The Importance Of Adding Variety To Your Bodybuilding Workout Routines

By Author: Krunoslav Oresic.
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Changing things up is a key training concept when it comes to maximizing your muscles' potential to grow bigger and stronger over the long term.

Changing things up is a key training concept when it comes to maximizing your muscles' potential to grow bigger and stronger over the long term. Promoting variety in your weightlifting program is one of the best way to ensure you won't waste yout time and get stuck at lifting plateaus in which you see very little results for long periods.

Your body will adapt to anything it’s asked to do on a repeated basis. Likewise, any new stimulus you throw at it will elicit a change. So you need to constantly change your workouts. As a general rule, do not do the same workout for more than eight consecutive weeks. To that end, here are the major variables that you can change in your routine on a regular basis:

(1) Exercises. Don’t do the exact same exercises day in and day out. If on the last day that you trained chest you did barbell bench presses, next time substitute dumbbell presses or machine presses. For the back, alternate between lat pull-downs and pull-ups, ...
... or do bent-over barbell rows instead of cable rows. The possibilities are endless; you can substitute numerous exercises.

(2) Exercise order. Another way to add variety is to change the order in which you do the exercises. If, in your previous chest workout, you did flat bench presses first and incline presses second, do incline presses first the next time around. If you always do cable press-downs for triceps before all other triceps moves, try doing it last occasionally. This is a particularly good way to add variety when your exercise choices are limited, such as for those who train at home.

(3) Sets, reps, and resistance. Don’t always stick to three sets of 10 reps or four sets of 8 reps on every exercise. Mix in high volume (five or six sets for an exercise) with low volume (two or three sets) and high reps (15 to 20) with low reps (5 or 6).

(4) Rest periods. How long you rest between sets should change on a regular basis and depends on your goal. But in terms of variety, don’t always rest 1 minute between sets, for example. Experiment with shorter rest periods (30 to 45 seconds) and longer ones (2 to 3 minutes) to see how your muscles respond and recover.

These are just a handful of ways to add variety to your training to keep your muscles from adapting and your results from becoming stagnant. Another way to make sure your training is constantly changing is to do a periodized program that consists of different phases, or cycles, over the course of a few months or even a year or more. The phases typically alter volume, rep ranges, rest between sets, and exercise selection to help you achieve various goals throughout the course of the program, even if you have one overriding objective in mind (such as strength, size, or definition).
Resource: http://www.muska-posla.com/znacajvarijacijaubody.htm