How to Tweak a Program for BIG Gains

There’s nothing worse than the program hopper, the person who jumps from program to program without fully investing the time and effort necessary to make physical improvements. These guys are usually the biggest moaners too, telling you that your methods don’t work because they’ve tried everything!

However, you aren’t going to hit on the right training program with your first try, it will take some trial and error to determine what exercises and loads work best for you. So a bit of program hopping is necessary, just take into account the following points.

It takes a minimum of 8 WEEKS of training with the same program for most long lasting increases in physical performance. This is 2 months of solid training. Whilst you will make immediate gains from any decent program (more reps than last week, more weight than last week etc.), these are almost completely neural gains.

The body will try to improve performance in the most efficient way possible, so if you want to add some muscle size, your body will adapt to make the nervous system better at your chosen exercises before it gives in and adds some muscle.

What works really well for you may not work as well for everyone else and vice versa. So beware taking the advice of someone who is raving about a particular training program, it may not work as well for you!

So when choosing and evaluating a training program, use this 3 step process to get the most out of every method you try:

1) Train on the program for a minimum of 8 weeks without changing anything

2) Keep the exercises that you got stronger on and drop the rest

3) Replace the dropped movements with similar but different exercises

Keep track of everything and use the above points every time you feel that a change is in order. Remember; it’s better to change one thing at a time with an existing program than to throw everything out and start again! If you have any more questions about this concept, just drop them in the comments section and I’ll help you out!

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Stay strong

Ant