Should You Do Different Exercises Each Workout? (Big Mistake!)

So you're working out multiple times a week. Let's say you're doing legs on Monday and then legs again on Thursday. Should you be doing the same exercises on both of those days, or should you be changing up the exercises between those 2 days? Well, let's cover it right now. Let me give you some background knowledge first. Your strength and your muscles can be challenged in many different ways. You don't just challenge your muscle in one For example, you can challenge your muscles in different positions. And let me explain what this might mean. Let's say you're doing a hip thrust, for example. A hip thrust challenges your muscle in the shortened position because at the very top, when you're squeezing your glutes, that is when the movement is the hardest. And that's where your muscle gets challenged in that shortened position versus let's take something like a Romanian deadlift, for example. That movement challenges your glutes in the lengthened to mid position. Because when you get to the bottom of an RDL, as you're starting to get out of the bottom and starting to come back up, that's when your glutes have the most tension on them and it's the hardest for them to do that work. Whereas when you start to stand up in the shortened position, the movement is not really that hard. You're just standing up with some weights in your hands. It's harder like on your grip than it is for your glutes. So that's one example. You can also challenge your strength at different parts of the rep. So let's take a tricep extension just as an example. When you're doing a tricep extension press down, that movement is hardest when your elbows are fully extended and you are having to really kind of like resist that movement from pulling you back up. Whereas if you take something like an overhead tricep extension, for example, that movement is hardest out of the bottom when your elbows are actually flexed as you get to about that middle point of the rep. Because when you fully extend your arms, you could probably just sit there with the weight all day and just like keep your arms right there. Your triceps really aren't getting challenged that much. But from right here to right here, that's when a lot of your tricep is getting challenged. So you can challenge your strength in different parts Of the rep. And you can also challenge your muscles from different angles and your strength from different angles. Let's take the very simple example of a flat dumbbell bench press versus an incline dumbbell bench press. A flat dumbbell chest press is going to work a little bit more of like the middle to lower part of your chest, whereas an incline bench press is going to work a little bit more of your upper chest and a bit more of your shoulder. And then last but not least, I could keep going here, but I'll just say one more. You can challenge your muscles from a bilateral perspective versus a unilateral perspective. What does that mean? A bilateral just means 2 legs or 2— both sides of your body. So think like a squat, for example. And then a unilateral just means 1 leg or 1 side. So let's say a Bulgarian split squat or a reverse lunge, for example. So as you can see, that's just a few, but there are many ways you can challenge your strength and your muscles to then improve improve your strength and your muscles. So with knowing this, I think if your goal is to get the most well-rounded muscle, the most well-developed muscle, the, the most total body strength that you are looking to get, you would almost be doing yourself a disservice if you kept in the same exercises for each workout of the week. Because if you only kept the same exercises, You would be missing out on so much opportunity to hit your muscle from different angles, different ranges of motion, bilateral versus unilateral, and so on and so forth, which then again would lead to less progress from building a well-rounded muscle and a well-rounded total body strength. All right, let's look at what your first leg day might look like and what your second leg day could potentially look like to make sure you are hitting your muscles from the different angles, different resistance profiles, different ranges of motion. Let's say that your first exercise is a squat. Remember, that is a bilateral movement, so you're doing both sides of your body at once. That is a squat movement pattern that you could simply on your second leg day just do some sort of unilateral movement for your squat instead. So in this situation, you would be doing a Bulgarian split squat instead because you're still doing a squat movement pattern. It's just you're doing a single leg squat movement pattern instead. All right, keeping with this same simple concept, let's say you're doing on your first leg day, you're doing a regular barbell Romanian deadlift. So again, you're doing a bilateral movement and you are using a barbell for this movement. Let's then say you go over to your second leg day. Let's say you're now doing a single leg Romanian deadlift again. You're just going from a bilateral to a unilateral. And then this time you are doing more of a dumbbell-based movement instead. And then let's just say, for example, you wanted to work your quads, right? Let's say on the first lower body day, you're doing that leg extension machine. This is going to work your quad in the shortened position. And that resistance profile is going to be, it's going to be very hard, Once you kind of get to the top, when your legs are kind of like fully, fully, uh, lengthened and squeezing, right? When you're squeezing your quad really hard. Then if you then swap that on day 2 for something called a reverse Nordic curl, and if you haven't done a reverse Nordic curl before, they are absolutely brutal on your quads because they work your quads in that lengthened, position. So when, like, when your knees are bent— now remember the leg extension, it was hardest when your legs went straight— the reverse Nordic curl is working when your knees are bent and you're really kind of like stretching your quads. And so again, a great way of knowing, like, if you want to work your quads, you can do it, but you can do it from a different angle in a different range of motion and, you know, working the muscle from that different resistance profile. I'll give you some examples when we talk about, let's say, an upper body one day during the week and then your second upper body day during the week. Let's say for example, you are doing a flat dumbbell bench press on your first upper body day. On your second upper body day, you could potentially do a cable chest press instead because the flat dumbbell chest press is going to be working your muscle more in that like lengthened position. So when you get to the bottom of that chest press, that is really where it's going to be the hardest for your chest to get that up. And it'll take the most work from your chest. Whereas when you're doing a cable chest press, for example, yes, it'll be hard kind of out of the bottom, but it'll really, really, really be hard in that like middle to kind of like that shortened position when you're talking about a muscle standpoint. And then again, from a resistance profile standpoint, The resistance profile of this flat dumbbell chest press is, again, you're, you're kind of working that rep at like the bottom of the rep. You're kind of getting stronger in the bottom of the rep. Whereas in that cable chest press, you're kind of now getting stronger towards like the latter half of that rep when you're kind of like finishing that rep out. If you only did a flat dumbbell chest press on both days, you would be missing out on that second part. And let's say for example, you are doing a one-arm lat pulldown to work your back and to work your lat. In this situation, you are now changing up the angle at which you are working your lat from, because in this variation right here for the one-arm lat pulldown, the angle is coming from above. So that's going to work your back in a little bit different way. Whereas when you're doing this one-arm lat row, It's no longer coming from above. It's coming from kind of directly in front of you. So while this is still going to work your back, it is going to work a different part of your back because it's working it from a little bit of a different angle. And then one last example for upper body. Let's say on your first upper body day, you're doing what is called a spider curl. As you can see right here, where your shoulders and arms are kind of in front of you. This is working your muscle in that shortened position that we kind of talked about earlier. And then let's say on the second upper body day, if you want to work your biceps again, you switch to this double arm face away cable curl. Now you're changing the angle because now your shoulders and your elbows are behind your body and now you're working your bicep in the lengthened position. As opposed to the shortened position. So hopefully, as you can see from those examples, it is usually going to be in your best interest if you're trying to make the most progress to challenge your muscles and your strength in different ways. That's why on the different days, if you're doing lower body and lower body or upper body and upper body or lower body and full body, usually doing different exercises throughout the course of your week is going to be what is best for you to see the most progress humanly possible. I know this can be a little bit overwhelming. And so what I will say is I did another video on this. You can check it out on my channel if you'd like to. Or I also wrote an article on this, which you can— I will drop down in the description of this video below. You can feel free to check that out. And the last thing I will say is if you're just like, man, I don't know, can you just make a workout program for me, Eric, and I'll follow it? I do that as well. You can head to erfcoach.com. Clubhouse.com. You can join up inside of my Clubhouse. That's where I have all of my training programs. We make a new training program every single month that you will be able to have access to, and all of it will be taken care of for you. You won't have to like think or worry about like how to create your own program. It'll all be right there for you if you're somebody who might be looking for that as well. Hope this video helped you. If you have questions, drop them below. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you found this helpful. Give it a thumbs up, and we'll chat soon.