The biggest training lie in the gym: how often should you change your program?
What you need to know
• Most of the progress in the first four weeks of a new program comes from neural adaptation, not directly from muscle mass gains.
• If you’ve started a new program and feel that the initial rapid progress is beginning to stall, that is actually the moment you start building muscle directly – provided, of course, that you train hard.
• If your goal is to build muscle, keep the basic exercises in your programs year-round. Change the number of sets, the rep count and the training methodology, but always keep the basic exercises in, to a greater or lesser extent.
In practically every gym where I’ve worked or that I’ve visited while traveling to various seminars, the so-called “four-week adaptation” rule is such a popular and deeply entrenched belief that it’s simply taken for granted. Gym trainers everywhere keep repeating that you should change your training program every four weeks, because otherwise your body adapts and you stop progressing.
Pardon my bluntness, but this is not true and it is complete nonsense.
Trainers who make this claim have probably forgotten how the body responds to a training stimulus and starts to adapt. Or they are simply incompetent, or the point of the talk is just to sell more of their services. Either way, this advice doesn’t hold up!
The illusion of progress
The supposed need to renew your program, split or routine every four weeks is one of the biggest lies in the training world.
How things actually are:
In the first four weeks of every new program, our performance is rather modest across the board, because the new exercises in the program feel awkward or because there was simply a rest break before the new start. The unfamiliar feeling when performing exercises is normal, since the body is once again doing “something” it isn’t used to doing.
An example of how “unfamiliarity” shows up as poor performance: I decided to do my last workout together with a friend, and I decided to follow their entire program. But their basic pressing exercise was the incline barbell press. I hadn’t done this version of the press for something like 6 years, and with 100 kg even six sets were very hard to get through, even though my record in the regular press is 185 kg.
So in the first week of a new program, the numbers you put up in the workout naturally aren’t all that impressive. In the second week, the new movements start to feel more familiar and a bit of a routine begins to form. As a result, the weights start to go up. The nervous system reaches efficiency at around the third week, the muscle fibers are learning to work together under effort, and more and more fast-twitch muscle fibers have started to wake up from “sleep” and contribute increasingly to the effort under heavy training loads. So in the third week of a new program the weights start to rise noticeably, and the performance feels somehow good. But all of this progress and weight increase has not even in the slightest come from muscle growth.
In the fourth week, the initial rapid progress that came from improving neural mechanisms starts to stall again. For most trainees, progress usually stands still in the fourth week of a new program. And so the trainer steps in and changes the program. New exercises, new methods. What happens? In the first week of the next new program the numbers are low again, because the movements, the exercises and the nature of the work are new and uncomfortable.
That is how the cycle keeps repeating. In the first couple of weeks progress is nonexistent, because the body is finding its routine/rhythm; in the third week progress is good, because neural adaptation has set in; the big initial effect begins to grind to a halt again around the fourth week, because the initial adaptation through neural mechanisms is running out. Again the trainer says that in the fifth week you could start a new program, because your body is probably starting to adapt to the “old thing”.
And the cycle keeps repeating until you start to realize that this way you simply won’t progress, or you simply run out of money to order new programs. The moral of the story is that as long as you have great potential to progress through neural mechanisms, you won’t progress through muscle mass gains.
When we train, perform sets or lift weights, our body is in a state of stress. The body’s reaction to such stress is adaptation, so that it is ready if “something like that” comes again. The body responds to stress in the form of training load through the adaptation mechanisms that are the fastest and most economical. Improving neural mechanisms is considerably faster, more effective and more economical than building new muscle tissue. The former isn’t as costly; the latter requires energy and is a more expensive “project” for the organism, and on top of that it isn’t as fast. Energetically, building muscle is very costly: building about 450 grams of muscle tissue takes approx. 10,000 kcal. Moreover, building muscle isn’t costly only in the moment, but places cost demands on our body/organism for the future as well (the muscle mass that has formed will potentially have to be maintained, after all). Put simply, the body generally tries to avoid any gain in muscle mass. If it has to choose between making neural mechanisms work better or growing new muscle in order to cope with a new situation, the body will in every case prefer the first option.
In fact, to start building new muscle, you first have to exhaust, in a sense, the potential of “neural adaptation”. Only then does the body begin to seriously “think” about constructing new muscle tissue.
Muscle growth starts when you hit a plateau
Important: if you’ve hit a plateau after starting a new program, that is exactly the point when the body starts adding more muscle mass, provided, of course, that you’re still trying to progress and training hard.
If you look at the training programs of big, strong guys, they actually don’t change exercises very often. They add a set or two of something “new” in one workout or another, and they try different variations of the basic lifts for a change, but by and large their training keeps revolving around the same movements.
Dorian Yates, Ronnie Coleman, Arnold – all of them grew on more or less the same basic movements. When they wanted a change, they got it through different set lengths or training methods, but the basic movements/exercises have stayed by and large the same year-round for all of them. Why? Because those gave the best results for what they were after.
What’s more, look at Jim Wendler, Mark Rippetoe or me: we all have certain basic lifts that we keep in year-round. These lifts form the core of our programs, and that’s been relatively stable all along. We change the number of sets, the set length, the intensity and the methodology we use to approach these basic exercises, but the exercises themselves stay the same. If we kept changing our programs all the time, muscle growth would be ruled out and impossible.
The same goes for bodybuilders, for example John Meadows: he naturally uses a bigger arsenal of exercises than Wendler or Rippetoe, but there are certain basic lifts that stay the same year-round.
There will certainly be people who say, “but the Westside guys use a lot of exercise variation”. But Louie Simmons himself admits and accepts that “the whole game is really about neural adaptation and progressing through it”, and only then do “we add the muscle-building work”. The point is that at Westside, exercises are deliberately changed very often in order to progress as much as possible through neural adaptation. But if your goal is to focus on stimulating the adaptations that come from the muscular component, you should do the exact opposite of Westside and not change exercises too often.
So we don’t need variety, variations and change?
You may now be left with the impression that, indeed, nothing else is needed: just do the same exercises year-round and progress will still be there. That’s not quite the case. For continuous progress, you do have to vary your training, because it’s true that if you do the same thing all the time, the body eventually adapts and progress stops.
The key to progress is variation, but it has to be done in a way where the exercises remain by and large the same, while we vary how we perform them – through different intensities and different rep-and-set schemes.
There are many options: you can vary the rep count, add chains and bands to the main lifts, play with rest periods, and so on. There are plenty of ways to do the same exercises differently, but generally the well-known basic exercises should make up the bulk of your programs throughout the year.
Happy training!
Original article: The Biggest Training Lie
Author: Janar Rückenberg
Come and train! ArtGym
