Want to know one of the most common mistakes I see people make in the gym?
Changing exercises too often.
If you don’t stick with an exercise long enough, then you aren’t able to actually create meaningful change.
I’ll see someone doing a squat, and on their first week, they’ll be holding a 20-pound dumbbell.
The next week, they’ll be doing the squat again, and they’ll be holding a 25-pound dumbbell.
The third week, it’s a 30-pound dumbbell.
Then the fourth week, they’re doing an entirely new exercise.
And that’s just a great way to never actually make progress.
Let’s look at the squat they were doing
Over the course of three weeks, they increased the weight they were moving by 50%.
Do we think they got 50% stronger in less than a month?
I mean… that’s a complicated question because “strength” is multifaceted.
But I can absolutely guarantee they didn’t create a 50% improvement in strength from a muscular standpoint.
So if the strength improvement wasn’t entirely muscular, that means it was more a combination of neurology and confidence.
They learned to do the movement a little better (neurology) and as a result, they gained confidence.
Both of these things are really important and they’re a part of getting stronger, but we still ultimately want to create a muscular response.
Which they probably didn’t do – or at least not very much.
If they’d stuck with the movement for another 3-4 weeks, then I’d guess they would have found a plateau where they actually would have been able to push hard enough to create changes to the muscle.
But instead they just moved on to another exercise with which they’ll probably repeat the whole cycle again.
Then they’ll wonder why they never really make a lot of progress.
To be clear, I’m not saying they were half-assing it for any of their sessions.
The process of building skill and confidence in a movement is both necessary and time-consuming.
We all have to go through it.
Yet if you’re changing your exercises every 2-4 weeks, you’re likely going to spend most of your time in that “learning” phase and never actually get to a place where you’re able to create real muscular change.
Also, the movements that you hate the most…
The ones you find the most frustrating…
They’re probably the movements you should spend the most time doing.
Now I’m not talking about movements you hate because it’s painful.
If something’s painful, we likely want to figure out why, but that doesn’t mean we just need to keep slamming our head into a wall and doing a movement that hurts.
In fact, it’s almost always a sign that we need to make some changes.
If something hurts, then something needs to change.
That said, pain is not the only reason we end up hating movements.
I hate wide grip lat pulldowns.
Why?
Because I’m bad at them.
They require a lot of focus and I’m annoyed by the relatively small amount of weight I have to move to do them properly.
They don’t hurt.
They just force my scapula to work in ways that aren’t particularly natural to me.
Now… this is an example of a movement I should 100% be doing on a regular basis – at least if I want good shoulder function later in life.
I should include wide grip lat pulldowns in at least 75% of my yearly training program.
Because I’m bad at it and because I find it important, I need to spend even more time practicing it and working to improve.
If you spend too much time in the “learning” phase, then we can never really get to the “progressing” phase.
Commit to a movement for 6-8 weeks and see what happens.
And if you have any questions, just message me.
I’m happy to help if I can.
PS – This is also true for running workouts. It’ll take someone a week or two to even learn how a VO2 Max workout should feel. If you only do a 3-week block once per year, then you’re never actually going to make progress. So you know… commit to the process.