How to Avoid Exercise Redundancy and Keep Progressing
You show up at the gym, head straight to your favorite machines, and go through the same routine you’ve been doing for months. After a few months or a year, you see results: Your strength increases, your muscles fill out, and you feel more athletic.
But now, you feel that your progress hit a wall. Your workouts feel repetitive, your motivation is slipping, and worst of all, your body isn’t changing the way it used to. This isn’t just a case of lack of discipline; it’s a classic case of exercise redundancy.
When you do the same movements over and over, your body adapts, and eventually, the stimulus isn’t strong enough to force new growth or improvements. Even worse, many lifters tend to overlap exercises that target the same muscle groups, making many of their exercise sets redundant.
This article will give you a step-by-step guide on how to avoid exercise redundancy and keep progressing in your fitness journey.
Exercise redundancy occurs when your routine becomes overly repetitive and when you overly exercise the same muscle group in a single workout. This leads to wasted effort, as multiple exercises target the same muscles without adding real value, causing unnecessary fatigue rather than stimulating new growth.
A common example is performing pull-ups right after lat pull-downs. Despite the difference in set up and positioning, both primarily target the lats. However, doing them back-to-back offers little benefit unless you change reps, tempo, or resistance. A better approach is pairing one with a compound movement with a row variation like barbell rows or seated cable rows, which targets the lats from different angles while also engaging the traps, rhomboids, and rear delts. This ensures a more balanced back workout with vertical and horizontal pulling movements, leading to better overall muscle development without unnecessary sets of exercises.
Another case is overloading with variations of the same movement, such as Romanian deadlifts (RDLs), single-leg RDLs, and trap bar deadlifts in the same session. Since all follow the same hip-hinge mechanics, they train the hamstrings and glutes similarly. Instead, incorporate a different lower-body pattern, like squats or hip thrusts, for better balance and efficiency.
Chest
Exercise redundancy occurs when lifters overstimulate one muscle group with multiple similar exercises, often at the expense of training other muscles due to time constraints or busy schedules.
Most experts recommend performing 10-20 sets per muscle group per week, spread across multiple workouts, to maximize muscle growth. The ideal number of sets per session depends on your training frequency, experience level, and recovery capacity. Too little volume may not provide enough stimulus, while excessive volume can lead to fatigue and hinder recovery.
Here’s a general guideline based on experience level:
- Beginners (5-10 sets per week): Those new to resistance training can make significant gains with lower training volume, as beginners experience “newbie gains” where their muscles respond quickly to new stimuli.
- Intermediates (10-20 sets per week): Once you’ve built a foundation, a moderate-to-high volume approach is ideal for continued progress, ensuring sufficient stimulus without excessive fatigue.
- Advanced Lifters (20+ sets per week): Highly trained individuals often require more volume to keep progressing, but this should be managed carefully to avoid overtraining.
Even with the bare minimum, research shows that just 4 sets per muscle group per week can still promote muscle growth if you are a beginner. However, for long-term progress, the key is balancing volume, recovery, and intensity to maximize results without overtraining.
Avoiding exercise redundancy is about making your workouts more efficient and well-balanced to ensure that every exercise is intentional and can effectively improve your gains. Instead of repeating similar movements, focus on variety, strategic programming, and proper exercise selection to maximize results.
Instead of stacking exercises that target the same muscle in the same way (e.g., pull-ups followed by lat pull down), mix in compound movements that engage multiple muscles at once.
Instead of repeating exercises that use the same joint mechanics, aim to train muscles from different angles. For example, if you’re doing bench press for chest, a better complementary movement would be dips (which involve a deeper range of motion and more shoulder flexion) rather than just switching to another flat pressing variation like dumbbell bench press. This ensures more complete muscle activation while avoiding unnecessary fatigue from repetitive movements.
Another effective way to avoid redundancy is to pair opposing muscle groups in your workout. Instead of doing multiple variations of quad-dominant exercises (like squats and leg presses), you can balance your session by incorporating a posterior chain movement like Romanian deadlifts or hip thrusts. This approach prevents overloading one muscle group while ensuring a well-rounded workout.
More exercises don’t always lead to better results—better execution does. Adding unnecessary volume without purpose can cause excessive fatigue without providing additional muscle stimulus. Instead of cramming multiple variations of the same movement into a workout, focus on high-quality, well-structured sets that maximize efficiency.
If you have 3 different exercises that target the same muscle group, each having 3 sets or more, you might be wasting your time and suffer diminishing returns on your workout. A well-balanced program typically includes 3-5 effective sets per muscle group per session, depending on training frequency. Instead of endlessly increasing volume, focus on progressive overload, improving form, tempo, and mind-muscle connection—these factors drive real progress without wasting time and energy.
Fatigue alone isn’t a sign of progress. If your muscles are too exhausted from redundant exercises, you might be compromising intensity and proper form, which can slow down strength and hypertrophy gains.
Rather than doing multiple squat variations in one workout, you can modify how you perform your squats. Slowing down the eccentric (lowering) phase, incorporating pause reps, or increasing time under tension forces your muscles to work harder without needing to switch to a different squat exercise. This approach enhances strength, control, and hypertrophy while reducing redundancy.
Varying rep ranges is another effective way to prevent stagnation. If you always train in the 8-12 rep range, your body adapts, and progress may slow. Instead, cycle between lower reps with heavier weight (4-6 reps) for strength, moderate reps (8-12) for hypertrophy, and higher reps (12-20) for muscular endurance. This variation challenges your muscles in new ways, ensuring continued growth without the need for excessive exercise volume.
A well-structured workout program ensures that each muscle group receives adequate volume and recovery without excessive overlap. Overloading one area while neglecting others can lead to muscle imbalances, overuse injuries, and stalled progress. To prevent this, distribute your training volume strategically across the week.
Your workout split determines how you distribute training volume across the week, ensuring each muscle group gets enough work and recovery. The best split depends on your experience level, training frequency, and goals.
- Full-Body Split (2-4 days/week) – Ideal for beginners or those with limited training time, this approach works all major muscle groups in each session, allowing frequent practice of movement patterns with lower volume per session.
- Upper/Lower Split (4 days/week) – This divides workouts into upper-body and lower-body days, providing more focus per muscle group while still allowing adequate recovery.
- Push/Pull/Legs (PPL) Split (4-6 days/week) – A popular intermediate-to-advanced split that separates workouts into push exercises (chest, shoulders, triceps), pull exercises (back, biceps), and leg exercises (quads, hamstrings, glutes) for better muscle balance.
- Body Part Split (Bro Split, 5-6 days/week) – Focuses on one major muscle group per day, allowing high volume per session but requiring more weekly training days for full-body coverage.
Choosing the right split helps optimize recovery, prevent overuse injuries, and maximize progress without unnecessary redundancy.
Here’s a plan for women that will help you minimized exercise redundancy and maximize your results:
And for men:
The human body thrives on challenge and adaptation. When you lift heavier weights, push your endurance, or try new movement patterns, your muscles, nervous system, and even your mental focus stay engaged.
But when your routine becomes predictable, you’re not just risking plateauing in your progress, which may lead to imbalances and overuse injuries.
The key is to structure your training with intentional variation—modifying exercises, manipulating volume and intensity, and incorporating different training styles that force continuous adaptation.