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My jazzercising and philosophizing mother has taught me a few things in life. Besides the proper way to work out to Madonna songs, she also instilled in me a thoughtfulness about life’s excesses. She’d often quote Cicero and say, “never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.” Considering her smarty pants quotes, I guess that’s why I was a rather eccentric child that was health conscious but also super into eating chocolate chip cookies. Nevertheless, in the fit of many a cookie withdrawal, my soul was often comforted by the idea that at least my body would be healthy just so long as I limited the sweets. Therefore, it’s no wonder that being aware of excess has served me well as a personal trainer.

With excess and fitness in mind, consider your routines. Do you change things up every so often? In the case of the typical stranger I see at the gym, I too often see them working out month after month to the same routine, same machine, same intensity, same music, etc. Granted, not everyone has the same fitness goals (or even makes fitness goals); but, if your goal is to increase your performance (and not just relieve work stress or look strong), there are more efficient uses of your time.

In my personal training experience, I’ve observed that stressing your body in the same way, repeatedly, isn’t as effective as the practice of varying the stress over different exercises and different routines. Now, my evidence for varying workouts isn’t scientific, but I have observed this phenomenon first hand.

Case in point, a new fitness pupil of mine, Jacob, has been working out in the same gym as me for over a year. During this time, I watched him use the same machines, day in and day out, and even spoke with him about his performance increases. In a year’s time, he was able to increase his workload over 100% in a few specific exercises. However, while his performance gains were noticeable, he wasn’t satisfied with his return on time and energy spent. He wasn’t getting noticeably “stronger.”

As with any new pupil, I ran Jacob through a test workout to identify his performance thresholds and consulted with him on what goals he was interested in meeting. The test included various cardio, isometric, isotonic, and flexibility routines and Jacob let me know that he wanted to increase his total lifting strength and endurance (I guess he’s into moving furniture). During the test I noticed that he could indeed lift a fair amount of weight given his size but that his power over a certain range of motion didn’t translate into other lifting exercises. For example, he was great at the chest press but was unable to do pull-ups. He was all over the biceps machine but could barely do a shoulder shrug. Given these observations, Jacob had worked his routine to excess.

Fixing a person’s routine isn’t a problem. You just prescribe some new exercises and a new plan. However, if you’re currently working without a personal trainer, it can be difficult to be in-tune with how you’re progressing. Therefore, you need to keep my mom’s and Cicero’s rule in mind, “never go to excess!”

This is a guest blog post contributed by :

Philip Golobish is a free lance personal trainer and fitness writer. When he’s not at the gym he spends his time promoting sports related things like masters golf tickets and the Kentucky Derby. Feel free to contact him at pgolobish (at) gmail (dot) com.