The Exercise Lottery

Tom Haviland is a master of the Zercher squat.

Muscles don’t need to be confused. They need a reason to adapt!

Somewhere along the way, muscle confusion became a training principle. Maybe the Trappist monks have it figured out better than we do.

These guys have been brewing basically the same beer for generations. No pumpkin spice IPA, no new flavor every six weeks, no confusion. They just keep refining the process and getting better at it. Then they show up at beer competitions and these humble servant suddenly start collecting awards like the ’85 Bears running through the NFC!

They didn’t get there through novelty. They got there through mastery.

Take productive exercises, progressively overload them, eat enough food, recover, and give the process some time. You’re probably going to get bigger and stronger. That may not make you TikTok famous, but it’ll make you cock of the walk instead of another pussycat in the gym.

That doesn’t mean you should marry one program and do it until they wheel you out of the gym. Accommodation is real, and variation is useful. Hell, some of you probably know my work because of the exercise variations I’ve come up with and used over the years. I’m a huge believer in variation. The problem is when changing exercises becomes the program instead of something you’re using to keep progress moving.

If your squat is going up, you’re healthy, and you’re recovering, milk it. Changing a lift that’s still producing just because six weeks passed is like leaving a winning blackjack table because the cocktail waitress quit smiling at you.

Eventually things change. If a movement starts beating you up or demanding twice the work for half the return, move on. Loyalty is admirable, but this isn’t the Alamo. Adding 50 pounds to an elite squat could take years, lost jobs, squandered relationships, and getting chased out of the local Asian fusion buffet with a machete because last time you stayed four hours and ate no vegetables. At some point, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Don’t Throw Out the Main Thing First

Let’s say somebody has been squatting successfully for six months and suddenly stalls. Bodyweight hasn’t drastically changed, technique looks good, recovery is reasonable, and there isn’t some obvious screwup in the program. I’m probably not immediately throwing away the squat. I’d be more willing to start messing with the work around it.

There’s more room to play with accessory exercises. Changing a leg extension costs almost nothing. Changing the primary squat variation for somebody squatting 500 pounds affects technical practice, loading, specificity, and potentially fatigue. Those aren’t the same decisions.

If you’re a competitive powerlifter, the squat, bench press, and deadlift deserve some protection because those are the things you’re judged on. Your accessory exercises don’t have that same status. If a hamstring exercise has stopped doing its job, replace it. If another rowing variation gives you what you need without pissing off your elbows, use it. Nobody gets extra white lights because they stayed loyal to the same leg curl.

The Permanent Honeymoon Phase

Variation can create its own problem. Every new exercise has a learning curve, and performance will often improve pretty quickly in the beginning. Some of that may be physiological adaptation, but some is just learning the exercise. Your setup improves, coordination gets better, you figure out where to push, and the numbers go up.

Then right when the easy improvement starts slowing down, some people change the exercise again. Now you’ve got another new movement, another learning curve, and another quick jump in performance. Do that over and over and you can end up with somebody constantly getting better at new exercises without staying with anything long enough to find out what it can actually do for them.

It’s basically a permanent honeymoon phase. You’re trying so hard to avoid accommodation that constant novelty becomes the normal stimulus.

I don’t think there’s a magic number of weeks an exercise has to stay in a program. You have to rely on experience. The athlete matters and the exercise matters. A technically demanding competition lift is a completely different animal from a leg extension. Trying to solve that with a universal four week rule just creates another problem.

Sometimes Strength Fixes Technique

Coaches love cues. Chest up, knees out, stay over the bar, keep your back tight. Sometimes that’s exactly what somebody needs. Other times the athlete already knows what he’s supposed to do. He just isn’t strong enough to keep doing it when the weight gets heavy.

Take a lifter who keeps folding over in the squat. Everybody starts searching for some specialized variation or another cue to keep him upright. Maybe that’s the answer, but maybe his back is just weak. Build the hell out of it and dollars to donuts says some of that technique improves by default. Sometimes the athlete knows the right position; he just isn’t strong enough to hold it under load.

Strength and technique aren’t living in two separate universes. Your ability to execute good technique under load depends partly on being physically strong enough to hold the positions you’re trying to hit. Sometimes another cue helps. Sometimes you need to strengthen the machinery.

SAID Doesn’t Mean Dress Rehearsal

Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands is one of the most important principles in training, but people can take it so literally that it becomes ridiculous.

If specificity meant everything in training had to look exactly like the sport, football strength and conditioning would be easy. Put the kid in a 20 pound helmet and 40 pound shoulder pads and start running football drills. Football players wear helmets and shoulder pads, so heavier ones must be even more specific. Keep adding weight until his neck looks like a Brahma bull and apparently we’ve solved athletic development.

That’s obviously not what SAID means.

If a football player needs more force production, we can build strength. If he needs better acceleration, we can sprint. If he needs to repeatedly express those qualities, we’d better have some conditioning in there too. Then he practices football and learns how to use those qualities while actually playing football.

The weight room doesn’t need cosplay as the sport. If a powerlifter’s back is the weak link in his squat, the exercise that builds his back doesn’t have to look like a squat. If stronger hamstrings help an athlete maintain better positions during a clean, his hamstring work doesn’t have to look like a clean.

Specificity matters, but interpreting it too literally can get stupid in a hurry. Some ideas are about as safe as deciding you need an outdoor table late at night at Jesse’s El Taco de Mexico in Oxnard. Use some judgment.

Variation Needs a Job

I’m not anti variation. I’ve used it my entire coaching career. It can bring up weak points, reduce repetitive stress, provide a different stimulus, emphasize a muscle group, or let somebody keep training hard when something is getting beat up. It’s also one way to deal with accommodation.

I just want a reason for doing it.

If we’ve identified a problem and another exercise looks like a better tool for fixing it, make the change. If we’re changing half the workout because four weeks passed and the spreadsheet says it’s time, we’re getting into programming cosplay.

Even boredom can be a legitimate reason. Adherence matters. If somebody hates an exercise and I can get essentially the same result from something they enjoy, I’m not going to turn it into a religious argument.

The old school guys didn’t have every term we have now. They might not have talked about accommodation, dynamic correspondence, stimulus to fatigue ratios, or motor learning, but plenty of them understood how to get strong. Put weight on the bar, get better at the lift, build some muscle, and keep doing it while it works. When it stops working, figure out why before you blow the whole thing up.

Modern strength science should help us do that better. It shouldn’t turn training into a weekly exercise lottery where the coach gets to show off how many variations he knows.

Milk what works. Change what needs changing. Most importantly, know why you’re doing either one.

Variation should extend progression, not replace it.

And if you’re tired of playing the exercise lottery and want the thinking already done for you, start with one of my JoshStrength programs. Every exercise has a job, every variation has a reason, and the goal is simple: get stronger HERE.