Exercise Consistency: The Real Secret of Working Out
Remember “muscle confusion”? That phrase was all the rage with the advent of P90X just a few short years ago. The premise was simple enough: trick your muscles into constant adaptation and growth by confusing them with new, flashy exercises!
Did it work? Well…yes. For most people, anyway. But not for the reasons you’d expect.
The fact is, flashy workout programs with a lot of unnecessary fluff work for those of us who are just starting to exercise because at that point, anything would work! Many of us don’t even need to enter a gym the first few weeks; we’d just need to walk there, turn around, and walk home!
Lousy trainers and fad training programs have a long legacy of promising “the secret” in the form of a “scientific breakthrough.” But there are no secrets, and there really are no breakthroughs. Those bosu-ball pistol-squat thrusters done with two kettlebells may look impressive, but they offer no actual benefit. At best, they’re dangerous, AND they’re not nearly as effective as a simple squat.
Anyone can make you feel uncomfortable, or make you exhausted: a good trainer—and a good training program—keeps you healthy and keeps you on the road to progress.
The Real Secret
So, do you want to know what the real “secret” to achieving your exercise goals is? The secret that the fitness industry by and large ignores?
It’s…consistency.
Consistency in effort. Consistency in dedication. Consistency in training. Exercise consistency isn’t lauded by fitness professionals because it isn’t sexy. It’s not marketable. It doesn’t sell. But it’s exercise consistency that produces the results you want!
P90X was many things, but a “consistent” program it was not. With any workout program, there’s always the accompanying fear that people will get bored of doing the same things over and over. Here, we constantly switch between exercises and rotate between formats, but the programs that we use are also structured: we follow a regular training split—necessary for managing your rest—and we constantly return to basic exercises. Switching up exercises to target different muscle groups and give the ones you’ve been working a rest is certainly necessary, but not when you’re working on one specific muscle group. Exercise consistency paired with progressive overload is the smartest, safest way to go.
Progressive Overload
A good workout program uses progression to produce results, whereas a bad one operates completely at random. Progression is something that people understand really well when it comes to an activity like, say, running, but it’s not so intuitive when they enter the gym. Everyone who’s ever run for a stint of time has, during that time, slowly increased their distance, or their speed. That’s linear progression, and it produces what we call “progressive overload.”
Progressive overload is a simple concept: you do a little bit more each workout, and your body continues to adapt to the new stimulus. Adding weight, frequency, or number of repetitions to your routine challenges your body, and allows you to understand and measure your progress. If you do the same thing each and every day, how’s your body going to adapt? The answer: it’s not. Switching up your exercises just for the sake of something new without actually adding any new weight or reps won’t help you at all in the long run. That’s why progressive overload and exercise consistency work so well hand-in-hand.
Progressive overload is necessary regardless of your fitness goals, but it’s absolutely critical if you want to improve your performance! Achieving progressive overload if you’re using a well-structured workout program with the same exercises is easy: each time you do a back squat, you try to add a little weight.
But if that back squat becomes a bosu-ball pistol-squat thrusters done with two kettlebells, all you’ve changed is the exercise itself. There’s no way to do “more” because you’re using a completely different exercise. Do this too often and it becomes really, really difficult to make progress. Exercise consistency with minor changes to the weight, frequency, and repetitions is the only real way to know that you’re adding something beneficial to your routine.
In short, there are no secrets, and consistency in your workout will keep you making progress over the long haul. Sometimes we get too caught up in doing something because it “looks” tough: I challenge you to focus on the basics and try to get better at them! Focus on providing progressive overload for your squats, your push ups, your deadlifts, and your presses, and watch as your fitness improves!