Our Obsession With Variety

We're conditioned to chase the newest thing. New workout, new method, new gadget, new plan promising to finally be the one that works. Scroll through any fitness feed and you'll find someone telling you the thing you did yesterday is already outdated.

Here's the thing, though: exercise physiology hasn't changed much in the last fifty or sixty years. The principles that made runners and lifters fitter in the 1970s still make runners and lifters fitter today. Progressive overload works. Consistent aerobic volume works. Specificity works. None of that is new, and none of it needs to be.

The problem with constantly switching things up isn't that new workouts are bad. It's that you lose your ability to tell what's actually working. Change too many variables at once and you can't isolate the one that mattered. That's not really a training principle so much as it's just the scientific method. If you want to know whether something is making you fitter, you have to hold enough else steady to actually see it.

My Monday Test

Right now, training for a half marathon, I've brought back something I hadn't used in a couple of training cycles: a once-a-week sub-threshold run on Mondays. Not quite race pace, but close to it, somewhere around 7:15–7:20 for me. Each week I add a mile, but the pace stays put. Volume goes up. Effort target doesn't move.

It's become my "am I getting fitter" test. Same effort, same pace target, slightly more distance, week over week. If I can hold that pace for a longer stretch than I could a few weeks ago, that's real signal to me. As I get closer to race day, I may begin increasing the pace as well, but only if I've had a few consistent weeks that tell me i'm getting fitter.

It also shows me other things. Last week I ran five miles at that pace in extreme humidity, and it was a grind just to hold 7:20–7:25. The following week I did six miles in far cooler temperatures. I held right around 7:15, and could have held it for another 2 miles. That's the kind of comparison you only get when the workout itself doesn't change out from under you.

There's a confidence piece here too. By the time I get through this block, that run should be nine or ten continuous miles at threshold — basically a dress rehearsal for how the second half of the race is going to feel.

One caveat worth naming: that much continuous work at that intensity carries more injury risk than breaking the same volume into two or three chunks with a few minutes of easy float between them. I lean toward the longer continuous version because I adapt well to it and I know myself well enough to back off if something starts to feel off. That second part matters as much as the workout itself — know which version fits how your body actually responds, and know when to pull the plug.

Same Idea, Different Barbell

I build strength programs the same way. For four to six weeks, the core lifts largely stay the same. That's not exciting. It can start to feel repetitive by week three. But it's the only way to actually see progress — more reps at the same weight, more weight at the same reps, whatever the goal is. Swap the exercises out every week and you'll still benefit, it will just be harder to gauge improvement.

None of this means never changing anything. I don't hold that Monday sub-threshold run all year — just for a block, then I step away from it, then I bring it back later in the training cycle. It doesn't even have to be weekly. Dropping in a repeatable benchmark workout — six or eight 800s, 5 x 1k, or whatever your favorite benchmark workout may be — a couple of times over a block gives you a fixed point of comparison you can actually trust.

The Boring Part Is the Point

With as much content as we're all served telling us there's a better, newer, faster way to train, the least exciting answer is usually the right one: pick something, hold it steady, and come back to it often enough to see whether it's working. That's not a lack of imagination. It's how you actually know if you're getting fitter, instead of just guessing.