Is it true that doing the same exercises every day, won’t work?

The same exercises daily result in boredom and body adaptations.

The truth is, if you do the same thing over an over again expecting different results, you will be sadly disappointment. As Einstein said, that’s just the definition of insanity.

The truth is, most of the time we get stuck in our safe little comfort zone, with the same weights, and exercise. It may seem easy, and it may not require too much effort on your part. When you train with the same weight week in week out, overtime, your body will develop adaptations to the resistance, and gains as well as strength will not increase. You are no longer challenging your body, therefore it cannot progress towards the next stage.

There are many ways in which you can change up your exercises, in order to get the most benefit from the particular activity or stimulus. I will provide you with some options to beat boredom and plateaus.

5 ways to change up your routine for awesome gains

1. Vary your exercise intensity and activity. Some day’s, train with heavier weights, then on another, do high reps with low weight. You can add a different type of cardio, such as HIIT which is recommended the most. Throw in a bit of walking, and maybe a bike ride. Change it up constantly, so that your body is always guessing and you will always make strides towards your fitness goals.
2. Take training outdoors. For a bit of variety, change your scenery and train outdoors. Find somewhere that has stairs, space and maybe a running track. Perform some HIIT sessions on the track, run up the stairs, or even use resistance bands. Grab sone friends and encourage one another to do better.
3. Circuit training. Circuit training really get’s the sweat going, and challenges your whole body. You can create one program focusing on lower or on upper body – maybe try out a full body circuit. The trick is to do as many reps and sets as you can, without a rest in between the exercise. Resting is only permitted at the end of a full round. You can include 5–10 different exercises. This will really break through a workout plateau. Change it up from full body on day, to lower and then upper body.
4. When training with weights, vary the tempo. Temp training can really assist you when the weights are not as heavy. You can do eccentric (lowering) or concentric (lifting) movement workouts, both recruiting different muscle fibers. To give you an example, let’s use the biceps curl. Instead of focusing the tempo upon the lowering movement, swap it out it, and focus on the lifting motion. You lift the weights upwards in a slow and controlled way, and quickly bring them down, Keep that up, and feel the burn!
5. Lengthen or shorten your rest periods. Rest periods when weight training, serve a specific purpose and also support our strength training goals. My advice on this one, would be to lengthen your rest periods (1 minute to 1.2 minutes) if you would like to focus on strength lifting. That means, your 1RM will have to be heavy, and you should be performing 1–4 reps of this, needing over a minutes rest. If you want to burn body fat and increase your gains, shorten your rest period. Work with 2–3 exercises back to back, and really smash it out.

When performing the same exercises day in day out, boredom sets in, and therefore, you are not motivated to move forward and make changes. I urge you to use some of the strategies above to guide you towards that next level of improvement in strength, increase hypertrophy and further accelerate fat loss.