Exercise Progression

What is one of the biggest mistakes new exercisers often make? You might be surprised to learn that it's doing the same workouts over and over for weeks or months at a time. This certainly isn't the only mistake exercisers make, but it's one that can cost you what you want most out of your program: results. Progression is key if you want to get stronger, fitter and healthier and it's the one area that seems the most confusing. How do you change your workouts so that they're effective, challenging and fun? One simple way is to try new exercises.

Progressive Exercise

Progression can come in a variety of ways: changing your weight, repetitions, intensity, speed, duration, exercises and more. The bottom line is, once you master something, you need to do something to make it harder. One way to do that is to try new variations of traditional exercises. Some basic ways to change what you're doing are:

• Change your position. Look for ways you can change your position to make moves a bit different. If you usually do regular squats, try taking the feet wide and the toes out to fire different muscle fibers. Change your chest press by going to an incline bench or elevate your feet during pushups.
• Change the type of resistance. If you gravitate to machines, try free weights or the cable machines. If you always do free weights, try some of your exercises on machines. Movements will always feel different when you change the resistance.
• Go from bilateral to unilateral. One of the most interesting ways to change exercises is to use only one arm or one leg at a time. This makes almost any lower body move (like squats or deadlifts) more intense and even upper body moves get more challenging when you switch to one arm at a time (as in a one-armed chest fly).
• Add a balance challenge. Going unilateral, as mentioned above, can make balancing more of a challenge but, even more challenging, is using something like a ball, foam roller, BOSU Balance Trainer or inflatable disc.
• Do more compound movements. Doing two exercises at once can save time and add a new dimension to your workouts. Try doing squats with an overhead press or deadlifts with a row. For more ideas, check out this Strength Training Workout which features a variety of compound exercises.

Those are just a few ideas for making changes in your strength training workouts. You can also follow some the basic exercise progressions shown in my Upper Body Progressions and Lower Body Progressions workouts. Each workout shows a series of exercises for different muscle groups ranging from beginner to advanced, allowing you to see simple ways to challenge your body once you master each move.