Throw Your Body a Curve

Written by Eric Broser

In order to continually make progress in the effort to improve your physique you must make sure that your training is both progressive and dynamic. This simply means that as time goes on you must strive to increase your intensity of effort in the gym, as well as look for ways to present a novel/unique stimulus to the CNS and muscles. In other words, doing the same things over and over will eventually lead to stagnation, the result being zero gains in size, tone and/or strength.

One of the simplest ways to “throw your body a curve” is to completely change the exercises you have been using, which of course will force your muscles/CNS to adapt to something entirely new. However, this is not always possible due to lack of varied equipment or limitations due to injuries or other circumstances. In addition, if you have been training for some time, you may have whittled your “pool of exercises” down to the ones that you absolutely know work best and feel “right” for your particular body.

So, here are several ways that you can increase your intensity and/or create a novel stimulus for your muscles without changing any of the movements you enjoy doing:

Vary your rest periods between sets. If you are used to resting 2-3 minutes, try switching to rest periods as short as 30-60 seconds, or as long as 3-4 minutes.
Vary your rep tempo. If you normally utilize a tempo of say 2/0/1 (two second negative/0 seconds at midpoint/1 second positive), try other lifting speeds such as 4/1/X, 3/1/3, or 2/2/1, for example.
Note: X = explosive as possible
Change the order of exercises. Perhaps you normally start your body part workouts with compound lifts, and finish with isolation exercises. If this is the case, try starting with the isolation movements first and finishing with the compound lifts.
Change your body part split. If your split looks something like this: