How Often Should You Change Your Workout Routine?

Nikkiey: If your goal is to build muscle, your workouts probably need to be a little bit more boring than you want them to be. You need to do the boring work in order to recomp and change your body composition. If your goal is to build muscle, if your goal is muscle growth, constantly changing what you're doing can actually make it harder to determine whether you are progressing at all. And so I want you to start thinking about strength training as a skill. A squat is a skill. A deadlift is a skill. A Romanian deadlift is a skill. A shoulder press is a skill. A lat pulldown is a skill.

You have to become good at these movements. And this is something that people underestimate when it comes to doing progressive overload. Let me remind you that soreness is not an indicator of progress. It isn't proof that you built more muscle.

What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkiey Stott. On these episodes, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident.

Guys, in today's episode, I want to talk about something that I think a lot of women need to hear, especially if you are someone who loves to work out. Because, ironically, the women who love working out the most can sometimes be the worst offenders of what I want to talk about with you guys today. And that is constantly wanting to change your workouts.

Do you guys know how many times I hear within our WarriorBabe coaching team that our babes want new workout plans every two weeks? New exercises, new programs, new challenges, new training splits, new rep schemes, new something, new ways to make yourself sore. Because somewhere along the way, I think we as women started to believe that if our workouts feel repetitive, then they're not working anymore. And so in today's episode, I want to argue the opposite of that.

Because if your goal is to build muscle, your workouts probably need to be a little bit more boring than you want them to be. If I can simply put it, you need to do the boring work in order to recomp and change your body composition. And I know that nobody wants to hear that. I've had to lean in with babes in my previous coaching days saying that. And I know that our coaches lean in saying that the boring work is where the work actually gets done.

And people still resist it. Babes still resist it. Women still resist it. You don't want to hear it. And I get it. Doing something new is fun. Walking into the gym and doing something completely different feels productive, right? I know a lot of women are so excited when new training programs open every six weeks, because it's this new challenge to the muscles. You feel like you're doing something. You feel productive. You're sweaty. You're sore. Your heart rate is up. You're like, oh yeah, that was a good workout.

But was it a good workout? Or was it just a different workout? Because those are not necessarily the same thing. And if your goal is to build muscle, if your goal is muscle growth, constantly changing what you're doing can actually make it harder to determine whether you are progressing at all. So in this episode, I want to explain why repetition in your workouts is one of the most underrated parts of building muscle.

Why I think so many women program hop. And how to know when it's actually time to change your workouts. Is it four weeks? Is it six weeks? Is it eight weeks? How do I know when it's actually time to change something up? And something that you'll be able to actually look forward to, right?

So think about it this way. Think about the way fitness is marketed. Never do the same workout twice. Shock your muscles. All the 30-day challenges and 90-day challenges out there. Keep your body guessing. Confuse your muscles. Okay, first of all, your muscles are not sitting there going, oh shoot, she's doing squats again. Or she's doing a deadlift again. Or she's doing a chest press or a shoulder press again. We've figured her out.

Your muscles don't need to be confused. So the terminology of keep your body guessing or confuse your muscles, no. What they need is to be challenged. And that's a huge difference. Your body adapts to the demands you consistently place on it. And that's literally what you want.

So when you lift weights, you're giving your body a reason to adapt. And then over time, you have to give it a slightly bigger reason to continue adapting. Does that make sense? You guys know progressive overload. More load. More reps. Better execution. More control. Different variations to tempo. Different variations to rest periods. That is a form of progression.

But if you're constantly changing the movement, whether it be every day or every two weeks, which is a common thing that I hear, how do you know if you're actually progressing or not? How do you know that you're actually able to increase weight on a certain exercise? Let's say on a Monday you do a barbell squat. The next week, you do a goblet squat. And then you're doing Bulgarian split squats. How do you know you're progressing in the squat? And then maybe you're on Instagram and you see this new variation to the squat.

So you start doing that. And now you're just doing a ton of different exercises. But are you actually getting any better at them? That's the real question I want to challenge you guys on. If you find yourself changing your workouts either every single day or every two weeks inside the gym, because of what you saw on Instagram, or because you just want to change up the variation to your workouts to feel more productive, are you actually getting better at any of these exercises? I would ask yourself that.

This is one of the biggest distinctions that I want you to understand: exercise is not the same thing as training. There's nothing wrong with going in and, quote unquote, exercising. Moving your body is incredible. Walking is considered exercising. Going for a run is considered exercising. Taking a class at your gym is considered exercising. Doing a random workout that you found on Instagram because it looks fun, that's awesome. That's also considered exercising.

But if you have a specific goal in mind, like building muscle, which is what a lot of you mean when you say, I want to be leaner, I want to be more defined, I want to be more toned, you are directly correlating that to the goal of building muscle. And if you have that specific goal, like recomping your body and building lean tissue, you're not just exercising anymore. You are training.

Training has, and hear me when I say this, training has intention behind it. Training means that there's a desired adaptation that you want to happen over time. And if there's a desired adaptation, then we need to be able to measure whether that adaptation is actually happening.

For example, if you guys are into sports, think about how an athlete trains. A basketball player. Imagine that person saying, I don't want to practice free throws anymore because I've already done those. I just need something new. You think LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and whoever your favorite player is from your local team is going to say that?

No. They still shoot the same free throw over and over and over again. Why? Because repetition creates skill. And so I want you to start thinking about strength training as a skill. A squat is a skill. A deadlift is a skill. A Romanian deadlift is a skill. A shoulder press is a skill. A lat pulldown is a skill. You have to become good at these movements.

And this is something that people underestimate when it comes to doing progressive overload. The better you get at performing a specific exercise, the better you're often able to load the intended muscle. Meaning, the better you become at an exercise, the more weight you can put on it, because you're becoming more stable. Your technique on that specific exercise is improving. You may even feel it in different places as you go down in a squat. Like, oh, I only ever really felt it in my quads, but now I'm actually getting into my hamstrings because of the depth. Because I've worked on my technique. Because I've worked on my skill.

You learn what the movement is supposed to feel like. You understand where your failure point actually is. And then you start pushing that movement harder. But if you're somebody who goes in and changes the workout every single week, or every day, or biweekly, you're just consistently living in the learning phase.

You're never giving your body enough time to become really freaking good at that specific movement. You're not giving your body the time to become really good at that skill. So I just want to make that differentiation known. Exercise is not the same thing as training. Everybody, quote unquote, exercises. But how many people actually go into the gym with intention?

If you have a progressive overload program, if you are inside of WarriorBabe working with one of our coaches, you have a program that has been developed over four weeks, six weeks, or eight weeks, depending on how your coach lays it out for you, that has progressive overload behind it and intention to it. Some of you will notice that when you start a new workout program, the first week is typically hard because you're calling on muscle fibers that maybe weren't incorporated in the previous training block. They're waking up. That's why you probably feel a little bit more sore.

And then by the end of that training block, not only do you know the routine when you go into the gym, right, I go from this equipment to this equipment to this equipment, but you recognize that the exercises are actually getting, and I say this word lightly, easier. They should still be hard with the load you're putting on them, but the exercise feels better. That's everything I just said happening. You're getting better at the movement. Your skill is developing. Adaptation is happening.

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To piggyback off what I just said, why do new workouts always feel effective? Because this is where I think people get fooled a little bit. You try a new workout and the next day you can barely sit down on the toilet. Your glutes are destroyed. Your hamstrings are sore. You're having trouble walking down or up the stairs. You have to walk up sideways and you're like, wow, that workout worked. That felt great.

But let me remind you that soreness is not an indicator of progress. It isn't proof that you built more muscle. A big reason you're sore is because the stimulus was new. Like I just said, the muscle fibers weren't yet used to this new training block. Your body wasn't used to it. And new doesn't automatically mean better.

This is where I think a lot of women accidentally start chasing that soreness feeling instead of chasing progression over time. I would say at least a solid 80% of women walk into the gym and leave gauging the workout by whether they're going to be sore the next day. That is a terrible gauge. The gauge is not going to happen on a day-to-day basis, guys.

The gauge is whether you are progressing over time. And I think a lot of people get fooled because so many people want instant progress, an instant, tangible result, something that happens in a 24-hour period. I hope by now you understand that muscle is not an overnight process, and building it is not going to happen in a 24- to 48-hour period. It happens over time.

So if you're evaluating your workout by, did I sweat? Did I burn a lot of calories? Am I sore? Did it feel hard? I would challenge you to change that perspective to: did I perform better? Did I actually feel it in the muscle groups I'm supposed to feel with the movements on my plan that day, whether it be a squat or a row or a chest press? Did I feel my muscles working? Was I able to add more weight? That's a completely different question. A completely different perspective.

Because muscle growth isn't about destroying yourself every single workout. It's literally about repeatedly creating enough tension and enough stimulus that your body has a reason to adapt over time. And most importantly, you've heard me say it before, you don't build muscle while you're inside the gym doing your training. You are breaking down the muscle fibers. What matters is how you recover from that workout in the 24 to 48 hours after.

Are you getting adequate sleep? Are you providing your body with the proper nutrition and enough food to recover from that workout and give yourself the fuel you need for the next workout? So recover from it and then do it again and again and again, because recovery is where the muscle gets built.

Something else I want you to think about is that repetition, doing the same thing for four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, whatever the programming calls for, gives you data. And I personally love data and numbers, because they tell us what's actually happening instead of relying on feelings and emotions.

Let's say you do a Romanian deadlift for eight weeks. At week one, you're using 30-pound dumbbells for 10 reps. A few weeks later, now you're using 35s. Maybe you're even getting into the 40s. Or maybe the weight hasn't really changed yet, but you've been able to do more reps with the same weight. Maybe you did eight reps before and now you're doing 12 with the same weight. Or your range of motion is better. You're controlling the movement better. Your technique is cleaner. Or you were leaving four reps in the tank before and now you're actually able to push close to failure safely. You know what I mean? That's progression. Any one of those categories.

For most of you, you're probably going to notice that you have the same rep scheme but you're increasing your weight. That's huge. That's progression. The first week you're doing 30s, and by the end you're probably doing 40s or 45s. That's huge. And with that data, you can see it. You can track it.

But imagine if every single Monday you did a different hamstring exercise. Week one, you did an RDL. Week two, a good morning. Week three, a single-leg RDL. Week four, a deadlift. You have no baseline. You may do some of those as isolation work, but it should still be the same workout for a certain amount of time. It's not changing every day or every two weeks, is the point I'm trying to make. Because then you have no baseline. You have nothing to compare it against. You don't actually know whether you're getting stronger or not.

You're just doing stuff. And I don't want you to just do stuff. I want your training to have purpose. I want you to have intention behind your training. And this is where progressive overload really shines. People think, I need to add every week. Not necessarily. Progression can happen in multiple different ways. It can happen by adding more weight. It can happen by adding reps. It can happen by changing the tempo or speed of the motion. Or by improving your technique, where you get a little deeper in a squat. Or you have more control, or more stability. That's progression.

And for women who have been training for years, progression is not always going to happen in giant jumps. Sometimes progression is very boring. You did 10 reps last week. This week you probably did the same 10. It's supposed to be very repetitive and very boring. But it's still progress.

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All right, let's get back to the show. You need repeated exposure to an exercise to see progression happen over time. And it's not going to happen in a one-week span. This is why I always want women tracking their lifts. I want people paying attention to their weight. I want people paying attention to their reps. I want people paying attention to the order of the exercises they're doing.

Sometimes you might have to move an exercise around because somebody is sitting on the piece of equipment, but you're still paying attention to how much weight, how many reps, and how you're improving. Are you getting better? Did it improve over time? Because if you walk into the gym and don't remember what you did last week, if you're changing it over and over again, you're leaving so much opportunity on the table. Now you're just choosing your weight based on how you feel that day.

Oh, okay, 25s feel good. 30s feel good. Meanwhile, maybe you did 30s the week before, but you don't remember. So now you're either underloading yourself or doing the exact same thing and not really challenging the muscle. That's not progression. That's guessing, is my point. And building muscle doesn't happen by guessing. It happens by being strategic with your data.

So if there's anything you take away from this podcast, it's this: you have to be intentional with your training. You have to have purpose behind why you're doing it. And you have to have a logical strategy when it comes to data and actually track what you're doing.

So up until this point, you may be wondering, okay, if this all makes sense, why do people keep changing their programs? Why are women so tempted to change? The first thing is boredom. And I get it. Doing the same exercises for several weeks doesn't give you that same productive feeling or dopamine hit that trying something new does.

The mindset shift I would offer, though, is that your workout doesn't need to entertain you every single day. Your training has a job. And that job is to move you toward your goal. Sometimes the things that create the best results aren't exciting. Eating enough protein every single day isn't exciting, but you still do it, right? Getting your steps in isn't exciting. This is where I wish the industry didn't make such big claims that sound like they're going to create such big changes.

When truly it's the basics. It is just the basics. Eating your protein, having a training block for X amount of time, getting your steps in, going to bed on time. This stuff isn't exciting. And as I've said on podcasts before, it's also not sexy to say this stuff. That's what the industry does really well. It makes things sound sexy. But I'm here to tell you the opposite and challenge it. Going to bed on time isn't sexy. Doing Romanian deadlifts for the eighth week in a row is not sexy or exciting.

But you know what is? Looking back six months later and realizing your body composition has changed. That's freaking exciting.

The second reason women change their workouts is because they think they've plateaued. They've done the program for maybe two or three weeks and they're like, okay, my body is just used to it at this point. Three weeks in, my body's not really doing anything. It's not changing and I don't feel like I'm sweating in my workouts.

Girl, I need you to hear it. You just learned how to do those exercises. This is three weeks in. Guys, give yourself a minute here. You probably haven't exhausted the adaptation from the program yet. You may just need to get better at executing it, or train harder, or recover better, or eat more. Right?

So if that's you, if you're saying, well, I just plateaued, I challenge you to keep going with that same workout program and put more intention behind it. It could be lacking one of those things I mentioned. Either you're not tracking your data, there's no purpose behind it, or you don't have intention behind your training. You're just looking at it as exercising.

One last thing before I start closing down this podcast, because I think this is really important for you to hear. Doing the same exercises does not mean you're giving your body the exact same stimulus forever. Because you are changing.

Let's say you've been squatting for six weeks straight. In week one, you're thinking about where your feet are. How much am I going to load on the bar? What's the weight I'm actually going to start at? Am I keeping good form going down in my squat? Am I breathing right? Is my back straight? Your brain is thinking about everything in week one when you're introducing a new workout program. You're thinking about 47 different things. And it's not just the squat. It could be, how am I going to flow through the exercises with the layout of my gym? Oh, I'll probably have to move this exercise up because I know somebody is usually on that equipment. You know what I mean? In week one of a new program, you're thinking about everything.

Six weeks later, you don't have to think about all that anymore. The movement becomes automatic. And now you can focus on the effort. Now you can actually push. Now you can actually feel the muscle working. Now you can actually know the difference between, this is uncomfortable, and, wow, I legitimately only have one rep left. That's a huge difference. And like I said earlier, you also become accustomed to how your path moves inside the gym.

I always used to joke with the WarriorBabes that the first week, your workouts may take a little bit longer because you're just trying to get the lay of the land for moving from exercise to exercise. By week three, you're basically a pro at it. By week six, you could do it with your eyes closed. That's the huge difference I want you to realize. Week one is going to be drastically different from week six. But you have to keep doing the same thing over and over again. That's where really productive training starts happening, because the progressive overload you're doing through those weeks requires effort.

So the common question is, when do I change my workouts? I'm not telling you to do the exact same program for the next seven years. Please absolutely do not do that. There's totally a time when change needs to happen, because your body still needs a bigger reason to adapt, as I said earlier. But when you change a program, you're changing it for a reason. Not because you're bored on a Tuesday. Not because you saw a new exercise on TikTok and wanted to incorporate it. Not because you're not sore anymore.

Generally, I want you to think in terms of training blocks, as I've been saying throughout this episode. And it's definitely not about thinking your muscles need to be more confused. Give your body enough time with a group of movements that you can actually become proficient at and progress in them. That might mean keeping some foundation movements in for six or eight weeks. And this depends on the person and depends on the program.

As I've said over many, many episodes, no two people will have the same macro numbers. It's the same with a strength training program. It's going to look drastically different for everybody. But here's the one thing I want you to know. You don't have to change everything at once. This is where people think, okay, I need a new training block, and suddenly every single exercise is different. Why? If your RDL is progressing beautifully, keep it.

If your hip thrust is progressing, keep it. If you're progressing in one specific exercise over another, keep that one in for the next block. Keep it in for 10 weeks. Keep it in for 12 weeks. If your lat pulldown feels incredible and you're getting stronger, keep it in there. You don't have to change every single exercise in a new training block, is my point. You could change one or two things without burning the entire program to the ground.

If there's anything I learned from bodybuilding, it's to think like a bodybuilder. There's a lot of repetition in that sport. You don't build a physique by constantly changing your workout program or constantly chasing something new. You build it through repetition: rep after rep, meal after meal, doing the same thing almost every single day. Workout after workout, week after week, month after month.

And I think this is one of the hardest parts of fitness for people to accept, because everybody wants to know the secret. What's the best exercise for glutes? What's the best split? What's the best rep range? What's the best program? But the program you can execute consistently, progress in intentionally, recover from, and stick with long enough to actually adapt is going to beat the perfect program you keep abandoning every three weeks, every single time.

Muscle is built through quality work done consistently over days and months. Not random acts of going in and doing a fitness workout. I want you to remember that. And I want you to remember that random acts of fitness do not create intentional physiques or change your body composition.

Maybe you remember the story I shared about when I first started working out and I would Pinterest all my workouts. I'd be doing a different workout every single day. Then when I finally got into a consistent routine with bodybuilding, because I had a goal of getting on stage, my workouts were the same for four weeks straight. And maybe one exercise would stay in every one of those workouts for the next 12 weeks while we changed some other things. But basically, what I'm telling you is what I've lived. It's been the best thing that's worked: being okay with doing the boring stuff. Because the boring stuff is ultimately going to get you to the goal you want with your physique.

So what I would challenge you with after this episode is to look at your current training and ask yourself, am I training or am I just working out? Do I know what I lifted last week? Do I know how many reps I got? Do I know whether I'm actually progressing or not? Am I giving the exercises and movements I'm doing inside the gym enough time to actually develop a skill or master them? Or am I just someone doing a new workout every day? Am I someone who changes it up every two weeks? Am I searching for something new because it feels more effective and more productive? And if you're somebody who gets bored easily, replace that with telling yourself, doing the boring work is going to give me the result.

Because there's a point where repetition stops being boring and literally starts becoming mastery. And I can confidently say that after being in the industry for over 10 years. You start knowing your numbers. You walk into the gym thinking, okay, last week I got 10, this week let me up it to 12. Or last week I did 30s, let me try 35s. That's training. That's you competing with yourself. That's you chasing progression, not chasing something new.

And then suddenly the same workout isn't really boring anymore, because you're actually seeing yourself progress. You're seeing yourself get stronger. You're seeing yourself master the movement. You're seeing yourself learn the technique better. Your muscles don't need more confusion. What they do need is consistency and progression. So stop thinking that a good workout has to be new, or that you have to be sore because that means you're growing.

[Audio gap in the recording.] ...because they actually have, and they know that it takes time, and they don't spend their year starting over every two weeks. They just compound the effect over time. Rep by rep, workout by workout, year by year. Just repeat this: your muscles love repetition. All right? I hope this episode helped you guys, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.

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