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At my gym, a trainer provided me with an exercise routine. The first day, I work on my chest and biceps, the second, on my legs etc..
And later, he told that after three months I should go to see him to change that routine. And then three months after that, we will change it again etc.
Why does my working out routine needs to be changed every so often?
The main (good) reason why it's recommended to change your routine every so often is psychological, but it's a double edged sword.
On the one hand, if you do the same routine every time, you might get bored, you might stop challenging yourself because you know what you can do.
On the other hand, since you do know pretty well what kind of weights you can lift, you know when you're developing and when you're just lifting the same weights all the time.
In the extreme case, if you're doing isolation exercises where your main muscles get very strong in relation to the rest of your body, you might end up injuring yourself because of imbalances.
Why does my working out routine needs to be changed every so often?
As you train your program, you should be slowly increasing weight as you feel you can handle it and still meet the targets for your training. This level of progressive adaptation should keep you improving for a while, but there will come a time where adding that next 5 lbs or 2.5 kgs just won't work anymore. It's at this time you need to change your approach to training to keep seeing progress.
Will that be precisely at 3 months? Maybe. It might be a little sooner, it might be quite a bit later. 3 months is a pretty common amount of time to re-evaluate how things are going and what, if anything needs to be adjusted.
As already mentioned, there can be psychological benefits to changing things up regularly. Some people thrive on variation more than others. In any well designed program, there should be some allowance for occasional variation for when you are either having an off day or a day where you feel like nothing can stop you. The biggest challenge that anyone who designs programs has is to keep things interesting while still helping you see progress.
