The Integra Blog

Client Questions: How Often Should You Change Your Program?

George says: “Ian King suggests that you should change your program every 3 weeks and Charles Poliquin says that you should change your workout every 4 to 6 weeks. This is to prevent a situation where your progress stalls or plateaus.

In other words, the particular stimulus you’ve chosen (exercises, sets, reps and rest) is no longer eliciting a noticeable adaptation (increased strength / muscle growth / fat loss etc). You may not need to completely change your whole workout, there are many variables that can be altered to maintain progression.

Ideally, you would want to plan your program in phases of training, each phase would have a focus (e.g. hypertrophy / strength, etc) and you would plan to prevent plateaus. But how could you monitor this?

At Integra, we tend to progress most clients’ programs every 3-6 weeks, dependant on a variety of factors and variables that we monitor.”