squats will stop you in your tracks and make you have to stop training quads or go much easier to

heal up. But if you alternate months of high bar squatting with months of mostly leg pressing, you
can let the part of your knee irritated by squats to heal while still getting great growth from leg
presses, and then come back to squats later and repeat in that fashion.

4.) How does variation application change with training age?

In general, beginners to training are very unlikely to develop staleness to growth because
EVERYTHING is so new. In addition, one of their top priorities needs to be to learn the technique
fundamentals on the basic movements (squats, pullups, rows, presses, deadlifts, etc.) so they can
safely and effectively use those moves for the rest of their training careers. Switching exercises
often is thus both needless and negative for beginners, and they can go between 6-12 of their first
months of training without deviating from their core moves much or at all. On the other end of
the scale, super advanced bodybuilders may be so resistant to adaptation in general that they
need a high degree of variation to keep gains coming. In such cases, switching exercises every 2-4
weeks might be beneficial on the net balance.

For most of the rest of us, alternating moves every 1-3 mesocycles is probably best, which means
that you can use an exercise for between 4 and 24 weeks before replacing it with another one for
the same muscle group. For most intermediate and advanced lifters, I recommend 8-16 week
rotations.

Lastly, if you’re a STRENGTH athlete (weightlifter,

(weightlifter, powerlifter, strongman), you need to get as
much neural efficiency out of your muscles as possible and must always stay pretty sharp on the
competition moves. Thus, you will use variation MUCH LESS than someone training for
hypertrophy for its own sake would. For example, in a 6 month prep for a PL meet, 2 months of
that prep might stay completely away from the PL moves (the first 2 months), and the rest of the
time the competition moves will be trained in some way every week.