How Often Should You Change Muscle Building Exercises?

In the world of muscle building certain questions tend to crop up much more frequently than others; usually because they are at the very foundation of your training, hence, everybody tends to ask them at least once in their ‘career’. One such question is how frequently should you change muscle building exercises in order to maintain progress? Much has been written about this in the past, and many answers have been given. Some will advise you to change the program every 4-6 weeks, some every 2-3 weeks, and some go even further and advocate changes every single week. As you will discover in this article, it’s actually much more complicated than any concrete answer, and actually depends a great deal upon how you train.

It’s all in the nervous system…

What most people who give a stock answer to this question fail to take into account is the central nervous system, which is the key to everything. Your nervous system is responsible for muscle movement and strength adaptations, and is what determines whether you progress or stall.

Your body in all of its processes is constantly trying to achieve a state of homeostasis, including in muscle and strength levels. This means a state of no (or minimal) change. That’s right – your body is fighting to prevent you from gaining muscle and strength (so you’ve got to work around this).

And the central nervous system fights change in the following ways…

Not only does your body fight change evermore over time as you close in on your genetic potential (hence slower and slower gains) but it also fights change between training sessions, too, causing progress to stall until you change exercises or protocols.

Here’s where most people who advocate a set period before changing exercises come unstuck…

The more extreme the demands placed upon the nervous system relative to its current maximum capabilities, the more promptly the central nervous system will seek to prevent further change. In practical terms this means the heavier the weights used, the greater the demand on the central nervous system, and the sooner it fights to prevent further change by becoming less responsive!

Therefore, someone working with lighter weights and more repetitions per set will be able to do so – and make strength progress within this protocol – longer than someone working with much heavier weights with fewer repetitions.

Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell recommends changing exercises of 90% and above of a single max effort every 3 weeks tops, and preferably every week. So if you do a standard max effort bench press one week, the next week you may choose a max effort incline press or a military press or a floor press. This way, the central nervous system doesn’t get to shut down its response to the movement pre-emptively because the movement you give it is different enough to get a positive reaction each time.

But what if an exercise is still working well when the time comes to change?

Then don’t change it just yet! Generally, you will find that the guidelines I’ve laid out will hold true, but there will be times when you feel you can squeeze out an extra few weeks from an exercise and continue to make progress. If that’s the case, then go for it, of course.

If you take this approach, there are 3 main signals to look out for that an exercise is losing its effectiveness and change may soon be required:

• You start stalling and can’t increase the weight or reps without compromising form.
• You start to feel uncoordinated and weak and may even go backwards somewhat.
• You lose the sore feeling you get in the muscles a day or so after training which you almost always get when you first change over (you especially feel it if you train to failure or close).

Keep in mind there may be times when you just perform poorly and it has nothing to do with an exercise losing its effectiveness. Everyone will experience disappointing training sessions every now and then (though you’ll be surprised by how many won’t admit to it), so it’ll be up to you to decide whether to chalk a disappointing session down to ‘one of those days’ or the genuine need for change. I’ve experienced poor sessions before and opted to try again with the same exercise the following week and made progress once more and even gone on to squeeze out more progress for several weeks afterwards with the same exercise and felt very glad I persevered. Of course other times I’ve bombed again and knew for sure it was time to switch; swings and roundabouts!

One final thing that must be mentioned is changing exercises isn’t the only thing you can do to prevent your routine from becoming stale. Read my article on The Many Different Ways To Change Your Muscle Building Routine to discover over a half dozen more ways (other than total exercise changes) which you can use to freshen up your routine and continue to make progress.