More change...

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that change is inevitable and about how we can choose some of the direction of our change.  Taking that overarching idea a little farther, we need to consider what we are doing in our workouts, what changes, if any, are resulting from those workouts, and what we might want to change to get the changes we might like better.

If we do the same thing over and over in the gym, we will not get the same results.  We will get progressively fewer gains from the same work as our bodies adapt to what we are doing.  (It is nice to know that there is some wiggle-room in the definition of insanity, though…)  What used to result in weight loss or muscle gain or both now barely helps us maintain our current condition.  This is why we have to change things up.

Change comes in many flavors.  We can switch activities, which will automatically cause us to recruit different muscles and brain cells.  We can increase the speed of what we are doing or the weight of what we’re lifting or the amount of time we work out or the number of repetitions or sets.  All of those things help, but it is also important not to choose the same switch every time.  We need to keep our brains and our bodies just a little off-balance for best results.

Go play.