More exercises don’t always mean more progress

As you become more experienced, it’s easy to assume that your training needs tob e more complicated. Sounds reasonable enough, right? But does it?

‘To grow my quads, I have to do 3 sets of leg extensions, followed by lengthened leg extensions for another 3 sets.’

‘Bigger guns? Hammer curls, bicep curls and preacher curls, all to maximum pump!’

The thought of that you have to do more exercises, and with that most of the time, more volume is still out there. Adding more work can be useful. But adding more exercises isn’t automatically the best way to create stimulus, and sometimes it can become counterproductive. Let’s dive deeper in to it.

Dosing it right

If you’ve been doing strength training for a while, you most likely know that you’ll have to make it more challenging over time. There are plenty of ways to do so, but to keep the focus we’ll look at adding more exercises.

Whether your goal lies with more strength, aesthetics, a combination or something else, adding more exercises might interfere with your progress. Adding an exercise is only one way of increasing the training stress. It doesn’t automatically mean you’re providing a better stimulus.

There is a dose of training that is enough to stimulate progress and there is a point where adding more starts to interfere with performance and recovery. Where that point lies differs between people and depends on the exercises, training status, goals and other life variables.

To take the example of growing your arms, or guns, I’ve noticed that quite a few people think that doing 4 different types of curls will do it. But when I tell them compounds already provide some stimulus, after which a smaller amount of direct arm work may be enough, it gives them food for thought. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t necessarily need several curl variations in every session.

Secondly, your body needs to get better at certain movements, which takes time. Repeated exposure leads to a movement becoming more efficient. Constantly replacing an exercise means you keep changing the task you ask your body to improve at.

Variation isn’t bad. Variation without a reason can make progression harder to track.

Example

An athlete, training for around 2 years and having made good progress while doing it, felt like he’s in a phase that adding new exercises is the next step. Let’s take his lower body days as an example. Heavy back squats, RDL’s, lunges. One might say, that should be plenty. But this athlete felt it was needed to constantly add and vary with different, spicy exercises. Over time, progress stalled, training sessions became increasingly long and some aches started appearing. Leaving us with the question: what can be optimised to have some fun with novelty whilst still staying focused?

Looking at the whole picture, the issue wasn’t simply that the new exercises were ‘bad’. The problem was that novelty had replaced focus.

Taking a more serious look at his lower body day, every week there was a new variation of all exercises. Not to mention the number of different exercises in one session, leading to durations for 2 hours plus. The first step is to reduce the fluff and regain focus. By making, from the 2 lower body days in the week, 1 session more intense and ‘basic’ and having the second day more lower intensity, technique focused + allowing for more novelty. This gave the athlete more room for both focused progression and experimentation without letting the latter take over the programme.

Some of the new exercises simply had to go to regain that focus . Don’t get me wrong: if you’re not competitive or if you are and off – season, some play and experimenting with new exercises is nice to do. But still, some focus is needed for progress in the long run.

Combined with checking in what goals this athlete has, setting up the correct exercises was easier.

The goal wasn’t to remove novelty, it was to give it a place in the programme where it wouldn’t interfere with the main goal.

Common mistakes

To name a few:

• Every week, adding new variations because it looks cool

• Doing only more and more, thinking it’ll lead to more progress over time

• Being completely without any goals, even if it’s a small one

• Changing an exercise before you’ve given it enough time to work

What’s in it for you

Before adding another exercise, ask yourself the following:

What  am I trying to improve? What is currently limiting my progress? Can I recover from it? Have I given the current approach enough time?

Final thoughts

More exercises don’t always mean more progress. Yes, your training needs to continue providing an appropriate stimulus as you adapt. But that doesn’t mean necessarily adding more ecercises.  Progresscan come from increasing load, improving technique, changing intensity, increasing volume when appropriate.

Progressing over time isn’t just about doing more and more. Or varying constantly, thinking that you need to shock the muscles (never thought that I would dust this quote off). Instead, setting small goals over time, or a big one, will help with your focus. Then ask what do you really need in terms of exercises, volume/intensity in order to reach that goal.

Stuck for a while, even though you’re still training consistently but are lost in the woods because of all the options? You’re not alone.

You don’t need to constantly add more to make progress. Sometimes you need to remove what’s getting in the way. The goal isn’t to find the most complicated programme. It’s to find what you need, dose it right and give it enough time to work.

That’s exactly the kind of problem I enjoy helping people to solve. If you’d like to discuss your training and see whether we might be a good fit, let’s have a chat.