Blog | Training When Should You Change Your Training?

Author / Raven Winters

7 - 9 minutes read

Your training should evolve without deleting the progress you’ve already made.

There’s a point in almost every training program where you start wondering whether you should be doing something else.

Maybe your progress stalled. Maybe your shoulder is pissing you off. Maybe work kicked you in the crotch and the five days you planned to workout turned into two. Or maybe everything is working perfectly well and you’re just bored. Whatever the reason, the question eventually appears: Should I change my training?

Before you do, answer a better question. What problem are you trying to solve?

Sometimes you’ll know. Sometimes you’ll need another set of eyes on it. That’s always been the thinking behind our mantra “People Helping People”. You do the work, but you don’t have to figure everything out on your own.

Start With The Goal

Training is supposed to take you somewhere. Stronger. Faster. More muscular. Better conditioned. More capable on the field. Harder to kill. Whatever your goal is, your training should be moving you towards it.

That sounds obvious, but people have an incredible ability to forget why they started doing something the moment something new and shiny appears. You start a program to get stronger. Six weeks later, your squat is moving, your deadlift is climbing and you’re recovering well. Then some guy on Instagram tells you the exercise you’ve been doing is suboptimal, so you swap it out. Then someone else tells you you’re doing too much volume, so you cut that back. Then you read something about recovery and decide maybe the problem is your HRV.

Three weeks later you’re six side quests deep, doing a completely different program and trying to solve a problem you didn’t have in the first place.

This is how athletes end up constantly training and rarely getting anywhere.

Before changing anything, go back to the goal. Is your training still moving you towards it? If the answer is yes, you probably don’t need another answer. You need to keep training.

One Bad Day isn’t a Plateau

Progress rarely feels as clean as it looks on paper. Some days everything clicks. Other days the weights feel heavy, your timing is off and the whole session feels like shit.

That’s training. You show up and Move the Dirt.

The trouble starts when you treat every bad session like new information. One shitty workout doesn’t mean your program stopped working. Neither does one terrible night’s sleep, your watch giving you a recovery score of 37, or feeling beaten up after a hard week.

Pay attention to what keeps happening. If your performance has been heading backwards for weeks, that’s worth looking at. If the same problem keeps showing up, that’s worth looking at. If you’re consistently struggling to recover from the work, something probably needs attention.

But if Tuesday just sucked? Tuesday might have fucking sucked. Move the dirt and see what Wednesday brings.

Make Sure The Program is Actually The Problem

Let’s say your progress really has stalled. Now you need to figure out why.

Your squat hasn’t moved in a month. Maybe you need a different strength stimulus. But before you rewrite the program, take an honest look at the last few weeks. You’ve been sleeping four hours a night, eating like a six-year-old at a birthday party and somewhere along the way started cherry-picking the sessions you enjoy while skipping the shit you don’t. At that point, it’s pretty hard to know whether the program has stopped working because you’re not really running the program anymore.

The program is always the easiest thing to point at because it’s right there in front of you. But what happens during the other 23 hours of your day comes into the gym with you.

You don’t need perfect sleep, perfect nutrition and a stress-free life to make progress. Good luck with that. But you do need to account for the fact that all of it comes into the gym with you.

So before you start tearing apart the program, take a look at what else has changed. The answer might be staring at you from somewhere outside the spreadsheet.

Boredom isn’t The Same as Failure

This one gets athletes all the time. Something is working, progress is moving in the right direction, but eventually it stops being exciting.

Progress is often boring. You do the work. You recover. You come back and do slightly more work. Repeat that process for long enough and something impressive eventually happens.

Unfortunately, somewhere around week six, your brain starts wondering whether a completely different program might work even better. Maybe it will. Maybe you need more variety. Maybe you’ve finally found the missing piece.

Or maybe you’re just bored.

Constantly searching for optimal is a very effective way of never spending enough time doing anything to find out if it actually works.

So know why you’re changing. If the training no longer serves the goal, change it. If you’re making progress and just getting itchy, maybe leave the fucking thing alone.

Know When The Goal Has Changed

There are plenty of good reasons to change your training. The season ends and what you need from the weight room changes with it. You’ve spent six months chasing strength and now you want to put on some serious size. You signed up for a race. Work changed and six training days no longer fit your life. Or maybe you just achieved the thing you set out to do and you’re ready to chase something else.

Goals change. Life changes. Your training should be able to change with them.

The point isn’t to stay married to a program forever. It’s to know what you’re training for and choose the right tool for the job.

If the destination changes, change the route.

Ask Better Questions

We have more information available to us than any generation of athletes before us, and that’s a good thing. You can track your sleep, heart rate, recovery, calories, macros, steps and training load. You can find millions of programs online. You can ask AI a training question at 11pm and have an answer before you’ve finished taking a shit.

There’s plenty of useful stuff in there, and you should always be looking for an edge. Knowing what actually applies to you is the harder part. More data, more answers and having the whole thing personalized for you doesn’t guarantee you’re solving the right problem.

Before changing your training, ask:
What is my goal?
What evidence do I have that my current training isn’t getting me there?
Is the program actually the problem?

If you can answer those three questions clearly, you’ll make better training decisions than most people who spend their lives jumping from one supposedly optimal solution to another.

You Don’t Have to Figure it Out Alone

Sometimes you’ll go through all of this and still not know what the right call is. You’ve looked at the goal, the progress, everything happening outside the gym and you’re still going around in circles.

That’s usually a good time to get another set of eyes on it.

Someone with enough experience to see what you can’t when you’re buried in the middle of it. You think you’ve plateaued. They see three bad sessions after six months of solid progress. You want to change programs. They ask why. You think you need to push harder. They tell you to back off.

Or you’ve convinced yourself you need to change everything and they tell you the most useful thing you could possibly hear:

You’re making progress. Stop fucking around.

That’s where a good coach earns their keep.

And that’s why Power Athlete has always put real coaches alongside the training. They know the programs, they know the methodology and they know what questions to ask when the answer isn’t obvious.

You can bring them the messy stuff. The shoulder that’s pissing you off. The week that went sideways. The plateau you can’t explain. The new goal you’re chasing. The program you’re thinking about switching to. Sometimes you need an answer. Sometimes you just need to talk it through with someone who knows what the fuck they’re talking about.

That’s People Helping People.

Recently, one of our athletes posted this in our Discord:

“Hi all, just a note of appreciation to all the Coaches on here. This platform, training, and nutrition coaching has pulled me out of a pretty dark trajectory both physically and mentally. I appreciate this community so very much.”

There’s a lot more going on there than delivering the right workout. It’s having good people in your corner while you do the work.

Power Athlete All Access

That same thinking is built into All Access.

Every Power Athlete program sits under one membership, with our coaches there to help you figure out what comes next. Your goal changes? Change programs. Your schedule changes? Find the one that fits. Not sure which direction to go, whether you should switch at all, or what to do when life starts fucking with the plan? Ask us.

You’ve got ten programs built around the same Power Athlete methodology, plus access to the people who know them inside out.

You focus on being the athlete. We’ll help you figure out what comes next.

10 programs. Real coaches. One Power Athlete community.

$59/month. Less than the cost of two individual programs.

GET YOUR ALL ACCESS PASS.