When to Change Your Workout (DON’T MESS THIS UP!)

Knowing when to change your workout and when not to is one of the most important things you can get right when it comes to your training. Change too often and you could sacrifice your ability to build the necessary foundation required for building a muscular physique. Change too infrequently and y

JESSIE: Hey, Jeff! JEFF: Yo?! JESSIE: Uh, I want to run something by you real quick. JEFF: Sure. JESSIE: So, you know how you were saying ‘keep things fresh, and interesting’?

I think you can do it with the YouTube intros. I think the “What’s up guys? Jeff Cavaliere” has gotten a little stale. JEFF: Okay. Well, what have you got?

JESSIE: Well, first off. JEFF: Dude. You’re just staring. JESSIE: Yeah. They love that.

I mean, that’s what I do. They really like that. Okay, how about this? “Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com”?

JEFF: You want me to do jazz hands? JESSIE: Even better: “What’s up guys?! Jumpin’ Jazzy Jeff, ATHLEANX. com”. Wait.

You grew up in the ’90s, so you like ’90s music. I got it. Do it like Creed. “What’s up-a, everybody?! Jeff Cavaliere-a, ATHLEANX.

com-a”. I’ll keep thinking of them. I’ve got plenty of good ones up here, bud. JEFF: What’s up guys?! Jumpin’ Jazzy Jeff – ah, no.

It ain’t working, Jessie. I ain’t changing, but I will tell you this: we’re going to talk today about change and change is one of the most common questions I get asked. That is: “Jeff, how often should I change my workout? ” First of all, we have to understand ‘what does that mean? ’ Because there are a lot of things that you can change.

You can change the exercises that you’re doing. You could change your training focus. You could change the way you’re doing the exercises. You could change so many things about – the time of day that you train. So many aspects and variables that you can change, but the most important thing is that change, sometimes, is overdone, and other times it’s not done often enough.

So let me explain. If you are a beginner, one of the big problems with beginners is this obsession with wanting to try all the new things. There’s all the shiny objects, we try to grab them all, and unfortunately it has a detriment to your workout progress because a beginner should be focused on a select few exercises, and worrying about getting better at doing those exercises. Now when we started with Jessie and his transformation, we weren’t doing all the fancy exercises. We were trying to do the basics, and stick with those, and help him to learn how to perform those exercises.

Within those, we do have some elements of change. Here we could work on increasing the weight that he’s lifting on those exercises. So obviously, increasing his strength. We could alter the tempo of how he’s doing those exercises as he gets more comfortable with them. We can work on, most of all, trying to increase the intensity that he can deliver during those exercises so with each new set, each new workout, he’s able to deliver more, and more tension, and intensity on the muscles he’s trying to develop.

But when you try to do more, and more exercises you’re asking yourself to learn how to do things that you’re really not that good at doing. The more exercises you try the more likely you are to not really be good at them. So it’s better to focus here, on these things, with a limited number of exercises. Now, when you’ve become more advanced you’ve likely done all the training variables. You’ve changed your rep tempo, you’ve increased your volume, and decreased your volume, you’ve changed the exercises by increasing the weight that you can lift on them, and you’ve progressed, and overloaded where you could.

However, that’s the key. At that point you have likely topped out in a lot of exercises. At least the drastic changes you’re going to be able to make in your strength. So here is what I think increasing the exercise variation is one of the bigger things that you can do to start seeing continued results. So increased exercise variation.

So now, if you think about that, have you ever experienced – you go to the hotel gym and they don’t have much there for you to work with, and you use whatever you have at your disposal there? You’re doing bench-press machines, you’re doing pec-deck, or something. You’re doing whatever is there just because that’s all they have, and you still want to get in a good workout. They don’t even have heavy enough dumbbells for you to really get the normal workout in that you wanted to do. So when you do this, two days later you can barely move in the hotel room because you’ve done things you haven’t done in a long time.

Maybe, as an alternative, you’ve watched me do an exercise here, on this channel – let’s say a face pull, recently. You’re like “Oh, wow! I haven’t done face pulls in a long time”, and you do the face pulls, and even though you’re fine with carrying tons of weight all the time, regularly, your traps, your upper back is sore as shit from doing the face pulls because you have become too efficient at the movements. That’s what we’re trying to get here. As you become more advanced your goals should be to try and find ways to make yourself less efficient.

Your bodies are masters of compensation. If you hurt yourself, if you hurt your knee, why does your back start to hurt? Because somehow, some way, your dumb ass is still going to the gym and figuring out a way to hobble around on that knee in such a way that it passes that pain onto somewhere up the chain. And you figure out a way. “Look!

I’m squatting, guys! My knee’s not hurting me anymore. ” Meanwhile, my back is killing me. Our bodies will always figure out a way to do what we’re not really supposed to do. They’re going to adapt to whatever you do.

You have to figure out a way to make sure that you’re forcing it to get used to doing something it’s not used to doing. That comes in with the next concept here of exerphobia. So, when we talk about change this is one of my big ones. How many exercises do you like? Maybe I should have said ‘what is your favorite exercise’, but how many do you like?

In this case, if you can start telling me “Oh, I like to do this, this, this, this, this, and this”, then likely, it’s time that you stop doing those exercises, or at least dial it back for a period of time. When you start to like an exercise it’s because you’ve become very efficient at doing it, and anything that becomes very efficient is something that we actually start to like. If you have a phobia of doing squats, but you like doing deadlifts it might be time to start doing squats because there’s a reason why you like that. Now, I’m not talking about – let’s be very clear – I’m not talking about ‘you can do squats, or you can do deadlifts, but you can’t do squats because something is killing you, or hurts, or your back is bothering you, or your knees are bothering you’. Likely, there’s something that’s causing that to be the case and that’s not the same thing.

When you are picking based on the fact that one of the exercises is difficult for you, just in terms of your effort level, but one of them, you’re actually really good at; that is when you want to start using them. So stop fearing those exercises and instead, identify the ones that you don’t like. Those are the ones I want you to start doing. Again, just take the ones you like out for a little time, and go back to them, and you’ll get that same response when you go back to them – that change – that actually is good for sparking new growth, and adaptation. Finally, a comment on fat loss.

Again, here, metabolically our bodies are always going to try and become very efficient at what we do. If you think about the first time that you maybe did a box jump, you’re doing box jumps, you’re using a lot of effort to get yourself up, on the boxes. You aren’t really good at timing your jump, at timing your arms with your legs to get a higher jump. So all that inefficiency is causing you t