By The One on One Team
Last Updated: 2/1/2026
How to Add Exercise Variety Without Sacrificing Results
Seek Variety the Right Way
Exercise variety is an important component of an effective training program. It helps prevent boredom, reduces the risk of overuse injuries, and challenges the body in new ways. However, variety without purpose can quickly become a distraction from the long-term goals that matter most: Healthy and Happy .
At One on One, we define exercise variety as the intentional modification of training variables to create a new stimulus, prevent plateaus, and maintain engagement, all while staying aligned with your goals and abilities.
What Are the Training Variables?
Instead of random change, we teach purposeful variety using the FITT Principle, modifying Frequency, Intensity, Time, and Type of exercise.
It’s been our experience that those seeking more variety are most often seeking a change in exercise type by adding more exercises or tweaking an existing movement. While exercise selection is important, changing exercises for variety’s sake can lead to decreased movement quality, increased injury risk, and sub-optimal training adaptations.
Manipulating exercise type isn’t the only way to change how a training session feels. As we rethink variety, let’s take a look at intensity, the most nuanced of the four training variables.
Intensity: Where Small Changes Create Big Impact
Exercise intensity refers to how hard your body is working during a training session. When devoting time to exercise, your goal should be to complete as much quality work as possible. This means training at a moderate to vigorous intensity by intentionally manipulating the following variables.
Pace – How quickly you move through a training session or circuit.
Volume – The total amount of work completed in a training session.
Tempo – The speed at which a repetition is performed, or how long your muscles are under tension. Generally speaking, if the objective is to burn calories, exercises are performed at a faster tempo. If the objective is to increase strength, exercises are performed at a slower tempo.
Resistance – The amount of external force used to make a muscle contract, for example adding weight.
By changing just one of these factors, even while keeping the exercises the same, you can create a different training effect. For example, slowing tempo increases time under tension, improving strength and control, while increasing pace shifts the focus toward calorie burn and cardiovascular demand.
The Balancing Act
Remember, when you increase one variable, you must often decrease another. For instance, adding volume or increasing pace may require decreasing resistance to preserve movement quality. This balancing act is what transforms a workout from a random effort into an intelligent and effective training session.
Moving forward, let’s add variety in a way that keeps your program engaging while maintaining the highest standards of safety, effectiveness, and long-term progress.
