Practical Uses of Variety in Training

A lot of my readers have been asking me about programming. This week, I was luck enough to have my friend Steve write a guest post for me. Steve Bare is a professional strength coach (CSCS, USAW) and competitive weightlifter. His experience includes work in the private industry and an internship at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. He now coaches at a high school, where he is thankful to work with a huge number of adolescent athletes, and give them all a great start in strength training. You can occasionally catch him writing on his coaching blog, BareStrength.



“Ya gotta switch it up, bro!” 

Variety in training is a very popular, yet polarizing, concept. From P90X marketing as “muscle confusion” to CrossFit purporting to be “constantly varied,” many brands are built by attempting to break the monotony of training. In this article, I’d like to discuss the practical application of variety in training, as well as the extents to which variation can be either be useful or counterproductive.

What qualifies as variety?

Loosely, any meaningful difference in training. This can come from changes in exercise modality (e.g., lifting versus swimming), exercise selection (e.g., lunges versus squats), implement (dumbbells versus barbells), rep range, rep tempo, training frequency, and more additional possibilities than I care to list at this time.

Why should you use variety in training? 

For one, introducing variety can diminish the risk of overuse injury. Athletes who engage in repetitive motions in practice and training tend to wind up with sport-specific injuries: baseball pitchers’ shoulders, rowers’ backs, tennis players’ elbows, runners’ shin splints, et. cetera. The primary recommendation to alleviate such symptoms is to decrease usage and strengthen relevant muscles and movement patterns, typically in an off-season period.

This is also relevant to recreational gym-goers. Your body doesn’t care whether you consider yourself a competitive powerlifter or not; if you’re maxing your bench press every chance you get, you’re likely to rack up some small injuries eventually. These injuries aren’t likely to go away without taking some time off from the movement.

Additionally, if you’ve been doing the same exact weekly schedule for months on end (and aren’t a beginner), chances are you’ve found yourself stagnating eventually. This can be referred to as “adaptive resistance,” when the same repeated exercises no longer disrupt homeostasis enough to drive adaptation. Changing a couple of key variables such as those mentioned above can be a powerful factor to continue to drive adaptation and get stronger.

So how much variation is enough? How much is too much? 

To answer these questions, you have to consider your goals.

If your only goal is to lose weight, for example, then your objectives in training are primarily caloric expenditure. Introducing a great amount of variety is fine, because just about any choice in exercise is sure to expend energy, provided it is performed with sufficient effort and for a sufficient duration. You could jog one day, lift another day, swim next week, fight crime another time, and continue to see results on the scale, provided you net a negative calorie balance. Of course, from a psychosocial perspective, most people enjoy seeing their performance improve, so it’s not a bad idea to stick with something for a while and enjoy the benefits of consistency: your running speeds up, your distances lengthen, your weights and reps increase.

However, if you have athletic performance goals in mind, you’ll need to ensure your training directs adaptation towards these goals. Whether your goal is to beat your old 5k time, or to win gold at the Olympics, your success hinges on specific performance improvements. It isn’t enough just to make sure you “get up and move”. You can run as far as you want, but it won’t ever be enough make you a great weightlifter; you still need sufficient specificity. If you change your exercise regimen each time you work out, you risk never providing sufficient overload. As such, we find some constraints on the limits of variation.

Beginning athletes can usually progress with just about anything, which leads to some polarizing conclusions.

On the one hand, there are proponents of systems capitalizing on very low variety for beginners. The benefit here is that the athlete quickly adapts to the cognitive demands of training, learning the lifts without getting confused by a great amount of variety, and is then able to reap the many benefits of strength training before eventually reaching a point of adaptive resistance.

On the other hand, recognizing that beginners will progress with just about any strength training program, you can also use this time to introduce athletes to a wider range of exercises. You could employ a teaching progression by having the athletes spend a couple weeks perfecting a goblet squat before moving on to a front squat, then a back squat, then a low-bar squat. You could instruct the athlete through different exercises every day of the week. However, you should still use the same exercise from one week to the next for a few weeks, so that the athlete has a chance to repeatedly practice one movement, and also see some progress in weight or total reps performed (overload). See below for a few example blocks:

The benefits here are many. The athlete is excited to train, with a greater variety of exercises. You can emphasize proper movement in a low-risk exercise, and then accumulate a lot of high-quality reps before moving on to a slightly more advanced variation with a greater load. Additionally, with each exercise the athlete knows, it becomes easier to teach additional movements in the future; for example, once an athlete knows how to front squat, lunge, press, and deadlift, it is a lot easier to teach them to clean & jerk.

*One thing to note: unlike many strength coaches, I often teach front squats before back squats. I do this because it gives me the opportunity to teach my athletes to stay upright in the squat, and I find that even beginning athletes are better at squatting deep with a front rack than they are with bars on their backs. I teach close-grip bench before a competition-width bench for similar reasons. On occasion, I have also taught sumo deadlifts before conventional because many non-contact athletes have disproportionately strong legs to a weak back, and they tend to prefer sumo initially for this reason; of course, this is also a great reason to eventually include conventional deadlifts, to ensure their backs grow accordingly!

This is not the kind of variety you need...

For intermediate and advanced athletes, most decent strength & conditioning programs will follow a system of phases emphasizing the adaptation of different physical qualities, such as aerobic conditioning, hypertrophy, strength, power, and peaking for competition (usually in that order). As a whole, this system would be referred to as a macrocycle; each 3-6 week chunk is referred to as a mesocycle; and each week can be referred to as a microcycle. By its very nature, such a system introduces variety in rep ranges, as well as often including variety in modalities, exercise selection, and tempos. Within a macrocycle, each mesocycle should gradually become more specific than the previous mesocycle, culminating in a major meet or a competitive season.

The earliest mesocycles will be the least specific to the goal, often outside the modality of the sport, to increase general fitness and work capacity. A great example of this is Olympic weightlifting champion Ilya Ilyin investing his time and energy swimming in his early mesocycles. This enables him to build up his general work capacity while letting his body heal from the repetitive trauma of his sport-specific movements.

Earlier mesocycles will include a greater number of unique exercises per session, per week, and between mesocycles. One hypertrophy block might have an athlete front squat and Romanian deadlift in one session, and then leg press and sumo deadlift in another session for 3-6 weeks. In the next mesocycle, the athlete might back squat and goodmorning in one session, and then conventional deadlift and step-up in another session for another 3-6 weeks. The goal here is to rack up great volumes without increasing the risk of overuse injury from any one particular movement.

In contrast, later mesocycles will increase specificity, decreasing variety. The final strength block for a weightlifter will include high intensity work on snatches, cleans, jerks, along with front squats and/or back squats, and possibly some additional work to target the athlete’s unique weaknesses, all performed several times per week for several weeks on end. Non-barbell athletes will typically maximize increases in strength, power, and/or speed (depending on sport and position), as well as increasing sport practice in preparation for the competitive season.

Introducing training variety can be a great way to avoid overuse injuries, drive greater physical adaptations, and generally enjoy your training more. However, it can also be tempting to overuse variety and under-apply the principles of specificity and overload. Be sure to use sufficient variety in your training that you avoid stagnation and overuse injuries, but not so much that you don’t make definite progress towards your goals!

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Changing up Your Rep Scheme

If you seek out nearly any fitness-related website for information regarding rep schemes, you'll see something like this:

• For size, do 3-4 sets of 8-12 repetitions
• For strength, do multiple sets of 5 of fewer repetitions at a heavy weight
• For muscular endurance, do sets of 20 or more repetitions

While this is, generally satisfactory advice, I want to delve a little bit more into this topic.

First of all, genetics play a big factor in hypertrophy (muscle growth). Everyone responds differently to certain types of training. Every person has a different distribution of type I (slow twitch) and type IIa/b (fast twitch) fibers. Renowned strength coach Charles Poliquin notes, for example:

"It should be noted that the triceps are more universally fast-twitch dominant, while there is more variation in fiber-type composition in the biceps. This example demonstrates why training programs should take each individual’s personal characteristics into consideration. This is true in terms of both exercise selection and especially the volume and intensity of the workload, since individuals and specific muscles that are either fast-twitch or slow-twitch dominant will respond differently to a given level of volume and intensity. Understanding what you are dealing with will make your training programs significantly more effective."

Put simply, if someone has more fast twitch fibers in a given muscle, then he may need to train a bit differently than an individual with a higher percentage of slow twitch fibers in that muscle. Muscles with a greater percentage of fast twitch fibers benefit from fewer repetitions per set, whereas muscles that are predominantly slow twitch will grow easier with the use of high volume. This also means that there's a great deal of variance in the ideal amount of repetition volume depending on what body part you're training.

While 8-12 repetitions will help build mass, it's certainly not the only method. In fact, it's ideal to change up your split if you've hit a plateau.

If you're gonna bench press to failure, just please, don't follow his example.

One method I like to use on certain movements is to go to failure. There is no prescribed number of repetitions, necessarily, but you want to keep repeating the exercise until your muscles give out and can no longer move the weight. This is a great way to induce strength gains. Nóbrega and Libardi note that "when it comes to trained individuals, evidence shows greater increases in muscle strength after [high intensity resistance training] performed to muscle failure compared to no failure." Some people avoid missing lifts, but the evidence shows that these repetitions recruit more muscle activation, and, thus, lead to greater adaptation. To apply this, you can put something like 85% of your best back squat on the bar and do one AMRAP set (as many reps as possible) to failure. Make sure you have a spotter nearby or you know how to properly miss a squat. It should also be noted that you do not need to do this frequently (perhaps only once or twice per mesocycle), as this type of training is quite stressful for the central nervous system.

You can also utilize this concept for muscular hypertrophy. "Recent studies have pointed muscular failure to be an important factor in order to maximize adaptations when RT is done at low intensities (LI-RT), " continued Nóbrega and Libardi. Try to use really light weights on your next set of biceps curls and go until you can no lift the dumbbells.

Additionally, while many "fitness gurus" have deemed high repetition sets as inefficient for muscle growth, research has shown that extremely high repetition training is, indeed effective for muscle growth. The conventional understanding is that sets of 20 repetitions or more are to be used for endurance of the muscle. Schoenfeld et. al. showed us, in his 2015 study, that 25-35 rep sets can work just as well as the traditional 8-12 rep sets we all know and love.

Schoenfeld drafted 24 experienced male trainees for his research. "Training was performed 3 times per week on nonconsecutive days, for a total of 8 weeks. Both [high load] and [low load] conditions produced significant increases in thickness of the elbow flexors (biceps), elbow extensors (triceps), and quadriceps femoris (9.3 vs. 9.5%, respectively), with no significant differences noted between groups." While this study defies the industry standard, it demonstrates that you can utilize many different intensities and volumes to elicit the same training effect.

Finally, I want to talk about sets. Most programs seem to cling to the magical 3-4 range. Every once in a while, you can try 5 or more sets. Why stop there? Sometimes I'll even do 10 sets of 10 (100 total reps) of a given movement. This is a great way to increase total workout volume and stimulate hypertrophy. You don't necessarily need to do 10 sets of every single accessory exercise, because you'd spend a full day in the gym, but it's a great way to finish off an intense session.

Works Cited:

1. Nóbrega, Sanmy R., and Cleiton A. Libardi. "Is Resistance Training to Muscular Failure Necessary?" Frontiers in Physiology Front. Physiol. 7 (2016): n. pag. Web.
2. Poliquin, Charles. "The Best Training Methods for Big, Strong Arms." Strength Sensei. N.p., 19 Feb. 2015. Web. 
3. Schoenfeld, Brad J., Mark D. Peterson, Dan Ogborn, Bret Contreras, and Gul T. Sonmez. "Effects of Low- vs. High-Load Resistance Training on Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy in Well-Trained Men." Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 29.10 (2015): 2954-963. Web.

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Revamping the Dumbbell Row

Rowing movements, like the dumbbell row or the kettlebell row, are a staple in any weight training or bodybuilding program. In fact, I would venture to say that a well-developed back is a fantastic indicator of overall strength and athleticism.

When you implement these movements into your routine, you want to make sure you're getting the most bang for your buck. If you execute a dumbbell row correctly, it is an excellent exercise for improving grip strength, shoulder stability, posture, and it can also advance your other big lifts like the bench press and the deadlift!

Two of the biggest blunders I notice most on this movement are the following:

Check out the position of her supporting arm. Don't do that.

1. Scapular retraction of the supporting arm. I mentioned this same concept on my post about perfecting the plank. Scapular retraction (when you pull the shoulder blades back), is a significantly less secure position than either scapular protraction (pushing the shoulders forward), or maintaining a neutral position somewhere in the middle. If you can see your entire shoulder blade, you're pulling from an unstable foundation.
2. Kipping as you pull. Kipping is great for those who want to lift the most weight (for their own ego boosters), or individuals who are mostly focused on achieving more reps per set, but if you want to utilize the powerful latissimus dorsi muscles to their capacity, you're better off without it. If your main goal is strength, use a lighter weight, or do as many repetitions as you can perform with strict technique.

While the dumbbell row might seem like a pretty simple exercise, there are a lot of little nuances involved to achieve maximal contraction of the prime movers. Make these two easy fixes, and your friends and family will look at you and say "baby got back!"

Works Cited:

1. Cressey, Eric. "Strength Training Technique: Scapular Movement During the Push-up." Eric Cressey. N.p., 9 Jan. 2013. Web. 02 Oct. 2015.
2. Paine, Russ, and Michael L. Voight. "THE ROLE OF THE SCAPULA." International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy. Sports Physical Therapy Section, Oct. 2013. Web. 02 Oct. 2015.
3. Somerset, Dean. "Deconstructing the Dumbbell Row." Deconstructing the Dumbbell Row. N.p., 9 Sept. 2011. Web. 02 Oct. 2015.

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Training Simple for Maximum Results

There is a seemingly infinite list of exercises to work any given muscle group. With websites like YouTube, it's pretty easy to find new exercises on the internet and feel inclined to add them into your routine. The question, however, is are these circus tricks necessary to take your performance to the next level? When it comes to adding in movements to your routine, I believe less really is more.

Just when I think I've seen it all, I find some crazy new movement on Instagram or some other form of social media. While these exercises range from impressive to asinine, many of them are unnecessary when developing a program for yourself or others.

There's a lovely acronym in the fitness industry that is applicable here:

SAID: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands

This principle explains simply that our bodies will adapt to the stressors to which are exposed. Therefore, if I want to become a better sprinter, well, adding some more sprinting drills into my regimen is a great starting point.

This may come as a surprise, but these will not make you a better squatter.

Personally, I train to compete in the sport of Olympic weightlifting. In order to get better in my sport, the bulk of my training consists of variations of snatches, cleans, jerks, presses and squats. Every once in a while, I'll add in accessory movements based on any imbalances or weaknesses. I rarely do conditioning, because it isn't really necessary for me to become a better weightlifter.

While you may not be looking to compete in a sport, it's important for you to set out your intentions from the get-go. You want to set realistic, quantifiable goals for yourself, and then select your exercises based on those goals. For example, if you want to bench 400 lbs, set your weekly workout routine around the bench press. Bench more regularly, and maybe include other, similar movements in your routine that will hit the same muscle groups (e.g. dips and strict press).

The more exercises you add into your weekly routine, the more overwhelmed you'll feel, and the less attention you'll pay to each movement! If you do 10+ exercises per day for the same muscle group, you're missing out on your ability to focus on any one of them.

Exercise variety does not determine your results. Doing 20 exercises for a muscle group will not necessarily make your muscles grow any quicker than doing 3 exercises for a muscle group. What does determine hypertrophy (muscular growth) is intensity (or weight used) and volume (number of reps performed). Basically, you only need to do a lot of reps of a few exercises to see results!

To apply this to sports, you must first analyze the demands of your specific sport. If you are a tennis player, which primarily takes place in the frontal plane, you want to make sure that a big part of your program involves lateral movements. Lateral lunges, lateral jumps and shuffling drills are all important exercises for tennis. Sprints on the rowing machine will certainly get your heart rate up, but they won't necessarily improve your forehand. Your exercise choices should mimic the demands of the game.

I'm certainly not telling you that you shouldn't try new exercises, as you may find a fun, creative new movement that helps you improve your weak areas. Instead, I believe you should find a handful of exercises that are directly beneficial to you and that will help you achieve your goals in the gym; everything else is frivolous.

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The Biggest Mistake You're Making in the Gym

When you walk into any fitness center, where do you see the most people? Most likely they're all crowded around the treadmills, stationary bikes and ellipticals. The common misconception is that you can achieve the body that you want and get in great shape by spending half an hour to an hour doing "cardio."

Day after day, thousands of people slave away on the cardio machines, many of whom are watching Gossip Girls or reading a book.

Look, as long as you're getting your butt off of the couch, I'm happy for you. Really. My goal, however, is to help you maximize your time in the gym. If you are one of these people who fits the description above, I'm willing to bet you haven't really seen the results you've wanted.

I'm not really a fan of steady-state cardio sessions. If you like to go for a long run every once in a while, that's great, but it shouldn't be the only thing you're doing in the gym.

Don't be like these guys...

If you want a more shredded and resilient physique, though, then you need to do the following: interval training and weight training. That's it. That's the secret sauce. Someone who is "fit" should be ready to take on any task at hand. He should be fast, strong, and powerful. Fitness is reading Game of Thrones on the elliptical for forty five minutes.

Interval training is one of the most effective ways to build lean body mass and improve your overall athleticism. There are countless different types of intervals, but here are some suggestions (you can do these with any activity, whether it be rowing, burpees, running, etc.):

1. 10 rounds of 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off (work up to decreasing the rest time as you improve)
2. 4 rounds of 1 minute of work, 2 minutes of rest
3. 8 rounds of 20 seconds of work, followed by 10 seconds of rest (called a "Tabata" interval)

These are a few of my favorites.

Strength training is important and necessary for...everyone. Yep. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Everyone should get stronger. Besides, being strong is awesome.

Let's say you're moving into a new apartment, and you need to move heavy boxes up the stairs. Strength training will prepare you for damn near everything. I can't really think of one situation in which being stronger isn't helpful.

You're not only strengthening your muscles with weight training, though--you're also strengthening your tendons, your bones and your ligaments, making you more resilient. If you want to avoid broken bones and osteoporosis (which I imagine you would), then you need to lift weights.

I'm certainly not telling you to quit your steady state cardio. I know that some people love a leisurely run. I think a great program is one that makes you well-rounded. If you want to become fitter and more resilient, then strength training and sprints should be a part of your regular routine. Step off of the elliptical and pick up some dumbbells.

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