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Too Much Variety Can Hinder Performance Gains
January 4, 2013 | by Brad Anderson
Variation is probably the most misunderstood principle of training. There are a variety of commercialized training methods that promote constant variation to keep your body guessing. While this is true in principal, too much variation in training leads to mediocre results. To compound the problem, the amount of variation of these training methods doesn’t fit the training level of the athlete.
The first misconception with variation is that you need to change the lifts you are doing from workout to workout or week to week. Variation should be achieved through changes in set and rep schemes and the weight lifted in relation to the athlete’s 1 repetition max. This does not mean change set and rep schemes so often that you are not maximizing the results from training one fitness parameter. The best way to achieve variation for most athletes is to change the weight lifted week to week. An anecdotal example is that competitive weightlifters use the same lifts multiple times a week and sometimes in the same day. These individuals constantly make physiological adaptations and enhance performance. The Olympic lifts these athletes train with are proven to greatly enhance vertical jump height, sprint speed, cutting ability, and reduce injuries. The point is that much less variation produces superior results than commercialized training methods and those that some trainers promote to increase athletic performance.
A recent form of variation that has become popular is daily undulating periodization. The fitness focus each day of the week is different. An example is on Monday the focus is on strength, on Wednesday the focus is strength endurance, and on Friday the focus is power. In theory this way of training should produce great results in all facets of athletic fitness. The reality is that you never make optimal gains in one fitness area or the other. The fitness focus should last anywhere from 4 to 10 weeks. This allows the athlete to maximize the gains in a fitness parameter and then change to another parameter while maintaining the previous fitness focus. This allows time for the athlete to become desensitized to the stimulus and when the training is focused again on previous fitness parameters adaptations can continue.
Variation should be low for athletes that have a beginner training status. Remember that just because an athlete is at the college or pro level does not mean that their training status is advanced. In my personal experience and talking to other strength coaches, advanced trained athletes are extremely rare at even the college level. With this in mind, the amount of variation for the majority of athletes should be low to moderate. So how much variation is low to moderate? I recommend to start with as little variation as possible to keep the athlete engaged in training and see what the results are. If the results are good stay with the same amount of variation until results begin to fall off.
Beginner trained athletes can achieve gains independent of variation and the amount of weight lifted. The focus for these athletes should be acquisition of appropriate form across a variety of lifts and sport movements. Even a focus on a specific fitness parameter for these athletes should be avoided because they will make gains and training for a fitness parameter requires 1 repetition max test. These facts show that variation should be low. As an athlete becomes more and more trained variation needs to increase substantially while focusing on one fitness parameter and maintaining the others.
These ideas shouldn’t be confined to the weightroom. Agility and speed training needs to be structured in respect to the principle of variation. Too much variation limits results, especially in respect to agility. A topic I will cover in a later blog is structure of agility and motor control and learning. Avoidance of too much variation will enhance the learning and appropriate development of agility.
Athletes need to be wary of commercialized fitness methods that suggest they ‘need to keep the body guessing’. Athletes need training that is backed by science and not selling a product. An issue that I did not cover is that these programs do not allow times for recovery and are rampant with overtraining syndrome. I do think some of these fitness methods are good for the general public because they get people doing more than nothing but are not appropriate for athletic performance.
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