If you’re joining a gym, training group, or working out at home, the idea is usually to progress and get better. Some people will progress faster than others and those who don’t progress as quickly want to know how they can speed up the process. One of the myths you might hear is that you always need to keep your body or muscles guessing by doing different exercises each week and workout so that you don’t plateau or get bored. Unfortunately, that’s not how the body works and whether you’re a beginner or an advanced lifter, consistency is the best way to get results.

There are many ways you can write or follow programs to help you get your results but there’s just so much of it to sift through. Here are four simple tips on how you can keep progressing in your fitness journey without chopping and changing workouts and exercises each time.

Progressive overload

The term progressive overload means that you keep increasing the volume or intensity each week or workout so that you can make small improvements each time. This is the better way of keeping your muscles “guessing” or in this case, stimulated so that you keep improving. The slight increase in weight, reps, or sets with the addition of rest time manipulation can stimulate your muscles to keep progressing.

Well-written programs with progressive overload are easy to track because you’ve got specific variables that are changing, so you know when you’re getting stronger, faster, or fitter. You want to keep a consistent stimulus between periods of recovery while tracking the improvements.

For example: If you keep changing your exercises for leg day, you can’t keep progressively overloading your muscles because you keep starting from scratch by doing a different exercise. Without a plan on how to progress those important volume and intensity variables, you’ll find it difficult to improve.

Training cycles

Now that we know you need a good program, how do you make sure that you’re constantly progressing without burning out? In simple terms, every good program is defined by training cycles. These are divided into macro-, meso- and microcycles. These are the periods of training defined by your goals, ensuring that you’ve got periods of progressive overload and periods of deloading, or recovery. Macrocycles define the longer periods to reach a goal, like losing a certain amount of weight in three months. Mesocycles are shorter periods of progressive overload and recovery, taking about four to eight weeks. Microcycles are your weekly routines defined by individual workouts.

Depending on your goals or training ability, these cycles, especially mesocycles will look very different. For those who are brand new to training and exercise, these training cycles can take a lot longer because their bodies adapt but also recover much faster, especially for the younger population. Intermediate and advanced athletes might have a four-week mesocycle with three weeks of overload and a week of deload because they tend to push their bodies much harder and need more recovery.

A good program will include well-defined mesocycle blocks within a larger macrocycle (e.g. 12-week transformation program) which ensures that you’re always progressing. You should still be doing the same exercises but with more reps, sets, or weight, or a combination of the three followed by a period of less load to ensure that you’re progressing and recovering effectively.

Keep the exercises the same during a mesocycle and track their progress instead of chopping and changing every week.

Consider stimulus vs fatigue

Stimulus to fatigue is a term popularized by Dr. Mike Israetel, a bodybuilder with a Ph.D. in Sport Physiology. Exercise is used to create a stimulus that will drive adaptation and performance but it will cause a certain amount of fatigue. Your goal is to get the most stimulus out of exercise without causing so much fatigue that you can’t recover before training again.

The relationship between these two variables is very important for progressing in your fitness journey. The better the stimulus, the more you will progress. However, if the stimulus causes so much fatigue that you can’t recover before your next training session, your progress will be negatively impacted. You also don’t want to have so little stimulus that you’re not driving any fatigue or adaptation. Fatigue is an important part of the process. You can look at this relationship from the perspective of the whole workout or even individual exercises.

Depending on your goals and training split, you want to recover from your overall workout by the time you reach that same workout or muscle group again. If you had an intense leg workout consisting of squats and accessories that fatigue the hamstrings, glutes and quads, you won’t be doing deadlifts for a couple of days. Both the squat and deadlift train large muscle groups but also fatigue the central nervous system in a big way.

You don’t just want to recover from your workouts, but you want exercises that have a great stimulus that causes a good amount of fatigue but not so much that you can’t continue the workout or recover before the next one. If you want to grow your legs, it might be tricky to continue the workout after many heavy squats, but if you had leg press or hack squats as your main multi-joint compound exercise, you have enough energy left to do more high-quality accessory exercises in the rest of the workout.

If you’re writing your program or talking to your coach, learning which exercises cause a good amount of stimulus with a good amount but not too much fatigue, you can find the exercises and workout split that gets you the best results.

This concept is at time complicated yet also simple, and can be expanded on in a much larger article, but not today.

Limit confusion

We only have so much time in the day to work out. If you don’t have a program that tells you exactly what to do, you can get confused and waste time. If you’re starting a good program, you can start lighter and get the hang of specific exercises. By the time you get to the last week of the mesocycle, you can push harder in the exercise to drive more stimulus into the muscle and recover effectively. If you’ve got a new exercise for the same workouts each time, you’ll be wasting time looking for new equipment you’re not used to using, learning the ropes, and not going heavy or intensely enough to drive that important stimulus.

All of this confusion will also cause frustration, making it less effective and you probably won’t stick to it after not seeing any results.

A well-written program with similar exercises in a mesocycle will provide you with a better stimulus-to-fatigue ratio while driving progressive overload. If you stay consistent with these important variables, you’ll have a better chance of getting the progress you’ve been working for.