Confusing Your Muscles

If you're looking to build muscle, it's not enough to just add resistance training to your workout.

While this is a good start, eventually your muscles will get acclimatized to a specific workout and stop growing.

The body knows how well to adjust to the current activity being performed every day and when it adjusts, it will no longer be challenged and will stop growing. To begin with, you can change the weight, number of reps or rest period for each exercise, but after a few weeks, your muscles will become bored again.

That's where muscle confusion comes in. When you confuse your muscles, they can't adjust to the exercises and are forced to continue growing.

At the very least, you should be changing the exercises you use to train each muscle every 6 weeks. An even better method is to change up your exercises every week. Have a list of numerous exercises for each muscle group and every week choose a new exercise from that list to keep you moving forward.

And while we're on the topic of muscle confusion, the same principle applies for your cardio training. Running on the treadmill is great, but eventually your legs will get used to that challenge. Add stair-climbers, ellipticals and other machines to your workout to reap even more benefits.