What is muscle confusion?

What is mucle confusion? from Hybrid Performance Method on Vimeo.

What is muscle confusion?

Muscle confusion is on page one of The Bro Science guide to lifting.

It only makes sense if you don't think about it too much. I mean come on, how could muscles get confused?

Muscles don’t know the name of the exercises. They only sense, produce, and transmit force based on input from the body. 

They don’t need to be tricked into getting bigger. If you think they do, try training them more consistently.

Most people believe they need to cycle through a wide variety of fancy exercises and change them from session to session. 

Maybe apart of this belief stems from the feeling of soreness that comes forms performing a new movement and the association people have with the soreness. But we know both of these things have little to do with getting bigger and stronger.  

Very simple resistance training programs with very little change have the potential to yield a lot of hypertrophy.

Constant variation gets in the way of adaptation because it prevents progressive overload.

If we don't repeat exercises we can't increase the demand overtime to see if we're getting stronger and to challenge the new reach capacity.

That doesn't mean do the same thing every day forever. Exercise can be varied every week. For example, using different squat variations or two different press variations are applicable. 

Most people can use some exercise variation across days, to weeks, and to months to keep training interesting. However, it should be used strategically and for its own sake. 

New exercises are cool, but getting bigger and stronger is even cooler. 

-Stefi