When, Why, How How Often Should You Change Your Workout Routine

As I explained last time (Changing Your Workout Routine Too Often), one of the worst things you can do is change your workout routine too often.

You do not need to “shock your muscles” or “keep your body guessing” or do silly muscle confusion workouts or anything equally dumb. It’s a myth. You also should not be jumping from one program to the next in search of some ultimate magical routine that is going to work unrealistically well/fast. It does not exist.

Truth is, just about every workout routine that is not completely terrible will work to some degree as long as you provide the time and consistency needed for it to work. If you keep changing things, that just can not happen.

Now, does that mean you should NEVER change your workout routine? Of course not.

You most certainly should change things, but only when it truly makes sense to. Making a change before that point is just counterproductive.

In order to understand what I mean, we are going to need to answer the following questions:

• When, why and how often should you change your workout routine?
  Meaning, what are the reasons for making changes? How do you know when it’s time to change something? How frequently should those changes be made?
• How should you change your workout routine?
  Meaning, once you finally figure out when/why/how often to make changes, what types of changes should you make?

So, let the answering begin…

The 4 Reasons You Should Ever Change Your Workout Routine

The way I see it, there’s really only 4 possible reasons for most people to make a change to their workout routine:

1. If what you’re doing stops working for an extended period of time. This is really the #1 (and most obvious) reason to change your workout routine in some way: when it is no longer doing what it’s supposed to do and producing the results it’s supposed to produce. (And of course, make sure you’re being sane here. If you have crazy unrealistic goals and expectations, no program will ever produce the results you want it to produce.)
2. If your goals change. For example, if your primary goal was always strength related, and now your primary goal has switched to building muscle or losing fat or anything else (or vice-versa), changes should be made to your program to reflect the changes in your goals.
3. If you get really bored. If you become so bored to death with what you’re doing that it’s beginning to hurt your motivation to train, then it’s time to change something to bring your interest/desire/motivation back. (Again, you need to be realistic here too. You can not act like you “get bored” with a workout after a week or two. In that case, you just need to suck it up and stop being a baby.)
4. If something out of your control requires a change. Meaning, let’s say some outside reason presents itself and forces you to change something. For example, if a change in your schedule warrants a change in your workout, or if you have some sort of injury that prevents you from doing something you are currently doing. Stuff like that.

In my opinion, these are the only reasons the majority of the population should ever even consider making a change to their workout routine.

What Kind Of Changes Should I Make?

Now, let’s say one of the above reasons does present itself. How exactly should you change your workout routine?

As usual, this answer depends on a million different factors. In most cases though, you’d probably be able to keep the overall setup and structure of your routine exactly the same and just make smaller changes to things within the workouts.

For example, if you are doing incline dumbbell presses, you could switch that to incline barbell presses or the incline Hammer Strength machine press.

If you’re doing standing barbell curls, you could switch that to seated dumbbell curls.

If you’re doing seated cable rows, you could switch that to t-bar rows, or bent over barbell rows, or some type of chest supported row.

If you’re doing split squats, you can switch to lunges.

If you are doing some exercise with an underhand grip, you can switch to an overhand grip. If you’re doing some kind of bilateral exercise (both arms or legs are used at the same time), you can switch to a unilateral exercise (each arm or leg is trained individually). And so on and so on.

Switch an incline press to any other incline press, a bicep curl to any other bicep curl, a row to any other row, a dumbbell exercise to the barbell version of the same exercise, etc. etc. etc. Quite simple.

More often than not, these are the types of changes that would be made most often. Just replacing an exercise (or a bunch of exercises) with another similar exercise of the same movement pattern and/or target muscle group(s). It’s not rocket science.

Beyond that, there are plenty of other changes that can be made without truly changing the entire program altogether.

For example, if your program uses a 4 day Upper/Lower split (with an A and B workout for each like The Muscle Building Workout Routine), you could usually change the order of the workouts. Do Upper Body B and Lower Body B first in the week, then Upper Body A and Lower Body A. Or, start with lower body instead of upper body.

You could also change sets and reps in an intelligent way that still keeps volume and balance the same. For example, if you’re doing 3 sets of 8 reps (24 reps total), you could switch it to 4 sets of 6 reps (still 24 reps total).

Again, quite simple. And there are dozens of other similar changes you can make just like the examples shown above.

You can decrease or increase rest time between sets in a way that makes sense, change the order of exercises within a workout in a way that makes sense, try out a different type of training method (like alternating sets), take an exercise you were previously doing for higher reps and start doing it for lower reps (or the other way around).

The list goes on and on and on.

How Often Should I Make A Change Like This?

Quite much only as often as one of those 4 reasons from before present itself. that is my recommendation.

I know people like to say things like “change your workout routine every X weeks,” but that is stupid. Maybe that routine was going to work perfectly well exactly as is for another 2 weeks or 4 weeks or 8 weeks or more.

So, rather than recommend how often you should make a change, I think it’s a much better idea to tell you when NOT to make a change.

And that is, do not make changes to your workout routine when you have absolutely no reason to.

When your overall progress stalls for a significant amount of time, or just one (or a few) specific exercises stall for a significant amount of time, or if you’re just sooo bored with your program that it’s hurting your motivation to train… that is the time to make a change.

And then obviously if some sort of outside reason requires you to make a change, or if you happen to change your goals and what you want to get out of you routine, then it would also make sense to make a change at that point too.

And in some cases, it may even be time to get rid of your entire program altogether and start something completely different.

But if there is one big point you should take from this article, it’s that if none of those 4 reasons I mentioned before actually exist… then you have no reason to change a thing.

In fact, as long as what you’re doing keeps working, feel free to keep on doing it forever.

When it stops, that is when a change should be made.