Vary Your Workouts for Balance and Consistent Improvement

Pizza tastes great. But would you eat it every day for a year? How about watching your favorite movie back to back for twelve hours (a marathon of Star Wars Episodes 1- 6 doesn't count - although that would still be too much intergalactic drama for me.)

You get the point, I'm sure. Simply to avoid boredom and maintain a reasonable level of engagement, you need to mix things up in your exercise program periodically. But there are a few other reasons that are at least as important:

• Distributing the stresses on your bones, muscles and connective tissues more evenly to avoid injury


• Avoiding the body achieving a high degree of adaptation and getting stuck at performance plateaus


• Minimizing the "diminishing returns" principle (each additional hour of a similar activity has a proportionately lower additional benefit than you have on the front end)

Now some people do really well with structure and repetition, and the idea of introducing any variation at all makes them skeptical. You don't have to give up a framework of structure to get some variation in your program, though. There are literally an infinite number of ways that you can vary it and still keep enough structure to keep it familiar and manageable. Here's an idea for cardio, for strength and for flexibility:

Cardio - If you're used to running on the treadmill for 30 minutes twice a week, try substituting a rotation of different activities on your second cardio day each week like a class, multiple circuits of jogging in place for three minutes and then skipping rope for two, swimming, rowing, elliptical trainer or stationary bike.

Strength - If you lift twice weekly and you want to stick to one major exercise for each body part for simplicity, alternate between your normal loads (8-12 repetition failure range) on the first day each week with about 60% of those loads for a 15+ repetition range on the second day each week.

Flexibility - Instead of doing all your stretching at the end of the workout, experiment with stretching each muscle group after working it on strength days and breaking up cardio with stretches at each 15 minute mark, as well as at the end of the workout.

If you are more the adventurous type, and you feel very comfortable with radical changes to your program (I work with a few competitive athletes who fall into this category), you need more objective-specific guidance. In this case I strongly recommend working with an experienced, nationally certified trainer (ACE, NASM, ACSM or NSCA) in your area to make the changes that will best suit your needs. Here's an article from my website to help you find the right trainer: http://www.trivalleytrainer.com/resources_3cs.html

Make your exercise program work for you. You're constantly growing and evolving. It should as well.