3.) What are the benefits of variation and what’s too little of it?

By reading #2 above you might be convinced that variation is just a terrible and useless training
principle and that it should be kept to zero. But that’s not true either. Variation is excellent when
applied appropriately and in moderation. Properly applied variation usually means keeping
exercises in the mix for between one and 3 mesocycles and then switching them out for others.
There are exceptions to this that are covered below, but these basic guidelines apply to most
lifters.

One of the main benefits of variation is the ability to use it to focus on specific areas that need to
be brought up. If your quads need work but your glutes
glutes and hams and adductors
adductors are already
huge, squats might not be the right
right choice for you (as painful as it is for me to write that in print
lol). Instead, you might want to use leg extensions, leg presses, and hack squats for some time to
bring up your quads to the
the rest of your legs. Same
Same idea with upper chest
chest and incline press, etc.

A simple derivative benefit of the one above is that

that if you want full development,
development, you’ll have to hit
each muscle from multiple angles and
a nd thus with different exercises. Whether this happens within
one workout or within one week is still not certain, but it’s probably not a good idea to go a whole
meso without hitting the upper chest, for example, or at least one rowing and one vertical pulling
move.

Another (and perhaps

perhaps the biggest) benefit
benefit of variation is as a tool to combat training
training staleness.
After doing the same
same exercises for a long time (months), even adding moremore weight and sets and
reps on those movements become less effective at growing muscle. Your physiology is so used to
the forces coming from the same exact angles and hitting the same exact motor units that you no
longer grow as much muscle as you once did. Your routine benefitted greatly by getting you used
to the same movements to present the most overload, but after months and months, that stability
is a negative because of the downside of staleness. Yes, there seems to be a middle ground in
muscle growth between switching exercises too often and not often enough. One lacks
momentum, the other promotes too much staleness.

An oft-forgotten benefit
benefit of exercise variation is the management
management of fatigue, especially
especially in such a
way that still allows you to train
train hard every single session
session of your training week. By using
alternate exercises that stress different parts of your muscle more than others, you can let the
fatigued parts heal up while hitting the alternate parts hard, and vice versa. For example, if you
train your chest with mostly flat and decline movements Monday and mostly incline movements
Thursday, the fibers that are hit hard Monday basically get a light workout on Thursday while the
fibers that are hit Thursday get a light workout Monday. Instead of doing both incline and flat
moves hard Monday and taking all-around easy Thursday, this alternate method of variation
allows every day to be a hard day for some part of your muscles but still lets the overloaded parts
recover well for next time.

Because different exercises hit muscle groups from different angles, they also hit the rest of your
connective tissues (such as tendons, ligaments and bones) differently. By changing up the
exercises every several mesocycles, you let the chronically stressed parts of the connective tissues
hit by the last arrangement of movements to heal before they are exposed to those movements
again. For example, if you only do high bar squats for quads, an aggravated knee from high bar