You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to know that it’s good to keep your body guessing if you want to lose fat over the long term. If you always do the exact same drills, you’ll find that the body gets acclimated and when that happens, it’s not burning fat the way it used to . That’s why I say you need variety in your workout. You might want to discard this approach to fitness as “old school” or “mythical”, but it’s the truth. Fitness professionals accept this as a fact without questioning. This is precisely the reason that I expect you to change your routine every month. This involves adding new exercises, or doing the same exercises different ways. You can even change the order that you do your exercises in: anything to make your workout different.

This is essential to your program because after a month of the same routine, you’re just spinning your wheels: going nowhere fast. I know that it takes time to sit down and plan a monthly workout, but you’ll have to do this if you want to stay lean and mean.

Another way to shake up the system is by varying the intensity of what you are doing. Go from long and slow to fast and hard, or somewhere in between. One thing that is very good to do is to break your workout into circuits by pairing up a few exercises into a mini sequence that is performed separately. This gives you more ways to change things around even when you don’t have a lot of new drills.

There are thousands of exercises and variations and intensity levels that you can mix and match from month to month. Even choose some that you hate because that will keep your body guessing too.