How To Use Muscle Confusion

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 The Truth About Muscle Confusion

 Muscle confusion in an exercise context is a controversial subject, replete with marketing hype.  I have my own ideas of how muscle confusion can be helpful to you if you think of it correctly.  While it is true that muscle confusion alone might not make your muscles bigger, it might help most by giving you variety and interest in your workouts. Variety is one of my favorite forms of external motivation.  You can use it to improve your mojo.  You may even get some conversion of it to internal motivation.  If you are doing the same thing over and over again, it can get boring. This saps motivation. Use variety to help you stay interested.

Research shows that your muscles will only get bigger from progressive stress.  So can muscle confusion help?  Muscle confusion, I admit, is oversold.  But it can make workouts more interesting and less boring as well as work different fibers and/or aspects of each muscle.


 Workout Approaches -  Worst To Best
  • Stop workouts due to boredom
  • Do the same workout over and over
  • Do the same exercise but use progression to increase stress
  • Use variety (sometimes called muscle confusion) and progression

 The worst thing you can do is give up and stop working out.  The most common reason for failure of any routine is stopping it too early.  Sometimes a lack of variety can lead you in this direction.  Use any motivator you can to make workouts more attractive.  The next worst thing  you can do is to do the same workout all the time without progressing your weight or reps.  You will not get bigger muscles and your workouts will become boring.  I have often said that the best workout is the one you are motivated to keep doing.  It can't help you if you give it up.

Next is doing the same thing but increasing the stress by gradually adding weight or reps.    This is the best way, indeed some say the only way, to add muscle size for a given muscle fiber or aspect.  Lastly is the method of using variety in combination with adding stress.  For an example of some good workouts for the biceps, see here.  With this approach, you can build size and strength in multiple fibers, helping to prevent injuries, and combat boredom in your workouts.

For another example, consider the quad muscles and squats. Squats are often prescribed as an exercise for the quads.   However, there are really four quad muscles.  Regular squats work primarily the central portion of the quads.  Doing squats with your toes pointed inward, you will work the inner muscle of the four quad muscles, the vastus medialis.  If you point the toes outward while squatting, you will work the vastus lateralis.  Any compound exercise like a squat will work a lot of muscles, but to varying degrees for various muscles.  See here for a really good description. of the squat in particular.  So if your goal is to build size with width, varying the angle of the foot is a good idea.

To summarize, the “best option” is the one that you like enough to keep doing, long term. It isn’t what you do, or what you want to achieve as much as it is your commitment and persistence. That’s why you should enjoy what you do.


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