You aren’t getting enough practice with the exercises, and allowing enough time to make significant progress with each exercise.

Imagine you’re trying to get better at speaking Spanish. Two weeks after speaking Spanish you switch to speaking Italian. Two weeks later, you move onto French, then back to Spanish, then Portuguese. You’d never make much progress or ever get that good at speaking Spanish.

If you want to get really good at something, you have to consistently practice it. Focused, deliberate practice.

And yes, even doing certain exercises takes practice. Especially more complex movements like squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, and bent over rows, and variations of those movements. Single-joint, isolation exercises don’t have nearly as much of a skill component to them, but it still takes time (not as much) to become great at those too.

When you get really good at performing certain exercises, that exercise becomes so much more effective, and you get more out of the time and effort you put in while reducing your risk of injury.

And once you’ve gotten really good at something, whether it’s speaking a language, playing an instrument, or doing an exercise, the maintenance of that skill is much easier than the development of the skill.

So then you can switch exercises, get really good at that exercise too, and you can still go back to other exercises you’ve perfected in the past and still be very good at them. And, getting very good at performing some exercises carries over to other exercises.

Tracking progress will be more difficult when you change your exercises too frequently.

This one’s pretty straightforward, but it’s pretty difficult to track something that’s constantly changing. When you stick with an exercise for at least a couple months, you can tell whether you’re improving or not.

If you’re improving that’s great. If you’re not improving, something needs to change.

And if you’re changing your exercises too frequently and having trouble accurately tracking progress, you might not even notice that you’re not getting any better.

So, by giving an exercise enough time, you can not only track progress more easily, but also actually make progress.

So, what’s a good amount of time to stick with an exercise?

It depends on the exercise and the individual

As I mentioned earlier, complex, multi-joint exercises like your bench, squat, deadlift, overhead press, and rows require more practice, and are more difficult to get right.

Single-joint exercises however are much more simple. Plenty of people can walk into a gym and have perfect form on a bicep curl on day 1. That hardly ever happens with a bent over row, deadlift, bench, squat, or overhead press.

Even with single-joint exercises, there’s still some practice involved so you can lift explosively with control, good form & technique, and  great mind-muscle connection.

So, compound exercises can stay in your program much longer, I’d suggest 12 weeks before switching to another variation. You don’t have to switch the exercise out if you don’t want to. For many people, the main compound movements will stay in their program basically all the time, but they vary the intensity and rep ranges.

Single-joint isolation exercises can be replaced more frequently. In my opinion, switching them out for something else each month is fine, but if it’s working for you and you’re not terribly bored, I’d recommend stick with what’s working.

Speaking of being terribly bored, that’s another reason someone might change exercises a bit more frequently than normal. Someone could get so bored with their program that they start to slack off and not train as hard, and maybe completely miss gym sessions more often.

One could argue that if they changed exercises more frequently, even if more frequently than recommended, they would still see better results because they’d be showing up to the gym more, and training harder.

And then of course, if an exercise is starting to cause joint pain and discomfort, swap it out for something else that targets the same muscle group, but that you can do pain-free.

If you’re making progress on all exercises, doing so pain-free, and you’re not too bored, then there’s no need to change anything.

Ride it out for as long as you can, get what you can out of it, and make a change when useful.

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