In my monthly newsletter, I wrote an article about soreness. Sometimes it’s appropriate to be sore and sometimes it’s not. If you’d like to get the premium content, you need to sign up at the bottom of this page! I could have taken a tangent in the newsletter and included this information, but I thought I would explain muscle confusion more thoroughly in a separate blog.
P90X popularized the term, “muscle confusion,” which is just a catchy way of saying variety in training. So, this is not a new concept…just a marketing term. No doubt you’ve heard that variety in training is good because your routine doesn’t get stale and you can derive benefits from cross-training. In P90X you may do a different workout each day, but you do the same workouts each week for 90 days.
Too much muscle confusion, however, spells trouble. In order to get better at an exercise, whether it’s getting stronger or nailing technique, you must do it over and over again. Every workout should be considered a practice session. If you are constantly doing different exercises for the sake of mixing up your training routine, you will be a jack of all trades and a master of none. And while there’s nothing really wrong with this, you don’t progress as fast as you would with more focus.
If you’re starting to wonder how this relates to my article on soreness, let me just answer that question before I go any further. Always doing a new routine or new exercises means your body never has time to adapt to the stimulus. That spells soreness as your body is constantly in alarm mode. Simply put, in order to make improvements, you need to repeat an exercise until you are proficient at doing it. (Wait, I said that above already. Hope it’s starting to hit home.)
Let’s look at push ups, for example. Almost all of my personal training clients do push ups and almost all start on their knees. The goal is always to have precise technique and graduate to push ups on their toes. So, we do push ups every. single. month. until they can do them military style. For some, this may take a few months, for others, this may take a year. Starting point, volume of training and consistency definitely play into how quickly any goal is achieved. Never do I change the program to include bench press, DB chest press, flyes on the stability ball just for the sake of working the chest a different way. Why? Because doing a push up makes you better at doing a push up!
Don’t get me wrong. Variety is a good thing. If you always do the same workout, you won’t make progress either. Add new stimuli to your workouts by changing the amount of sets, reps, weight, lift tempo, and rest intervals. There is a time in your overall training plan for changing exercises. Dial in your focus just like an athlete. During the “season,” you are working on execution of exercises, performing at your best, and achieving your exercise goals. During the “off-season,” that’s when you can change up your exercises and cross-train.
