Of course you exercise. In fact, you've got it down pat. You jog four mornings a week, lift weights at the gym and finish up with three sets of crunches.

You should be in great shape. So why doesn't your body look any different? And why does your shoulder ache after you finish your weights?

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It's probably because you're not varying your exercise routine, experts say. If you don't mix it up, exercise is less effective and you can even injure yourself.

"I ask people, 'How long have you been doing your exercise routine?' and they'll say, 'Oh, five or 10 years,' " says Randy Leopando, director of personal training for Nutriformance, an American personal training and nutrition centre in St Louis. "I think, 'No wonder nothing's happening. Boredom has set in, and when that occurs, their motions don't pay off. They're not paying attention to what they're doing.' "

Worse, says sports medicine specialist Dr Nicholas DiNubile, you are setting yourself up for overuse injuries - the result of repetitive stresses on the same parts of the body.

"Overuse injuries are subtle and much more common than acute traumatic injuries, like falling off a bike and breaking your arm," he says. "The symptoms may come on slowly or acutely. Sometimes [in the latter case] people think something new has happened, but it is just cumulative trauma."

Shoulders, feet, knees and ankles are all particularly prone to overuse injuries, DiNubile says.

"Shoulder tendonitis is the number one thing in people who do weight workouts, by not allowing adequate rest between workouts," he says. For runners, common injuries are inflammation of the Achilles tendon and of the tendons in the knee.

And it's not just the years of the same exercise routine that causes problems, DiNubile says: your body also declines with age.

"When you start seeing grey hair, the same thing is happening to your deeper tissues - tendons are less durable, collagen is not as elastic, there is less blood supply to the tissues. Anatomy can change, too. You can develop bone spurs in your rotator cuff in the shoulder," he explains.

Not changing your workout to reflect these changes makes you vulnerable to injury, he says.

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