If you workout regularly, at least 5 days a week, you are doing yourself a huge favor when compared to majority of the population around the world. However if you are doing the same routine, day in and day out, within a couple of weeks, your body will have adapted quite well to that routine and you will no longer see any growth in muscle size or strength. Furthermore, your muscles will actually shrink to the minimum size required to complete the same routine. And if you stop working out altogether your muscles will shrink to pre-workout size.
To see continuous adaptive growth, more challenging work must be planned at carefully designed and recorded intervals. Muscle and strength building is just a skill that shows physical results over time. But this method of progressive overload can be applied to a variety of skills that you would like to build up. By building the routine you set a baseline standard of what you can achieve. By adding more challenging work to that routine you incrementally raise the bar for whatever skill you are working on. Should you stop the routine or the progressive challenges designed into the routine, stagnation and even atrophy of the skill will be the obvious results.
This sounds like common sense. But when we don’t pause in our life to analyze and experiment with our daily actions, we stagnate, even atrophy in thinking. So think carefully on the world around you and your daily actions within that world while not taking yourself too seriously.