How to Rotate Exercises for Optimal Strength & Athletic Improvements: Creating Novelty
Exercise variety is a good thing and important for growth - but not everything should be done at once
Contents:
Accommodation & Returns
Stimulus & fatigue
Physical Literacy
Upper vs Lower
Developing “Complete” Range
Beginners vs Advanced
Rep Ranges
Program Emphasis
Example 9-week Program Rotations
Common Mistakes
Preferred exercises most frequently rotated with myself & clients
Here is a reality that clickbait posts & gurus hold back on explaining:
There is NO such thing as the single best exercise for any body part or training quality.
You can have a favorite exercise and you can have your “go-to”, but the reality is no single exact exercise and setup will grant maximum development on its own when speaking about long term results.
This means that exercise variety is important. As discussed in the tension range essays, resistance curves and repetition type between exercises for the same muscle group should be manipulated so the body is strong in every position and direction.
However, in order to give high intent to meaningful exercises cover effectively – not every exercise variation can be utilized in the same weekly training cycle and properly executed + recovered from.
What this simply means is that your training requires “blocks“ where the program is manipulated and adjusted not only with weight and reps but with exercise selection as well. This often means taking periods where you swap out some of your favorite exercises for you. In order to develop another range or quality and allow the body to re-sensitize itself to the previous exercise stimulus and round out your strength.
The Law of Accommodation
The “law of accommodation” in performance training is the idea that a repeated stimulus not only is adapted to by the body by getting better at producing the demanded outputs but also adapts by handling the actual stress/stimulus of the training demand better as well. What this means in simple terms is that the body becomes more resistant to a particular stimulus.
This is why a beginner trainee can make such great improvements quickly – because the very introduction of any training stimulus is very novel for them.
This quickly runs out however, and progress becomes slower and/or the training format needs to change.
This issue doesn’t disappear when an athlete becomes advanced, and rather becomes more pronounced than ever. Not only does the overall progress from strength training slow down for advanced training, but the particular progress on their most utilized exercises slow down in particular.
Due to the body’s adaptation response accommodating your training stimulus it is important to re-calibrate that training stimulus regularly and effectively to prevent long periods of plateaued progress.
The way this is done is by mimicking the same novelty effect you benefited from as a beginner trainee. You must introduce a novel stimulus to the organism that is in some way noticeably different from the one that has been “accommodated“ and thus spark the nervous system and metabolic response to accommodate something new.
You are trying to mimic “noob gains“ in the advanced athlete my pushing progress on similar movements and challenges that have enough differentiation that there is more “new“ in them compared to their current exercise focus.
Stimulus vs Fatigue
Another factor to consider when choosing to rotate an exercise is that a particular exercise executed the same way will place emphasized stress on certain mechanisms and particular tissues of the body. We do *want* that stress in the appropriate dose in order to provoke adaptation, but due to the law of accommodation the return on our investment becomes increasingly costly and less rewarding over time and as we progress.
When an exercise is consistently pushed near our limits, we accumulate stress damage and metabolic fatigue week after week that we often eventually diminish with a “deload” – where we deliver the decrease the training stress temporary early in order to fully recover from weeks to months of hard training.
However, there is also a period where choosing to “deload“ from a particular exercise for a longer period of time is beneficial in order to fully recover and adapt to its accumulated fatigue. During this time, you don’t want to simply not train a muscle group or a general movement pattern at all and thus lose your training adaptations, and so rotating to a “similar but different” enough exercise can allow some of those neurally and structurally fatigued elements to recover without losing any overall gains.
Doing this is often even more productive as gains are usually enhanced rather than maintained.
Physical Literacy
Lastly, another factor is in “physical literacy”. This is a term I took from Will Ratelle that I became very fond of as it describes our shared philosophy very well. (Follow him on YouTube or Instagram if you’d like)
The idea is that to “round yourself out” and develop as an athlete, your goal is to essentially be better at overcoming physical tasks. Being an all-around athlete requires some level of overcoming various challenges and rotation of exercises allows those challenges to be varied in training and expand the context with which you can express your strength and athleticism.
My philosophy of “hybrid athlete training” necessitates the capacity to express your abilities in a variety of contexts and not specialize too much in a particular category. This also applies to exercises themselves rather than just broad qualities.
I will continue to encourage exercise variety for the sake of variety itself and challenging the athlete with the difficulty that novelty brings – this also enhances the enjoyment and excitement of training and allows training to progress for many years longer than it would otherwise.
Below we will go over educational factors to consider on how, when, and where to rotate exercises in your program to prevent plateaus, injury, or weak links.