” he says.
By core lifts, Samuel means the big compound exercises that typically anchor a workout, like the squat, deadlift, bench press, and heavy row. These are the most effective movements to build overall strength and muscle—and they’ll be the ones you’ll want to progress the most. “The best approach is to choose two core lower body day lifts and two core upper body lifts. (You can alternate which lift you lead with on each respective day if you want to “mix things up” slightly),” he recommends. “But finding consistency with these lifts, which should be multi-joint (think squats, deadlifts, rows, presses) will help insure you’re challenging your body to build muscle and strength.”
The simple fact of the matter is that strength training is built on the principle of progressive overload, the process of challenging your muscles to adapt to increasingly greater stimulus. Typically that means adding weight, but you can also progress through other methods, like more volume (i.e. more reps) and time under tension, too. If you jump around between different types of exercises too quickly, you won’t give your muscles the chance to adapt, which takes away your best opportunities to grow.
That’s not to say there’s no room to introduce variation into your routine at all. Once you’ve got your core two lifts out of the way, there’s a lot more wiggle room to play around with the secondary accessory exercises that fill out the rest of your workout. These are your less involved exercises, like machine and cable exercises and isolation movements (think biceps curls).
Eric Sung, C.S.C.S., a member of the Men’s Health Strength in Diversity initiative and trainer at Performance Lab in New York City, agrees. “Rotating accessory exercises is a great way to keep training fun while adding slight variability,” he says, while still stressing the need to keep your focus on the “meat and potatoes” big lifts.
Here’s how to go about it. Establish your core pair of upper/lower compound moves, then vary your secondary lifts. Samuel has a strategy: Select those secondary exercises from a pool of four to six lower body and four to six upper body moves. “This variability can actually be useful too, allowing you to close blind spots in your training and helping your primary non-rotating lifts, too,” he says.
3 Smart Tips to Change Up Your Training
Try a New Variation
You might find yourself bored or at a training plateau with your big compound lifts. That’s just gym life. You shouldn’t abandon your routine totally—instead, shift to a different variation of your “meat and potatoes” moves to add a different wrinkle and keep you engaged. This might mean trying out a sumo stance for a deadlift or squat, or even working on different points of focus throughout the range of motion of an exercise with moves like a rack pull or floor press.
Switch Up the Implement
Your gym (probably) has lots of different gear lying around just waiting to be used. Instead of returning to the same old barbell movements, switch it up. “If someone were to be doing a barbell clean, if they’re open to it, I would definitely swing a kettlebell in there,” says Sung.” Introducing them to another piece of equipment might open up new doors and even branch out into other accessory movements. The movement pattern is pretty much the same—they’re just using something else.” Trap bar deadlifts, dumbbell bench presses, and landmine rows all fit into this category.
Eat Your Gym Veggies
There might be a movement that you love to hate and find yourself wanting to skip every time you encounter it in your training plan. It’s like a kid eating green vegetables—you don’t want to do it, but you know it’s good for you. Sung says that’s okay. “I have people that tell me ‘I hate doing this, but I do like it because it’s given me results,'” he says. “When I get answers like those, I’ll be like, ‘Okay, maybe we won’t do it as often. But we’ll keep it in the rotation and introduce other movements that you might like. This way they still enjoy exercising.” Hate front squats? Think of them like veggies. You can still do them—but find some other lower body movements or squat variations you can add to those front squat days that you love that can make it worth your while.
Brett Williams, a fitness editor at Men’s Health, is a NASM-CPT certified trainer and former pro football player and tech reporter who splits his workout time between strength and conditioning training, martial arts, and running. You can find his work elsewhere at Mashable, Thrillist, and other outlets.
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