Weight Training Advice
Muscle Confusion
any bigger and stronger. One of the main causes for this is that your muscles have grown too accostumed to your workouts. To combet this, you need to use some muscle confusion.
To use muscle confusion you have to do things in your weight training routine that your muscles aren't used to. When the muscles are forced to do something new they are also forced to adapt - and this adaptation is what leads to renewed growth. Whether you do a few little tweaks to your workouts, or overhaul them completely, giving the muscles something new will almost certainly work.
One great way to use muscle confusion is to make small changes from workout to workout. A lot of times this can be just performing a couple of different exercises or changing the order you do them in. If you always use barbells when you bench press, can use dumbbells instead during every other workout. If you always use the same grip ranges when you do pull-ups and rows, you can try different ones to hit the muscles from other angles. you could also try starting your chest workout with incline bench presses rather than flat ones and changing the order you do your upper back exercises (start with pull-ups or pulldowns one workout and rows the next). You can do this with any muscle group to work the muscles differently.
Another thing that is great for muscle confusion is to switch how many reps you do per set. In fact, you can do this all of the time by setting up your routine so that each muscle gets a light, medium, and heavy workout. If you follow a 3 workout split routine you would use lighter weights and higher reps for all three workouts. You would then go through all 3 using medium weight for a medium amount of reps. In the last phase of this routine you would do all three workouts using heavy weights for low reps. This won't allow your muscles to get used to one range of repetitions per set. You will also work both slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers by doing this.
Trying a new type of workout is another great way to use muscle confusion. One that you can try is the 10 X 10 workout. For this workout you will do 10 sets for 10 reps on one exercise for a muscle group. The amount of weight you will use should be one that you can do for 20 reps before hitting failure. The key to this workout is that you only get exactly one minute of rest between each set. If you are doing this muscle confusion workout for the bench press you would load the barbell with a weight you can do 20 reps on and do 10 sets of 10 reps with only one minute to recover between sets. This is way harder than it sounds. The first few sets wil be easy, but by the last few you may very well not be able to hit 10 reps. This isn't a workout you will want to use all of the time, but if you go through your entire weight training routine once or twice doing this, you should give your muscles a kick to breaking through a plateau.
As you can see, there are many great ways to use muscle confusion. These aren't the only one either. Doing anything that your muscles aren't used to can help you break through that wall in your training results and start your muscles growing again.
When you are trying to increase strength and muscle mass from weight training there is a certainty that you will hit a wall in your gains at some point. When you hit one of these plateaus you may find that you can't seem to get
