If you’ve trained before, you are familiar with the dreaded plateau. You’ve been pushing harder and harder but now you’ve reached a point where you seem to be “stuck”. You haven’t seen any significant progress in a while, what’s going on? Variety matters, and without it, eventually, your body will become accustomed to the same exercises and you may become bored or push yourself to the point of overtraining. Regardless of your fitness level, after prolonged periods of intensive resistance training, it’s not unlikely that you would experience a decrease in neuromuscular activation and muscular strength and as a result, will multiply the prevalence of overtraining symptoms.

What is the definition of a variation? A Variation is “the purposeful change of program design variable assignments to expose yourself to new or different training stressors.” Periodization programming is a great way to avoid hitting plateaus (we break this down in a future lesson). It’s advised to change the sequence of load, volume, frequency, and/or rest periods between the training week or even a single training session.