session, some of these problems are a given.

But if you’re doing 5 movements for the same muscle

group, nearly your whole workout is one big experiment in getting used to exercises just before
abandoning them for others.

The second problem with error a.) is that by using a ton of exercises per session, you can risk
running low on variants over the long (months) term. If “shocking the system” has advantages
(and it does to some extent), then how can you shock the system if you have used all the good
variants in just one or two mesocycles
mesocycles of training? What will your second quad meso look like if
you did squats, lunges,
lunges, leg presses, hacks, and leg extensions in your first
first meso? By using too
many variants in each session, you can quickly run out of effective variants and then
EVERYTHING is stale! Very shortsighted.

For the most part, the problems with option a.) apply to option b.), and still others apply to
option b.) as well.

First, if you’re switching exercises and their orders every workout, how do you make sure you’re
overloading? How can you directly compare leg presses to hack squats and thus adjust the
volumes and intensities to make sure that nextnext week’s leg press
press session is fundamentally
fundamentally more
overloading than this week’s hack squat session? Well, you kind of can’t! Thus every workout has
to be “kind of hard” and it’s really tough to both arrange to overload intentionally and to track
your progress. If you did leg
leg presses at 405 for 4x15 three
three weeks ago and this week you did 365
for 4x15 but after two more quad exercises than usual, did you get better? Who knows?!

Second, by always introducing your body to new variants, you’re always risking creating too
much muscle damage. An intermediate amount is usually a good thing for growth, but too much
damage leaves you simply recovering from the disruption and not using those resources to
improve. On the other hand, if you are so used to all of the variants that you never get very sore or
create much damage anymore, then you’re probably not growing all that well either!

Next, we have potential problems with directed adaptation. It’s very likely that muscles grow best
when stimulated in progressively
progressively greater
greater fashions in similar ways. For example,
example, by bench
pressing, your pecs grow more in some fibers than others, and by being exposed to benching over
and over, those growing fibers are more likely to stick around with their new size when you
switch to prioritizing other chest fibers through the incline press, for example. But if you switch
the focus every workout, no momentum is built and there’s not much directed adaptation. This
might result in less growth than if you took a more planned and stable approach to your training.
This point is a bit more speculative than the others, but it does carry considerable theoretical
likelihood. In addition, the too-frequent changing of exercises doesn’t let you build as much
strength and volume tolerance (and thus provide as much overload for growth) as you could have
had with more stable training.

Super variation-hungry trainers will often seek out any and all exercises to “keep the body
guessing.” This often leads them to select exercises that rank very poorly on other training
principles, such as overload. For example, bosu ball cable flyes may very well be different from
your usual chest movements,
movements, but they
they are so unstable and so underloaded
underloaded that they pale in effect
effect
to the other moves and are largely a waste of time. Variation for its own sake is ok, but not when
the variants barely do anything. If you
y ou need to “change things up” so often that you end up
changing them up with crappy exercises, you’re probably overdoing variation.