How to Use Variation in Your Weight Lifting Workouts to Maintain Interest
Doing the same workout every day can be monotonous. It can become emotionally boring. It can also become physically boring.
Your body reacts to mild physical stress by increasing strength and endurance to deal with the additional load. That is why exercise increases your fitness level. When your workout is the same every day, after a while your body stops increasing either strength or endurance. It certainly maintains them, but progress stops.
Avoid Physical and Mental Fatigue with Variety
Increasing repetitions can increase your muscle tone and strength. Increasing the weight you lift can also increase both. However, there are other ways to introduce variety. Many people stick with the same exercise week after week for each muscle group. There are multiple lifts that work the same muscle group.
A Few Varieties of Shoulder Exercises:
Here are some examples of shoulder exercises. Note that each motion puts a little more weight on a particular subset of your shoulder muscles:
Military Press: the standard press of a barbell straight above your head. This is usually done in a standing position. All weight machines have a position for the military press.
Military Press with Dumbells: dumbells are the individual small barbells for each hand. Many gyms also have sets of barbells with pairs for each weight gradation. This press, while exercising the same muscles as when using a barbell, also requires some balance. You can’t have one arm and shoulder’s slight weakness be compensated by the strength of your other arm and shoulder.
Side Lifts with Dumbells: start with a dumbell in each hand and your arms hanging down by each side. Lift both arms out and up in a semicircular motion while keeping your arms straight. A variation is to allow some arm bend. The bend sometimes makes it a little easier. This puts the most weight on your top shoulder muscles.
Back Lifts with Dumbells: these are done while lying face down on a padded bench. When lying on your front, lift the dumbells straight up toward the ceiling. In other words, you are lifting the dumbells toward your back. This exercises the back of your shoulders.
Each muscle group has a large variety of exercises that are available. This is just a small sample for brevity. A quick internet search will give you a large listing of exercises you can try. Some will be more difficult than they look and some will be easier.
By introducing variety into your workouts, you also introduce a little extra stress on your muscles, lungs, heart, etc. Therefore, even when you are doing the same number of repetitions with the same total amount of weight, your muscle strength, endurance, and cardiovascular capacity all increase. Your workout that takes about the same time. And it makes things more interesting.
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