Practical Uses of Variety in Training

A lot of my readers have been asking me about programming. This week, I was luck enough to have my friend Steve write a guest post for me. Steve Bare is a professional strength coach (CSCS, USAW) and competitive weightlifter. His experience includes work in the private industry and an internship at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. He now coaches at a high school, where he is thankful to work with a huge number of adolescent athletes, and give them all a great start in strength training. You can occasionally catch him writing on his coaching blog, BareStrength.



“Ya gotta switch it up, bro!” 

Variety in training is a very popular, yet polarizing, concept. From P90X marketing as “muscle confusion” to CrossFit purporting to be “constantly varied,” many brands are built by attempting to break the monotony of training. In this article, I’d like to discuss the practical application of variety in training, as well as the extents to which variation can be either be useful or counterproductive.

What qualifies as variety?

Loosely, any meaningful difference in training. This can come from changes in exercise modality (e.g., lifting versus swimming), exercise selection (e.g., lunges versus squats), implement (dumbbells versus barbells), rep range, rep tempo, training frequency, and more additional possibilities than I care to list at this time.

Why should you use variety in training? 

For one, introducing variety can diminish the risk of overuse injury. Athletes who engage in repetitive motions in practice and training tend to wind up with sport-specific injuries: baseball pitchers’ shoulders, rowers’ backs, tennis players’ elbows, runners’ shin splints, et. cetera. The primary recommendation to alleviate such symptoms is to decrease usage and strengthen relevant muscles and movement patterns, typically in an off-season period.

This is also relevant to recreational gym-goers. Your body doesn’t care whether you consider yourself a competitive powerlifter or not; if you’re maxing your bench press every chance you get, you’re likely to rack up some small injuries eventually. These injuries aren’t likely to go away without taking some time off from the movement.

Additionally, if you’ve been doing the same exact weekly schedule for months on end (and aren’t a beginner), chances are you’ve found yourself stagnating eventually. This can be referred to as “adaptive resistance,” when the same repeated exercises no longer disrupt homeostasis enough to drive adaptation. Changing a couple of key variables such as those mentioned above can be a powerful factor to continue to drive adaptation and get stronger.

So how much variation is enough? How much is too much? 

To answer these questions, you have to consider your goals.

If your only goal is to lose weight, for example, then your objectives in training are primarily caloric expenditure. Introducing a great amount of variety is fine, because just about any choice in exercise is sure to expend energy, provided it is performed with sufficient effort and for a sufficient duration. You could jog one day, lift another day, swim next week, fight crime another time, and continue to see results on the scale, provided you net a negative calorie balance. Of course, from a psychosocial perspective, most people enjoy seeing their performance improve, so it’s not a bad idea to stick with something for a while and enjoy the benefits of consistency: your running speeds up, your distances lengthen, your weights and reps increase.

However, if you have athletic performance goals in mind, you’ll need to ensure your training directs adaptation towards these goals. Whether your goal is to beat your old 5k time, or to win gold at the Olympics, your success hinges on specific performance improvements. It isn’t enough just to make sure you “get up and move”. You can run as far as you want, but it won’t ever be enough make you a great weightlifter; you still need sufficient specificity. If you change your exercise regimen each time you work out, you risk never providing sufficient overload. As such, we find some constraints on the limits of variation.

Beginning athletes can usually progress with just about anything, which leads to some polarizing conclusions.

On the one hand, there are proponents of systems capitalizing on very low variety for beginners. The benefit here is that the athlete quickly adapts to the cognitive demands of training, learning the lifts without getting confused by a great amount of variety, and is then able to reap the many benefits of strength training before eventually reaching a point of adaptive resistance.

On the other hand, recognizing that beginners will progress with just about any strength training program, you can also use this time to introduce athletes to a wider range of exercises. You could employ a teaching progression by having the athletes spend a couple weeks perfecting a goblet squat before moving on to a front squat, then a back squat, then a low-bar squat. You could instruct the athlete through different exercises every day of the week. However, you should still use the same exercise from one week to the next for a few weeks, so that the athlete has a chance to repeatedly practice one movement, and also see some progress in weight or total reps performed (overload). See below for a few example blocks:

The benefits here are many. The athlete is excited to train, with a greater variety of exercises. You can emphasize proper movement in a low-risk exercise, and then accumulate a lot of high-quality reps before moving on to a slightly more advanced variation with a greater load. Additionally, with each exercise the athlete knows, it becomes easier to teach additional movements in the future; for example, once an athlete knows how to front squat, lunge, press, and deadlift, it is a lot easier to teach them to clean & jerk.

*One thing to note: unlike many strength coaches, I often teach front squats before back squats. I do this because it gives me the opportunity to teach my athletes to stay upright in the squat, and I find that even beginning athletes are better at squatting deep with a front rack than they are with bars on their backs. I teach close-grip bench before a competition-width bench for similar reasons. On occasion, I have also taught sumo deadlifts before conventional because many non-contact athletes have disproportionately strong legs to a weak back, and they tend to prefer sumo initially for this reason; of course, this is also a great reason to eventually include conventional deadlifts, to ensure their backs grow accordingly!

This is not the kind of variety you need...

For intermediate and advanced athletes, most decent strength & conditioning programs will follow a system of phases emphasizing the adaptation of different physical qualities, such as aerobic conditioning, hypertrophy, strength, power, and peaking for competition (usually in that order). As a whole, this system would be referred to as a macrocycle; each 3-6 week chunk is referred to as a mesocycle; and each week can be referred to as a microcycle. By its very nature, such a system introduces variety in rep ranges, as well as often including variety in modalities, exercise selection, and tempos. Within a macrocycle, each mesocycle should gradually become more specific than the previous mesocycle, culminating in a major meet or a competitive season.

The earliest mesocycles will be the least specific to the goal, often outside the modality of the sport, to increase general fitness and work capacity. A great example of this is Olympic weightlifting champion Ilya Ilyin investing his time and energy swimming in his early mesocycles. This enables him to build up his general work capacity while letting his body heal from the repetitive trauma of his sport-specific movements.

Earlier mesocycles will include a greater number of unique exercises per session, per week, and between mesocycles. One hypertrophy block might have an athlete front squat and Romanian deadlift in one session, and then leg press and sumo deadlift in another session for 3-6 weeks. In the next mesocycle, the athlete might back squat and goodmorning in one session, and then conventional deadlift and step-up in another session for another 3-6 weeks. The goal here is to rack up great volumes without increasing the risk of overuse injury from any one particular movement.

In contrast, later mesocycles will increase specificity, decreasing variety. The final strength block for a weightlifter will include high intensity work on snatches, cleans, jerks, along with front squats and/or back squats, and possibly some additional work to target the athlete’s unique weaknesses, all performed several times per week for several weeks on end. Non-barbell athletes will typically maximize increases in strength, power, and/or speed (depending on sport and position), as well as increasing sport practice in preparation for the competitive season.

Introducing training variety can be a great way to avoid overuse injuries, drive greater physical adaptations, and generally enjoy your training more. However, it can also be tempting to overuse variety and under-apply the principles of specificity and overload. Be sure to use sufficient variety in your training that you avoid stagnation and overuse injuries, but not so much that you don’t make definite progress towards your goals!