[quote]David1991 wrote:
what would be better for people with long legs and torso’s. i’m 6ft right now so i have long everything lol [/quote]
6’ is not necessarily tall or long limbed, its pretty much average now. But if your 6’ and a small build then that might be a different story.
I just read one of the new articles by CT and he talks about this. I tend to agree with what he says based on my own experience. Im not necessarily tall only like 5’10-5’11" but im a fairly small build and have long lever arms. Ive made my best progress by focusing on deadlifts, and stepups, and using DB’s for upper body.
That doesn’t mean that its the only way though. Now im focusing more on bringing up my weaknesses with front squats and other exercises I have neglected.
-p-----------------------
Back to the OP question.
I dont really know where the whole “keep your muscles guessing” thing came from. It doesn’t make complete sense to me. Think of it this way. Olympic lifters spend their entire careers focusing on only a few lifts, and some exercises to assist in those lifts. The only thing keeping these athletes from becoming huge is the fact that they have weight classes, and they stick to lower volumes.
I think there are a few important reasons to modify or change your exercises from time to time.
1.) Most importantly is the law of diminishing returns. The more times you do a specific exercise with a specific grip and stance, etc…, the more volume its going to take to get further results. If you continue on too long, you’ll get to the point where prograss has stalled or reversed, and your even more likely to get injured.
I know Poliquin suggests never doing the exact same thing for more than 6 sessions. You might assume that by the sixth session of doing 5x5 on front squats you’ve already achieved 85% of what your gonna get from this specific exercise, and set/rep scheme. You could continue for six more sessions and try to get that last 15%, but this is far less than efficient, and this is the time when you’ll likely hurt yourself.
2.) With every exercise performed, there are stresses on your connective tissues and joints, that take longer to recover than your muscles do. Changing or modifying an exercise can help reduce repetative stress so you dont get injured.
3.) Changing or modifying the exercises make the program more fun. When its more fun, your likely to train harder and get better results. I always notice the best gains the first week or two of a new program, because im just happy to be doing something new, and put more effort in.
4.) Lastly, changing or modifying exercises will decrease the likelihood that your overtraining certain muscles, and undertraining others. If all you ever do is front squat, and dont ever do any pulls, your posterior chain is going to be very weak and your quads and hip flexors will be tight.
Thats my opinion on why you should modify exercises or change them from time to time.
I think individuals who are training specific movements like o-lifters and powerlifters, should modify the movement in little ways every couple of workouts. While individuals training for general strength improvements or for hypertrophy and fat loss can change around the movements more often.
I dont like when people get all fu-fu to try to “confuse” muscles. I recently started working at a gym, and they’ve got people doing all kinds of stepups+curls, and squats+rows, and they change the exercise EVERY single session. I dont know why people think that they need more than squats, deadlifts, presses, pulls, and some unilateral movements and explosive movements. I think it was cosgrove that mentioned the “big rocks” theory. Exercises like squats and deadlifts might account for 50% of your gains. Throwing in presses and pulls, will take you to 80%, and some unilateral work might get you to 90%. All that fu-fu stuff will only account for maybe 10%, yet these gyms these days spend over 50% of there time with fu-fu crap and maybe 5-10% of their time with squats and deadlifts (IF THEY DO THEM AT ALL). Just my little rant.