You’ve been given a home program, or you’ve joined our Strength for Life classes, Semi-Private group or Independent Gym sessions and now wondering when you need to see us again?
How often should this program be updated? Does it even need to be updated?
We encourage everyone to have a program review every 6-8 weeks.
Why? There are many reasons, these are just a few of the most important ones:
- Your body is incredibly adaptable, it needs variety to continue to stimulate physiological change in the muscle, bone or joint. Without this, we will get a short-term benefit, but after this, we plateau in our strength gains.
- Progression is key! Resistance training or strength training alone is valuable, however for most goals, ensuring that this is progressive in nature is imperative to continue to elicit benefits from the exercise.
- Motivation: the last thing we want is you getting bored of what you are doing or feeling like it is becoming super repetitive. Yes, familiarity can be comforting and beneficial for some time, but variety is the spice of life. There is always a way we can make our exercise more enjoyable; this helps with our adherence and motivation to complete it.
- Ensuring we are performing our exercises at an adequate intensity. In order to improve our strength, an exercise has to be somewhat difficult. Once it has reached the point that it is quite manageable to perform, the exercises needs to be progressed or changed.
I’m progressing my weights at home or increasing the number of reps on my own, do I still need a review?
It depends. If your goal is to build strength, you want to be completing around 8-12 repetitions (reps) of an exercise at 70-80% of your maximum capacity, e.g. if you were to give a score out of 10 in terms of how hard that exercise was, it would be a 7 or an 8. So, increasing the number of reps to 15-20 is going to focus more on our muscular endurance versus our muscular strength. Therefore, if you are increasing the number of repetitions of the exercise you may be changing the outcome of that exercise. Instead, we might look to progress you to a more challenging variation to keep the goal the same. For example, if a sit to stand exercise from a chair is becoming easy, we progress towards a single leg sit to stand.
If you are independently increasing your weights, this is fantastic, keep it up! However, remember we mentioned above that your body is incredibly adaptable. We want to continue to challenge it in a variety of ways to stimulate change within the muscles, bones and joints.
