Confused by the Concept of Muscle Confusion?

Ever heard of the term “muscle confusion”?

Is it real or just a myth?

Let’s start by getting a better understanding of muscle adaptation. When you engage in exercise, your muscles undergo both acute and chronic transformations. In each session, your body dynamically adjusts, and over weeks and months of consistent effort, it undergoes lasting changes.

Acute changes more commonly appear as dilating arteries and veins, increased heart rate, increased energy usage of muscles, and small tears in the contractile units of the muscles (the ones that help you lift weights, jump, or sprint). Although these changes matter, if experienced infrequently, they likely do not enhance your health or performance.

Chronic adaptations occur through sustained and regular training, where the cumulative effect of frequent acute changes leads to improvements in cardiovascular performance, muscular strength, power, and various health benefits. According to research, these enduring transformations typically manifest after 30 days, often within the span of 4 to 8 weeks of dedicated exercise.

What makes a person stick with training to even reach those goals of increased performance or muscle size? Motivation! Whether intrinsic or extrinsic, this is where some lose sight of New Year’s resolutions while others obtain success from their dedication. Motivation is a large determining factor in what I consider to be one of the most important components behind an individual’s training: intent. What I mean by this is how one executes an exercise or a drill. For example, if an athlete wants to get faster they need to perform certain drills and sprints. They are motivated to be faster but how they execute the drills and sprints is crucial. If they run at 100% of their maximum effort, they will get faster through consistent training and optimal recovery. If they don’t “give it their all” each time, they will see minimal improvement or none at all. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME! Right?

Back to muscle confusion. This is a theory that you can fool your muscles into making more adaptations by switching up what exercises you do in each training session. Can you do that? Should you use this format of training? Let’s dive into this a little more and discuss some research on this very topic.

Execution of exercises is a skill. Skills take time to master. For instance, dribbling a basketball is something that you need to do frequently to improve proficiency so that you can perform and operate at a high level to have an advantage over your opponent. It’s a fundamental element of the game. Soccer dribbling, batting, pitching, throwing and catching are all further examples of this. To perform an exercise to the best of your ability, you need to execute them safely and efficiently. This takes time and coaching! Starting with the basics at an appropriate age and gaining ongoing experience through training.

Experience takes time. As they say, training is a “grind”. It can wear down the attention span and interest level…it can lose appeal. When this happens, motivation and intent suffer. So “muscle confusion” has been a refuge for those needing a little more variety in their training. For a strength coach, this can be a little frustrating and definitely outside of your perfectly periodized program. However, there are forms of non-linear periodization that can fit right into your yearly training plan. This is also a good point of conversation for coaches to athletes or coaches to coaches. Chances are, if you are a strength and conditioning professional, you already know plenty of exercises that complement your athletes’ goals in addition to incorporating variety into training. 

Here’s where it all gets interesting to me. I know that consistency is needed for adaptations and athlete motivation is crucial to that. But what does the research say…

“The effects of exercise variation in muscle thickness, maximal strength and motivation in resistance-trained men” by Eneko Baz-Valle, et al. explored this topic for us. (Find the article link at the bottom.) It should be noted that the goal of this study was not max strength. The ranges of reps indicate more of a hypertrophy goal, meaning increasing muscle size. Muscle size doesn’t always equal muscle strength, by the way.

In 8 weeks, they found increases in both muscle thickness of the quadriceps muscles and strength improvements in bench press and back squat for both groups. The biggest difference highlighted by the study was the increase in intrinsic motivation by the group who had more variety in their workouts. 

As I mentioned before, if you increase motivation, you will more than likely increase the intent of execution. Again, that can provide better results and lead to a more positive association of the activity for that athlete.

Relating to the skills section, the group who did not have variety was better at bench press than the experimental group. So this could have an impact on programs that value certain exercises as the “gold standard” for their sport. If your football team is a “Clean, Bench and Back Squat Program”, you should make sure you’re good at those before adding more of a variety of exercises and movements.

When taking applicable information from this article, it is important to understand the layout of the study and its limitations. A hypertrophy protocol was utilized, (which may not be your goal at all times of the year), they only measured the muscle thickness of the quads, and the volume per muscle group and progression weren’t accounted for or standardized. This doesn’t diminish the results, I just think you should consider everything before employing any new strategies to your training regimens.

In conclusion, you can’t confuse your muscles. You train them to make the adaptations you want by putting them through purposeful training. For some, that means a few core lifts and some revolving accessories. For others, that is a constant variety of exercises to “keep things interesting.” It all depends on the group who is training. My recommendation is to train movements for your younger athletes and let them get great at squatting, lunging, pressing bodyweight, pulling bodyweight, sprinting, changing direction, jumping, and every other fundamental element of sport that I might have missed. Over time as they get better, you start adding more load and honing in on which exercise, drill, and protocol is best for your situation. If you find yourself needing a little feedback on how to find the optimal solution, email me: zwallace@acesnation.org. I’m a collegiate strength coach with over 10 years of experience and have coached athletes from ages 10 to 50. ACES Nation is here to help inform and guide you toward success!

Article:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0226989#sec015