Further thoughts on workout variation

I ran across an article on yahoo yesterday entitled "The 5 Biggest Exercise Myths" that gave me some further ideas about workout variation. I just want to make a sort of mental note about the substance of the article here. But before doing that, a bit of review on the need for variation in workouts as well as an update on how my current experiment with variation is going. Oh, and, incidentally, the article can be found here.

So, why variation in workouts? As I've observed previously, it's to offset monotony. Sort of a mental trick to counteract some of the trudgery that can go along with engaging in fitness regularly. The theory is, keep things changing in order to sustain interest and perhaps to help boost morale. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?

My own approach to varying things centered first and foremost on finding a few "canned routines." In layman's parlance this means finding a few exercise DVD's that suit my needs (upper-body strength training) that I can follow along with.

Well, we're in about our third year of working with those DVD's. So, though we've got some basic variety, I'm now looking into ways to vary things yet a bit more.

I recently decided that, for most of any given "phase" of our fitness cycle, I should be varying things by working out at a lower intensity. There should be a few sessions in each phase when I really go all out, but most sessions should be done at a lower intensity. I'm experimenting with that now.

And it's going ok. I can say it's refreshing to not have to feel that I'm pushing to my maximum all the time. It has its challenges but so far seems to be giving the desired effect.

One thing I will note here though is that I was initially thinking of doing high-intensity sessions toward the end of a given phase, while lately I've decided it's probably better to do the high intensity sessions at the beginning. But I may further change things based on what's said in the article I referenced at the beginning of this entry.

Before I address that issue though, I need to provide an overview of the article. Thus the following. It's a short piece that challenges some fitness "myths." What this means in the main is that it questions numerical standards such as the 10-repetition, 3-set formulas. Its not very technical and the alternate suggestions they make do seem appealing to me.

For example, the following excerpt:

MYTH #1: DO 8 TO 12 REPETITIONS
The claim: It's the
optimal repetition range for building muscle.

The origin: In 1954,
Ian MacQueen, M.D., an English surgeon and competitive bodybuilder, published a scientific paper in which he recommended a moderately high number of repetitions for muscle growth.

The truth: This approach places muscles under a medium amount of tension for a medium amount of time—it's basically The Neither Here Nor There Workout.

Here's the deal: Higher tension—a.k.a. heavier weights—induces the type of muscle growth in which the muscle fibers grow larger, leading to the best gains in strength; longer tension time, on the other hand, boosts muscle size by increasing the energy-producing structures around the fibers, improving muscular endurance. The classic prescription of 8 to 12 repetitions strikes a balance between the two. But by using that scheme all the time, you miss out on the greater tension levels that come with heavier weights and fewer repetitions, and the longer tension time achieved with lighter weights and higher repetitions.

The new standard:
Vary your repetition range—adjusting the weights accordingly—so that you stimulate every type of muscle growth. Try this method for a month, performing three full-body sessions a week: Do five repetitions per set in your first workout, 10 reps per set in your second workout, and 15 per set in your third workout.

That gets the variation gears working yet further in my mind. I don't intend to do 3 workouts per week, but it does seem as though I can adapt these directives in some way into my strength-training routines.

I could, for example, try to use heavier weights and fewer repetitions--and possibly more sets--during certain workouts. It doesn't seem, as I think of it now, that this is something I need to plan into my annual fitness schedule, but more like something that could be introduced more or less spontaneously. But I am still considering what are the possibilities for my purposes.

I should mention in closing that the article is tackling what could be considered body-building myths. In other words, they're saying that the received wisdom among body-builders is not necessarily going to build muscles as large or as quickly as has been assumed.

Which makes what's being said somewhat irrelevant to me, since I'm not trying to build bigger muscles. That said, the workout variation potential the article offers is definitely interesting. So I figure following some of the advice they give--despite the fact that I in no way, shape, or form, am interested in body-building-- certainly can't hurt me. It can help me introduce some further variation into my regimen and, though I don't vehemently opposing increasing the size of my muscles, I can't say that, if they did grow a bit further, I'd be terribly disappointed.

So, it's got me thinking. I'll be posting again on this topic once I decide how I can actually use the information I've found.