Why is my program the same week after week?

TLDR: You will get the best results from choosing a small number of exercises and getting stronger in those exercises week after week. Ideally you would only change up exercises as they stopped being effective for your goals, but having more variation is a perfectly viable way to train as long as you are keeping the movement patterns consistent. 

For the vast majority of my clients their goals don’t revolve around being good at a specific exercise. They would much rather use the time they are exercising to make the changes to our bodies that are going to have the biggest impact on their health. But to do that the most effectively, we have to get very good at specific exercises. 

When your program lacks consistency it deprives us of the ability to actually get good at those exercises. Let’s say you change your program every 4 weeks. Based on how long we understand skills take to acquire, you would probably get pretty good at those exercises in your program in week 4, which means you really spent 3 weeks training suboptimally and one really effective training week. Changing your program every 4 weeks means spending 3 of every 4 weeks training suboptimally. If you changed your program every 4 months instead of 4 weeks you would then have 3+ months of incredibly effective training having already acquired the skills to excel in those movements earlier on. This means lifting heavier, doing more reps and having more of an overall training effect.

That being said, once you have done an exercise for a relatively long period of time, it may be beneficial to swap it out. This time period can vary a ton, depending on a lot of different factors. If the exercise feels good on your body, you are able to add more reps and more weight over time and it’s not causing you any pain, you could probably benefit from keeping it in your program. When one of the previously mentioned factors changes, then it may be worth entertaining doing a different exercise or a different variation of the same exercise. 

But what if I’m bored of my program? Then let’s change it up more often! It’s my job as your coach to design you a program that you enjoy that you will consistently do. If having more variation makes you more likely to excel in that program, then that’s what I will do, despite it maybe being slightly less ‘optimal’ in a theoretical sense. While I would prefer more consistency, there are enough commonalities between different exercises that fall within the same movement pattern that as long as you understand how to hinge or how to squat, whether we do a front, back or goblet squat is not going to make or break your progress.