What Happens To Your Body When You Always Lift the Same Amount Of Weight

Much like our breakfast of choice or what we wear, most of us tend to gravitate to routine when it comes to our lifting workouts: We often use the same amount of weight, over and over. No shame—it’s particularly comforting to select a weight size you know you can handle when you’re at the gym, and when you’re sweating at home, you may not have a variety of weights to work with. But experts say not changing your weight size means you’ll be missing out on some pretty hefty benefits.

“When you train with the same weight week to week, over time, your body will adapt to the resistance, and you won’t see gains in muscular strength or hypertrophy [size],” says Jacque Crockford, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and exercise physiologist with the American Council on Exercise. Compare it to running the same distance every time you hop on the treadmill—at some point, you’re not going to see your body improve, since you’re no longer challenging it.

Always Exhausted? You Might Have One Of These Conditions

When your immune system is grappling with a disease, that fight requires energy.

So it’s probably not surprising that almost any disease you can name has fatigue listed among its symptoms.

“Fatigue may be the most common symptom people report, and in and of itself it can’t point you toward a diagnosis,” says Roxanne Sukol, M.D., a preventive medicine specialist at Cleveland Clinic.

Also complicating matters: “There are so many different ways to measure fatigue,” says Anne Cappola, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism.