I got back from a week of cycle touring in northern France this morning and the first thing I saw when I got home and opened the back door was our neighbour’s cat, Jake. He immediately padded into the house and coiled himself round my legs, mewing pitifully about having been abandoned for so long.
I’ve been home most of the day and except for a brief period when he was unceremoniously kicked out whilst I went to the village to restock the kitchen, Jake hasn’t left the house since I got home. He’s currently curled up on one of the kitchen chairs fast asleep, whilst I sit across from him writing this entry and roasting a pork joint for dinner.
His loyalty to me (and infidelity to his true owners) got me thinking about all the advice I’ve read over the years about loyalty to workouts. Are you the sort of person who is fiercely loyal to a workout pattern and struggles to make changes to it, or are you someone who changes your workout every time you read about a new one which you think may work better than your current workout? Which approach is best? Is there a perfect approach to rotating or changing your workout? Do you need to do it differently if you’re a woman?
So how often should we change our workouts?
No-one is ever going to agree on a single perfect approach because every trainee is different. However, most people agree that you need to change your workout frequently. At one extreme, Westside advocates conjugate periodization and they usually recommend that your maximum effort lift is changed every week.
What’s wrong with doing the same workout set for too long?
The main problem with doing the same workout with the same exercises for the same reps and sets, week after week, is that there is a significant chance of pattern overload and resultant injury. Paul Chek has written a set of articles for Testosterone Nation on pattern overload which is great (if fairly geeky) reading for anyone who enjoys moving heavy stuff about.
Well then, why not change your workout every time you’re in the gym?
In principle this may be fantastic, and Westside certainly get great results. Provided you work with good form you should avoid injury. Two problems though:
- You have no comparative. Over time you may get stronger, but how do you genuinely know that you’ve got stronger. What can you compare it to?
- You won’t know what weight to use (at least for the first few months). If you select a weight that is too low you may not get the best training effect and if you pick something too high you might get nowhere near the reps and sets you were after.
The added female complication
As a woman, I found I had an added complication. For the first half of the week when I start to menstruate I am as weak as a lamb. My core in particular weakens up so much that if I try to deadlift, squat, or bench some heavy weight I end up with poor form and get a sore back.
Fortunately I use a contraceptive pill which means that I can at least accurately predict my cycle and work round it. Using the contraceptive pill is, in fact, sometimes used in women’s power-lifting circles to control the timing of the power-lifter’s period. Most of us know that there are weeks in the cycle when we are at our strongest, as well as those weeks when we are at our weakest.
How do I adapt my workouts to fit with my menstrual cycle?
I’ve adapted my workout cycle to fit well with both my menstrual cycle and ensure that I get the periodization needed to avoid getting stale or suffering from any related injury.
- Weeks 1-3: 3 or 4 workouts a week, depending on whether I’m using a split body or total body approach. Until this week I was loosely following the principles of the Westside for Skinny Bastards program (since I am a natural ectomorph). I do the same maximum effort lift for 3 weeks.
- Week 4: Nicknamed the “rest week” and coinciding with my period, but not truly a rest week. It is a week of lighter weights with high reps and exercises that will help my form and posture for the long term.
After 2 or 3 cycles of this routine, changing the maximum effort lift each cycle, I make week 4 a genuine rest week, doing absolutely nothing for the whole week.
What do you do?
What I’m wondering is whether I am alone in finding that I can use my periods to create a natural periodization. How do other women arrange their workouts round their period? Do you just power on through it? If you do, how often do you change your workout?
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Very interesting! I too find that I am more susceptible to back pain / injury when it’s around the time of my cycle. I have recently been talking with my boyfriend, Nick Tumminello – also a trainer – about building my programs around that time of month to avoid such risks.
and here I thought it was just me!
Not just you at all.
Something I’ve started doing recently, rather than having every fourth week “off” is to arrange my standard training timetable so that I rarely train on Sunday afternoons and Mondays, since my period nearly always starts during the day on Sundays. I’m basically a weakling from the moment it starts through for about 48 hours but by the time I get to Tuesday evening I’ve usually strengthened up again. The new timetable means I don’t feel like I’ve had to make special concessions every month by missing a workout or changing my workout format for a session.
It’s helped by having such a reliable period – otherwise I would have to flex my workout content dependent on what was happening. It was really helpful to find out, through trial and error, how soon I’m usually back to max strength. I suspect every woman is a bit different to that extent and we all need to learn about what our individual strength cycles are, but before I started playing around with it I’d just assumed that I’d be weak right through until my period stopped again.
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