How to Do Muscle Confusion Workouts

Step 1

Muscle confusion workouts became really popular when DVDs like P90x and Insanity came around. This method of training revolves around the idea that after a certain period of time your muscles actually start to learn the routine they're going through. If you hit the same exercises for chest, and you work your chest on the same day every week, eventually your chest will stop reacting as well to training. With muscle confusion you can keep your muscles guessing, and as a result keep them growing. Below I'll outline the ways to keep muscle confusion, which is both helpful and fun, alive in your training regimen.

Step 2

The first way to keep your muscles confused is to, every three months or so, change the days that you work your muscles. If you've been doing chest day on Monday for the past few months, change it over to Tuesday instead. This simple alteration will confuse your muscles and force them to wake up and grow in order to compensate for the change. Besides, doing the same muscles on the same days can get tiresome after a while. Change it up for your muscles, but also change it up because it keeps things interesting.

Step 3

Another way to do muscle confusion workouts is to change the order of the exercises you do week by week. If you did flat bench, incline bench, and incline dumbbell flys one week, then try to mix them up in a different way the next week. This mix up will throw your chest off balance and force it to grow. You're still keeping things simple, but to your muscles it's very confusing.

Step 4

If you get sick of the same exercises every week, even in different order, then you can try another way of confusing your muscles: always doing different exercises. As each week goes by, make sure to completely ditch the exercises you did the week before and replace them with new ones. This is good for two reasons: 1. It keeps your muscles confused and keeps them growing, and 2. different exercises hit your muscles from different angles, which will help to give you a more balanced look overall.

Step 5

Finally, the last way to do muscle confusion workouts is to change the style of your lifting as time goes on. Do normal bodybuilding for a while (3 sets of 10 reps of maybe 5 exercises per body part). Then switch it up to powerlifting (5 sets of 2 reps for maybe 3 exercises for each body part). After that, maybe do some calisthenics (high reps for a bunch of body parts for every single workout). Changing up your style of lifting will constantly keep your muscles on edge, and it can be a lot of fun too. Try adding resistance bands into your workouts also, which will give your muscles another angle to deal with. I listed a great product below that offers a lot of different options for resistance bands of different levels.