I’ve always felt that doing a lot of different things help to make life more interesting, and I’m also aware that specializing in certain areas of life is needed to reach full potential in them.
How does this translate to weight training? From what I have read, the same principles apply: Variety is good, and so is specialization. I’d like to go over a way to look at variety when it comes to building muscle and getting stronger overall.
Through my study of how muscles work (reading personal trainer manuals to get ready for certification tests mostly) , I’ve been interested to find out that muscles operate a lot like armies. There are a certain amount of troops (muscle fibers) that operate as part of a (motor) unit. When that unit is asked to work, it goes all out until it is told to stop working.
So when you are lifting weight, your system asks a certain amount of motor units to do work in a certain area for a certain amount of time. These motor units go all out. If there is less work to do, they don’t go easy. Your body just uses fewer motor units.
As you are training, your motor units get more efficient, so you can get stronger without building any muscle. After 1 or 2 months of training however, your body starts to build muscle to get stronger.
Since your body recruits motor units in certain areas for certain jobs, bigger jobs require more units to be recruited. For example, squat exercises use motor units from all over the body, especially the legs, whereas triceps extensions use far less motor units.
The reason variety is so important is that it’s the only way you can regularly use all of the motor units in a given muscle group. A bench press uses certain motor units, and a dumbbell fly uses some of the same and some different muscle units from the same muscle group.
If you only do bench press for your chest, you are not training all of the motor units in your chest. If you do several exercises for your chest, there is a greater chance that all motor units will be trained, resulting in more overall strength gains.
This doesn’t mean you have to do 10 chest exercises for every workout, you can rotate them in and out of your workouts without losing strength. You will actually probably gain strength by adding variety to your workouts.
The other benefit of adding variety is that you reduce the chances of overuse injury. If you are always doing the same exercises when you work out, you may overuse those joints and connective tissues to the point where they result in tears or other injuries. By adding variety, certain areas can get extra time to recover and rebuild.
If you were an army general, you would want to make sure all your troops were ready for action. You would use your special forces for certain jobs, but you would make sure that all of your troops had the training and efficiency needed to help whenever called upon.
The nicest thing about adding variety to your weight training, on top of all the benefits, is that nobody has to die.
