How does muscle confusion work

Can we really confuse our muscles? Should we? That being said, there are benefits to varying your workout routine. The more comprehensive you can make a workout, the more ways you hit your muscles, and the more likely you are to have positive benefits. In other words, it's not necessarily that your muscles get "used to" certain exercises and they stop becoming effective. It's just that if you do the same moves, at the same intensity, and for the same number of reps day after day or if you run the same route day after day , you're only working certain parts of your muscles.

You'll see benefit from the moves, but only to a point. You'll also probably get bored. If you constantly switch it up, however, you'll be training more of your muscles.

That's true whether you do the same exercises at varied intensities or different exercises altogether. It's going to get better at handling whatever stress you put on it the more you do it. So when you stress it in different ways, you have more chances to positively adapt," Tumminello says. When the message arrives, a chemical reaction stimulates the muscle fibers causing them to contract.

The whole process takes a millisecond. It is this increase that improves the nerve connections to the result of this feedback from muscle to the motor neuron: The health of the synapse the connection between the nerve and muscle fiber improves and its activation pattern adapts to meet the requirements of the muscle.

And it is what we know about how our brain works and communicates with these muscles that lays the secret to how muscle confusion may work.

And since these are exercise that we do regularly, our body knows how to prepare. At least that is what research tells us. When Hatfield and colleagues recorded the muscle activity along the spines of 15 strength-trained men both after the subjects psyched up for a lift and after they did a distraction task like mental arithmetic, they found no difference in performance—though there is some research that has found the opposite.

Why the difference? Hatfield thinks it was the subjects—trained men. I think if we did this study with beginners, then we might see a difference. When looking at the brains and, in this case, the quadriceps muscles of people who participated in endurance training, strength training or no training communicate differently depending on the activity, University of Kansas researchers found that the quadriceps muscle fibers of the endurance trainers fired more rapidly.

So can muscles really be confused? Simulated differently? Of course we know that our nerves and muscles communicate differently when learning new movements or performing different types of exercises. Peak force recorded after psyching up was Carey Rossi is a journalist specializing in health, fitness, nutrition and mind-body topics. That's why we put together this muscle confusion cheat sheet.

Scroll down to learn where this term came from, how it applies to workouts and if it's actually legit. Popularized by boutique fitness culture and P90X trainer Tony Horton, there's not one widely accepted definition of muscle confusion. But generally, it refers to the premise that constantly switching up your workouts — and as a result, "confusing" your muscles — is the fast way to gains.

Because doing the exact same workout over and over and over again can lead to halted progress, it makes sense that this type of training has gained traction. While muscle confusion sounds like a pretty legit way to dodge a plateau, you'd be hard pressed to find a certified trainer or fitness coach who'd sign off on this being the best approach to meeting any fitness goal unless your goal is to try every workout class in your city.

Basically, "the body makes training gains based on what it does over and over again," Mack says. That means consistently working toward one fitness goal for example, building strength, improving mobility or increasing cardiovascular fitness is the faster way to reach it, she says. Let's say, for instance, you want to run a marathon. You shouldn't train for it by going to spin class every other day. The best way to prepare yourself is by running. Or if you wanted to get better at push-ups, you would have to do a certain amount of them each week and not, say, squats.

Despite what this fitness buzzword implies, muscles respond very predictably to exercise. At first glance, this may sound like muscle confusion, but it's actually an approach to strength training called " progressive overload.

The goal of progressive overload, according to Mack, is to challenge not confuse your muscles as efficiently as possible in order to avoid plateau. The movements may be different every workout, but they're thoughtfully chosen and put into a program that will make an athlete fitter.

You might be wondering why "muscle confusion" has maintained traction — given that there's another, more effective training method out there. The answer is that while progressive overload can be boring, muscle confusion is comparatively less boring. In fact, a January piece in the New York Times reports on a small December study in the journal PLOS One , using it to suggest that because "muscle confusion" is less boring, it may be more effective.