Siwtching Movements Very Often?

Hi Barbell Medicine Fam,

How ludacris would it be to switch movements every week? Ex: ssb squat rotated with barbell squat and leg press, or trap bar dead with conventional deadlift with sumo dead. Goals are strictly hypertrophy (running bodybuilding blocks indefinitely with a strength block mixed once in a while).

Random reasons why I think this is somewhat feasible:

  1. While, based on running pretty much all of your templates, that there is no indication of switching movements weekly but rather switching by block, a lot of your templates still have a great deal of variation with assistance and supplemental exercies within the blocks and they advocate user preference
  2. Based on listening and reading a lot of Barbell Medicine resources (thanks again!), in terms of general strength, hypertrophy, injury prevention, there isn’t anything special about the big 3, and, if available, the utility of speciality bars and machines can actually have positive outcomes
  3. Listening to Jordan on the RTS podcast advocate a “wider base” of movement profficiency and strength-although I’m probably abusing that concept with what I’m doing by changing things weekly?
  4. Currently im sort of “unmotivated” after gaining so much strength on strengthlifting, powerbuilding, and hypertrophy templates (all with great success so again thanks!) and currently my numbers running the bodybuilding block by comparison are quite low. Even as I know that absolute load on the bar isn’t a priority for myself right now, It keeps my motivation high to just hit an exercise and have a mindset of “im switching movements so I know my numbers may be low as a result, so let me just bro out, hit the set at prescribed rpe, and move on”
  5. i’ll still be following a sound progression plan that hits the prescribed RPE’s, which I assume is the most important aspect of programming rather than exercise selection, which is mainly for adherence. (Although one can argue that picking exercises “you feel like working” for the day improves motivation, and thus output performance, etc)
  6. Jordan’s answer to this old thread:
    https://forum.barbellmedicine.com/fo…novel-stimulus
    “in practice I have programmed both more frequent variation (weekly) as well as less variety (6-8 weeks).
    It really depends on the individual’s response, preferences, and overall goals.
    If someone is able to build momentum for whatever goal is important to them via reduced variation change then we’ll do that. Conversely, if someone prefers more variation or has a goal that requires more variation change, then we’ll do that!”

An important caveat that I’m (incorrectly?) assuming for myself:
I’m assuming I’m aleady reasonably proficient with movements having trained them the past 2 years. So maybe the learning curve wouldn’t be as steep with each new movement? I honestly don’t know. Whenever I hear that people say they took a few weeks to get “used” to a movement and a lot of initial strength gains are nuerological, I just wonder because won’t the body’s hypertrophic response be similar to a SSB vs barbell squat or conventional vs trap bar deadlift even though you rotate through them weekly? Really curious on your thoughts!

This was really long winded so I apologize! I wanted to at least try to attempt to show that I thought about it. Thank you for reading all of your hard work,

Monster

1 Like

Monster,

I think you’d likely generate less hypertrophy and strength from it due to not really developing a tolerance to anything, thereby causing more fatigue that you may not thrive in. The hypertrophy response is similar between variations in general, though some people may respond better (or worse) to another. However, building training tolerance to the requisite amount of volume requires some consistency in movement or different programming strategy that accounts for this. I like to program a given amount of variation and run with that over a block. Then again, you may do just fine and this could all be just a hunch that doesn’t play out in the real world.

-Jordan

2 Likes

Got it thank you! That makes sense, I thought i’d be able to “get away” with a very frequrny exercise variation, but if it’ll result, most likely, in inferior results then I’ll just keep chugging along.

Thanks as always,
Monster

1 Like