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By: Tanya Miller
Stop Trying to Confuse Your Muscles!
We are all too familiar with the term “muscle confusion.” The concept of “confusing” our bodies by constantly switching exercises and training splits has been touted for years as an essential component to avoid plateaus and optimize results. The idea is that once a muscle gets used to a certain movement, it will suddenly stop repairing the damage done during training beyond simply maintaining current size and strength. Not only is this rationale biologically impossible provided that sufficient progressive overload – increasing volume in the form of either weight, reps, or time under tension whenever physically possible – is practiced, it also seems to disregard the nervous system’s entire role in the process of growing stronger.
Neuromuscular Crash Course:
You know about “newbie gains” – that first year or so of intelligent training where the body is at its most responsive due to all the completely new stimulus. Well, part of that period includes the sudden, rapid jumps in strength, especially in previously sedentary individuals. This is not actually due to you getting stronger really fast. You’re becoming more efficient. Your nervous system is learning how to perform these new movement patterns, how to best fire signals to the motor neurons in the muscles being used, and how to use the baseline of strength you already have. With each practice of the specific movement, it gets a bit better at doing it, thus doing it better. Just like when you learn to ride a bike - you weren't too weak to ride a bike before; your body just didn't know the sequence of nerve signals necessary yet.
This is why light, easy training with meticulous form is so crucial in the beginning. You are literally teaching your body how to perform that movement from then on. Program a faulty code into the system, and that function will always be performed with the original faulty code you gave it. This is where another commonly-misused term, “muscle memory,” partly comes from – when your nervous system recognizes something it has done before, a program code it already has, it can quickly retrieve that code from its library, without the same delay of the learning stage. Back to the “like learning how to ride a bike” effect. Muscle memory does not mean that you keep a certain level of muscularity forever because you played a sport once in high school. It does also refer to the myonuclear domain theory about the retention of satellite myonuclei created via training even after detraining, but that’s a whole other article.
Once your nervous system masters one movement and is now fully utilizing the strength you started with, you are able to actually use enough force to challenge the muscles themselves with that movement. Then, and only then, can hypertrophy and strength gain begin to occur. For this reason, beginning with low-volume, basic training focused on the core compound barbell movements (even body weight mastery first if necessary) with perfect form for a solid phase is crucial. Not only is it important for establishing correct motor patterns, it’s quite useless to try to jump into anything harder until the neuromuscular learning phase has occurred. We can also extrapolate this to trained individuals via an introductory mesocycle at the beginning of a new macrocycle - this way we let the initial damage-control response run its course before entering a program full-force with the ability to adapt.
This process applies to every new exercise you introduce, including accessories. While those certainly do not require as substantial a motor learning phase as compound movements, you're still not doing yourself any favors by challenging your body to constantly adapt to movements rather than progressive overload on familiar movements. If you’re constantly throwing out exercises for different ones to "keep your body guessing," what you’re really doing is keeping your body constantly in the neural adaptation stage and allowing very little time, if any, to actually experience stressful loads from the movement and respond before you’ve replaced it with another new pattern to learn. This would be like constantly switching from class to class and expecting to learn the material.
After a solid phase of re-learning the deconditioned primal movement patterns most of us lost after childhood due to unnatural lifestyles, a variety of exercises and angles can definitely be ideal in a well-structured program for complete physique development as well as reduced likelihood of overuse injuries... but the aspect of structureis critical. Instead of haphazardly barging through a never-ending list of new exercises and workouts every other week, pick similar exercises with tweaks in angle, grip, equipment, etc., and rotate them (tracking performance with respect to each variation and ensuring progressive overload), so your body’s motherboard is always operating with efficient codes that it knows. In this way, you can actually spend most of your time pushing limits and progressing.
To Sum It Up:
Don’t stray too much when it comes to the big compound movements, as those involve many simultaneous movements and demand a lot from the nervous system, especially if you are a performance athlete who obviously must practice the movements of the sport, such as the big three in powerlifting. Early in a macrocycle is an appropriate time to allow more deviation from the "business" movements, as many periodized programs do - for example, a mesocycle or so of variations such as front squats, close grip bench press, or unilateral variations can effectively address weaknesses, mitigate joint/ligament stress from the previous cycle, etc. However, specificity is still crucial later in the program, where exercise selection should skew more in favor of competition lifts so we can sharpen those tools again.
Keep the “confusion” somewhere like cardio time, if you're doing it. Efficiency is in fact undesirable when aiming to maximize caloric expenditure - you don’t want your body to get used to one modality and learn how to do it with less expenditure when the goal is energetic "fuel inefficiency." (This is of course with the assumption that you are not a performance athlete whose sport uses a specific type of cardio, such as track, in which case specificity applies in the same way: you better be training what your sport involves and getting efficient at it. We're talking specificity here in relation to your goal, no matter what it is - fill your own blanks in the concept.) But your strength/hypertrophy/power work depends on maximal movement efficiency. The way to do that is, in fact, to keep your body as far away from confusion as possible.
You know about “newbie gains” – that first year or so of intelligent training where the body is at its most responsive due to all the completely new stimulus. Well, part of that period includes the sudden, rapid jumps in strength, especially in previously sedentary individuals. This is not actually due to you getting stronger really fast. You’re becoming more efficient. Your nervous system is learning how to perform these new movement patterns, how to best fire signals to the motor neurons in the muscles being used, and how to use the baseline of strength you already have. With each practice of the specific movement, it gets a bit better at doing it, thus doing it better. Just like when you learn to ride a bike - you weren't too weak to ride a bike before; your body just didn't know the sequence of nerve signals necessary yet.
This is why light, easy training with meticulous form is so crucial in the beginning. You are literally teaching your body how to perform that movement from then on. Program a faulty code into the system, and that function will always be performed with the original faulty code you gave it. This is where another commonly-misused term, “muscle memory,” partly comes from – when your nervous system recognizes something it has done before, a program code it already has, it can quickly retrieve that code from its library, without the same delay of the learning stage. Back to the “like learning how to ride a bike” effect. Muscle memory does not mean that you keep a certain level of muscularity forever because you played a sport once in high school. It does also refer to the myonuclear domain theory about the retention of satellite myonuclei created via training even after detraining, but that’s a whole other article.
Once your nervous system masters one movement and is now fully utilizing the strength you started with, you are able to actually use enough force to challenge the muscles themselves with that movement. Then, and only then, can hypertrophy and strength gain begin to occur. For this reason, beginning with low-volume, basic training focused on the core compound barbell movements (even body weight mastery first if necessary) with perfect form for a solid phase is crucial. Not only is it important for establishing correct motor patterns, it’s quite useless to try to jump into anything harder until the neuromuscular learning phase has occurred. We can also extrapolate this to trained individuals via an introductory mesocycle at the beginning of a new macrocycle - this way we let the initial damage-control response run its course before entering a program full-force with the ability to adapt.
This process applies to every new exercise you introduce, including accessories. While those certainly do not require as substantial a motor learning phase as compound movements, you're still not doing yourself any favors by challenging your body to constantly adapt to movements rather than progressive overload on familiar movements. If you’re constantly throwing out exercises for different ones to "keep your body guessing," what you’re really doing is keeping your body constantly in the neural adaptation stage and allowing very little time, if any, to actually experience stressful loads from the movement and respond before you’ve replaced it with another new pattern to learn. This would be like constantly switching from class to class and expecting to learn the material.
After a solid phase of re-learning the deconditioned primal movement patterns most of us lost after childhood due to unnatural lifestyles, a variety of exercises and angles can definitely be ideal in a well-structured program for complete physique development as well as reduced likelihood of overuse injuries... but the aspect of structureis critical. Instead of haphazardly barging through a never-ending list of new exercises and workouts every other week, pick similar exercises with tweaks in angle, grip, equipment, etc., and rotate them (tracking performance with respect to each variation and ensuring progressive overload), so your body’s motherboard is always operating with efficient codes that it knows. In this way, you can actually spend most of your time pushing limits and progressing.
To Sum It Up:
Don’t stray too much when it comes to the big compound movements, as those involve many simultaneous movements and demand a lot from the nervous system, especially if you are a performance athlete who obviously must practice the movements of the sport, such as the big three in powerlifting. Early in a macrocycle is an appropriate time to allow more deviation from the "business" movements, as many periodized programs do - for example, a mesocycle or so of variations such as front squats, close grip bench press, or unilateral variations can effectively address weaknesses, mitigate joint/ligament stress from the previous cycle, etc. However, specificity is still crucial later in the program, where exercise selection should skew more in favor of competition lifts so we can sharpen those tools again.
Keep the “confusion” somewhere like cardio time, if you're doing it. Efficiency is in fact undesirable when aiming to maximize caloric expenditure - you don’t want your body to get used to one modality and learn how to do it with less expenditure when the goal is energetic "fuel inefficiency." (This is of course with the assumption that you are not a performance athlete whose sport uses a specific type of cardio, such as track, in which case specificity applies in the same way: you better be training what your sport involves and getting efficient at it. We're talking specificity here in relation to your goal, no matter what it is - fill your own blanks in the concept.) But your strength/hypertrophy/power work depends on maximal movement efficiency. The way to do that is, in fact, to keep your body as far away from confusion as possible.
