Hi Nie!

I work out six days a week. Here's my current schedule:

• Monday - Weights - Leg Day™
• Tuesday - Yoga; Pickleball
• Wednesday - Weights - Chest, Shoulders, Triceps; Pickleball
• Thursday - Weights - Back, Biceps
• Friday - Pickleball
• Saturday - Pickleball practice
• Sunday - Optional pickleball session (sometimes replaces Saturday's practice session)

This has pretty much been my routine for the past few years.

I've moved some things around to allow better recovery between workouts, but all the workouts are the same. For example, I used to do Leg Day™ on Tuesdays after Yoga, but I felt that was just too much legs in one day and my strength and form were suffering at the gym. So I moved Leg Day™ to Mondays before Yoga and I think that's better.

My "weights" days go through a six-week progression from high reps, low weight to low reps, high weight.

Every time I switch back to high-reps workouts, I pay the price. My legs don't like that jump from low to high reps at all, so I'll basically be sore the entire week, just hoping things return to normal before the next week starts.

At a high level, that seems a little weird. I'm doing the same exercises, adjacent to the same workouts, but sometimes I feel great and sometimes I can barely move.

That just goes to show that you can make significant changes within your regular routines without actually changing the routine itself. And those changes within your routine can teach you a lot about the other parts of your routine.

For example, I learned how much different my performance is when I began my Leg Day™ workouts on tired legs (because I do yoga earlier that day), so I switched it up to prioritize better gym workouts. I also sometimes move pickleball sessions around if my legs feel especially fatigued (it's not fun playing pickleball on tired legs).

For the most part, I'm just trying to make sure I'm balancing progress against injury risk as I decide whether to do my normal workouts or change things up each week.

This has me thinking about other tweaks I can make to existing routines that might teach me something. Some ideas I'm batting around:

• What if I add back one running day every week? If you've been reading my newsletter for a while, you might remember that I used to run a lot, but slowed down a couple years ago to make room for pickleball and yoga. I have a friend who runs most days and he's constantly trying to get me to get back into it. But what if I just ran once a week? Would that be beneficial?
• What if I read a book with my coffee instead of reading the news? I've already been trying this occasionally, and I really like it.
• What if I move one of my weight workouts to a morning session? I generally feel much better when I lift weights in the evening, but I find that I feel pretty darn good for yoga on Tuesday mornings, so what if I lifted weights one morning a week?

None of these changes would be any sort of major upheaval of normal routine, but they may still affect me in ways I might not anticipate. I could learn a lot by making small changes, which is nice because it's a lot easier to make those small changes than to try one of those "I'm gonna try a whole new routine!" experiments that inevitably fail.

Why not look for one small tweak you can make to your existing routine this week to see what happens? You might learn something useful!

Have a good week!

Josh