The Benefits of Diversifying Your Workouts

At Tahoe Fitness Loft, we've got so much to choose from so you can diversify your workouts all under one roof.

We love a workout routine. It's terrific to get into a groove with your fitness and wellness habits. But, we also know that a groove can become a rut over time. 

Anything done day in, day out, the same way, over and over again gets stale, dull, flat, boring. You feel it, and your body feels it, too. 

So while we love seeing you stay consistently committed to your health journey, we also advocate for you to change things up. We’ve touched on the importance of change in your wellness practices before. Here, we wanted to focus more on the benefits of diversifying your workouts.

Your Body Has Many Moves

There are so many muscles in your body and your joints can move in so many amazing ways. But most of us don't utilize the body to its full extent. Over time, movement patterns set in. The way you walk, sit, stand, as well as lift weights, carry groceries, throw a ball—all your habitual movements become routine. 

On one hand, this is great. It means that you don’t have to consciously think through every thing you do every time you do it. That’d be exhausting! But it also means that you’ll continue to keep the same muscles firing, in the same sequence, going through the same range of motion. 

This is as true for everyday activities as it is for movements you do to stay fit and strong. There’s no singular exercise routine or activity that calls for a full range of motion of all your body parts or engages all your muscles in the many ways they can be engaged. 

When you stick to the same routine, it can lead to muscle imbalances, limited flexibility, injury, plateauing, and burnout. Introducing new stimuli by changing your workouts helps you to avoid all these pitfalls. 

Having access to a variety of equipment can help you change up your movement routine and keep things fresh.

Imbalances and Flexibility

Let’s look at these pitfalls a little more closely, starting with muscle imbalances and limited flexibility. When you do the same movements over and over, you’ll be utilizing some muscles more than others. The muscles that aren’t getting used much become comparatively weak and sometimes overstretched (which also makes them weak). 

Similarly, when you do the same movements over and over, your range of motion begins and ends with those movements. 

The muscle imbalances caused by some muscles being comparatively stronger while others are comparatively weaker, along with limited ranges of motion, can result in discomfort and even injury. 

Said in a more positive way: when you change up your workout routine, it helps to keep you moving with greater ease and feeling better, and it lowers your risk of injury. 

Diversifying your workout with balance and agility exercises can further boost your ease of movement and resistance to injury. These typically more delicate, refined exercises and movements tap into smaller stabilizing muscles. These are muscles that can often be overpowered by larger muscles around them when you're doing more intense exercise.

It can be surprising to discover how much better you can move and feel when you learn how to strengthen, engage, and activate all the muscles of the body. 

Plateauing and Burnout

On the topic of plateauing and burnout, it’s important to remember that improvement from a particular exercise will level out at some point. If you do the same movement at the same intensity, your body will adapt to that and will stop improving. To keep making gains, you can incrementally increase the difficulty of an exercise, but at some point, you’ll stop seeing improvement here, too. 

If continued improvement is your aim, you need to change the stimulus. Said another way, that’s when you need to change your workout. 

It’s important to remember, too, that gains don’t always come by lifting more or doing more. Sometimes gains come from participating in restful, rejuvenating activities. Always important to remember is that the body becomes stronger and fitter in the recovery phase: workouts are the breakdown part of the equation, and the gains are made while you rest and repair. 

Also to be mindful of is burnout: even the most motivated and goal oriented among us need to reset. Changing your workout routine can be just the shift you need, both physically as well as emotionally and mentally. Newness fires up different muscles and different neural pathways.

Building a Robust Cardiovascular System

Changing your workout routine also applies when addressing your cardiovascular health. Your cardiovascular system has many modes: it operates differently depending on the intensity and duration of your activity. Short bursts of very intense activity call on different processes than longer, less intense efforts. And there are yet other processes utilized for moderately intense, medium duration efforts. 

In order to develop a fully healthy cardiovascular system, it’s important to utilize all the various ways your cardiovascular system can operate. Easier, longer efforts; moderately challenging, slightly shorter efforts; and intense, very short efforts. They each have their benefits and changing your workouts to incorporate each mode can help improve your overall health.

The Power of Community

Changing up your workout routine benefits your mind and body, and it can also benefit your social life. Engaging in a new activity can introduce you to a whole new community. Whether you are joining a new Pilates or Barre class, hiking group, or trying out Spin or TRX workouts for the first time, you’re likely to be around new people. 

If you aren’t someone who’s worked out or done activities in a group setting in the past, this is a terrific time to give it a go. We’ve talked about the power of community here before: bonding with others over fitness goals can be motivating and rewarding. 

You can also bring in community to help get you over the hurdle of trying something new. It can be intimidating to be the beginner and the new person in a crowd. Enlist a few friends to join you and be beginners together. Feeling awkward and fumbling around by yourself isn't something many of us look forward to, but with friends, it can be a blast. 

Benefits at Any Stage of Your Fitness Journey

Whether you are an elite level athlete in your 20s or over 60 and just starting your fitness journey, diversifying your workout routine is beneficial (please always check with your doctor first, of course). More and more, more mature adults are trying new activities and sports–and at all levels! 

Working with a professional trainer or coach is advisable for any level of athlete, and especially if you’re just starting out. Participating in group classes is terrific as well.

Learning from the expertise of others is always a great way to avoid pitfalls and maximize your growth curve—getting the most out of the time you spend on your fitness and strength. Those in the know also can also help expand your horizons beyond what you might discover going it alone. 

You never know what new discovery you’ll make or benefit you’ll find when you diversify your workout regimen.