Want Consistent Muscle Gains? Stop Program Hopping

If you’ve ever structured your fitness regimen around the concept of “muscle confusion,” you may be a victim of pseudoscience. This buzz phrase, ultra-popular in the early 2010s, was sold as the magic ingredient to endless muscle-building progress. Surprise your muscles, proponents said, and they’ll grow like weeds. 

The truth is quite the contrary: Constantly jumping from exercise to exercise (or program to program) harms your strength and muscle-building progress more than it helps. While peer-reviewed research does show that strategic variation in exercise selection can positively influence adherence to exercise (important for long-term fitness) and elicit similar results, the body of evidence proving that periodized resistance training—a means to structure your workout program over time—produces serious results is too strong to ignore (1, 2).

Before you ditch longtime, go-to lifts or programs for the latest fad, let’s take a closer look at why sticking with some fundamental exercises over the long haul might be the secret sauce you’re missing.

About the Experts

Milica McDowell, Ph.D. is a physical therapist and clinical exercise physiologist.

Chris Mohr, Ph.D., R.D. is a fitness and nutrition subject matter expert and performance coach. He was the consulting Sports Nutritionist for the Cincinnati Bengals and the University of Massachusetts Athletic Program.

Domenic Angelino, M.S., C.S.C.S. is a personal trainer, published exercise scientist, fitness writer, and fitness industry consultant.

What’s Wrong with Program (or Exercise) Hopping?

Program hopping, or switching from program to program without ever completing at least one mesocycle—four- to 12-week workout plans—is attractive because new exercises bring excitement and a challenge. Doing the same exercises week after week can certainly get boring: No one’s arguing against that. 

If you’re constantly chasing variety believing that switching things up will give you better results, however, you’ll likely wind up disappointed. Plus, hopping programs makes it more difficult to gauge whether you’re actually getting stronger.

What about “muscle confusion”?

“But when I switch programs, my muscles get super sore, and I feel like I get stronger.” We’ve all heard (and sometimes believed!) this one. Variety confuses the muscles, shocks them, and keeps them on their figurative toes. If the muscles become sore, that’s a sign the workout is working, right? (Not exactly, but that’s a myth for another day). 

As the legendary muscle growth expert Menno Henselmans wrote, most gains—i.e. improvements in strength—that occur within a few weeks of starting a new exercise are largely neural in nature (3).

Milica McDowell, Ph.D., physical therapist, and clinical exercise physiologist, explains further: “When you start a new exercise program, the neural system changes first. It takes a lot longer for the muscle to change,” she says. “Generally speaking, if we’re asking someone to do a specific exercise program, we’re looking at four to eight weeks to see muscle change, depending on the training history of the person.”  

“But we can see neural changes, such as what happens when you learn new movement patterns, within the first week to 10 days,” McDowell continues. “These adaptations include better coordination between your brain and your body. You’re kind of getting into the flow: Your brain and your body get more connected.”

All of these neural changes are exciting and are, indeed, bonafide progress in a big way. But going through this process over and over and over again—which is what happens when you switch programs over and over and over again—stalls true strength gains. 

In other words: A new exercise might feel challenging and give you a sense of progress, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into long-term gains in size or strength.

Why consistency wins

When you perform a specific lift regularly, several things happen. First, as we covered, your body gets better at the movement itself through neural adaptations. 

As Chris Mohr, R.D., Ph.D., explains, “Neural adaptations are how the nervous system changes in response to new physical activities. When you start a new exercise, your body becomes more efficient at activating the required muscles, but muscle growth happens later.”

Domenic Angelino, M.S., C.S.C.S., notes that this is especially true for beginners. “Those who are newer to lifting weights can take around 6 to 8 weeks to neurologically adapt to totally new movement patterns. During this period, a lot of the increases in strength you experience come from simply getting used to the exercise, rather than from a generalizable increase in muscular strength.” 

So, in the case of beginners, hopping from one program to another isn’t just inefficient; it can also be downright counterproductive.

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Maximizing muscle growth

Muscle growth—what many of us are after—takes time. The body requires consistent stress to signal the need for adaptation, which leads to an increase in muscle fiber size, thus an increase in strength. However, when you’re constantly introducing new exercises, your body spends more time learning how to do the movements and less time actually building muscle.

Plus, following a program consistently allows you to engage in one of the most fundamental concepts in strength and hypertrophy: progressive overload. This is the principle of continually overloading the muscle in a way that elicits growth; most often, progressive overload is accomplished by increasing the load lifted for a given exercise week after week. 

This becomes critically important as you become more trained. “Becoming more well-trained means becoming more adaptation-resistant,” Angelino explains. “When you become more adaptation-resistant, you will require a greater degree of stimulus in order to incentivize your body to adapt to the demands imposed upon it.”

Importantly, a greater stimulus does not equate to a new stimulus. “If you greatly alter the structure of your program week-to-week,” Angelino says, “you’ll find that your workouts won’t compound on one another in an effective way since you’ll be emphasizing totally different muscles each week.”

Keep a handful of exercises in rotation, always

Instead of chasing novelty every few weeks, a more effective strategy is to include a few fundamental exercises that remain in your routine for a long time—months, years, or forever, even. 

These exercises act as benchmarks, allowing you to track your progress accurately and steadily over time. Think of them as the “control group” in your strength-gaining experiment, providing a consistent measure of how much stronger or more muscular you’re getting.

For strength and hypertrophy, compound lifts like the squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press are often the best candidates for these benchmarks. They recruit multiple muscle groups and allow for progressive overload, which is key to building muscle. By sticking with these exercises, you can measure true progress in a way that new exercises simply don’t allow.

As Mohr emphasizes, “Maintaining long-term consistency with specific exercises allows enough time for both neural adaptations and muscle growth to fully develop. This leads to more apparent strength gains and better skills in those exercises.” In other words, sticking with your bread-and-butter lifts isn’t just about ego; it’s about making measurable progress.

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So, When Should You Change Programs or Exercises?

Angelino explains that variation is not always bad. “Strategic variation is inherently a component of effective program design and can allow you to tailor your workouts to accentuate the effect you are trying to achieve,” he says. In fact, Angelino states that it’s not necessary to perform the same exact exercises forever. 

However, changes should support and complement the recent training you have done, he says, an exception being when you are specifically intending to switch programming goals, like what someone would do when moving from one mesocycle to another.

Mohr points out that variety helps “target different muscles and angles, which can better mimic real life,” where movements are rarely confined to a single pattern.” But he also cautions that frequent program changes make it difficult to track whether your exercises are truly driving long-term gains. 

The trick is to find the sweet spot between consistent foundational lifts and enough variety to keep things engaging—because adherence, a.k.a. continuing to exercise, is a major factor in long-term fitness (4).

This is important to consider because muscle and/or strength gains aren’t the desired outcome for everyone. If you’re someone who is exercising for the sake of your health, and not necessarily to become the next Stoltman or Schwarzenegger, variety may be the ticket to your goals. 

According to McDowell, a varied plan can keep you going. Lifting on Monday and Wednesday, playing pickleball on Tuesday, swimming on Thursday, going to Zumba on Friday, and hiking on Saturday aren’t going to get you jacked—but they will keep you healthy and fit.

If you’re an advanced lifter, strategic variation is more valuable

Angelino adds that strategic variation is key, especially for more advanced lifters. “If you are newer to exercise, limit variation in exercise type. If you are more advanced and very adaptation-resistant, you will likely require strategic variation in exercise type regularly in your programming.” 

The idea is to keep the majority of your routine stable while making small adjustments that keep you motivated and address weak points.

When adding variety, the goal should be to build on the foundation you’ve laid. For instance, if you’ve been bench pressing regularly, switching to dumbbell presses or incline presses can provide a fresh stimulus while still challenging your chest and triceps. This way, you’re not attempting to “confuse your muscles” but strategically layering new movements that complement your existing progress.

Sure enough, a 2022 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that exercise variation could have a positive effect on resistance training outcomes in some cases, and a negative effect in other cases (namely, the latter being excessive variation) (5). 

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How to Keep Things Fresh Without Program Hopping

If you get bored quickly, you’ll be pleased to know that there are ways to keep your workouts interesting while still focusing on your foundational lifts. 

One effective approach is to rotate accessory exercises while keeping your main lifts—like squats, deadlifts, and presses—consistent. For instance, you could alternate between different lunge variations (reverse lunge, Bulgarian split squat, etc.) every few weeks while sticking with the same squat pattern. This not only keeps your workouts fresh but also allows for progression in a way that you can track.

Another option is to vary your rep ranges or intensity techniques, like incorporating drop sets, tempo changes, or pauses. This keeps your training fresh and challenging while still allowing your mainstay lifts to serve as consistent benchmarks.

Ultimately, exercise variety can be beneficial, but only when it supports your long-term goals. Strategic variation can help you break plateaus, keep workouts exciting, and ensure well-rounded development, but remember that the core of any effective strength program lies in consistency. 

By keeping a few benchmark exercises as constants in your routine, you can introduce enough change to stay motivated while still reaping the benefits of long-term progression.