Muscle Confusion Explained (DOES IT WORK?)

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Yo! What the fuck are you doing? Muscle confusion, bro! But if you talk too loud they’re going to hear you. What’s up, guys?!

Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Muscle confusion in progress, or at least in Jessie’s mind, or at the very least, wherever Jessie’s training – because it ain’t here anymore, he got kicked out for that bullshit – he’s confusing every other person in the gym with what he’s doing. You see, muscle confusion is one of those buzzwords and terms that I have to dive into here today, to get to the truth behind what we’re really trying to accomplish. I actually believe in muscle confusion.

I do. I swear. But we have to understand what we’re doing in the first place. Confusing muscles should be about one thing, and one thing only. That is progressively overloading your muscles.

Providing them with a new stimulus that they aren’t used to. So we don’t have to do acrobatics. We don’t have to get on physio balls and start slamming med balls into the wall because that’s downright dangerous. What we have to do is provide some form of stimulus that your muscles haven’t encountered until that point if you want to see progression. So, you ready?

I’m going to give you a great demonstration right here of a possible way that could create muscle confusion. All right, here we go. I’m going to count down. Three, two, one, bam! There’s muscle confusion.

Right there. Let’s say I squat 225 and that’s what I’m used to doing all the time. By adding a single, 5lb plate to each side of the bar I’ve just gone to 235. Guess what? My muscles are confused.

They haven’t felt that before. That’s something new. I haven’t trained with that weight, at least in that rep range. So it’s something new. Well, we can go beyond that.

Let me show you another example here of muscle confusion. Let’s stick with the same weight that we always use on the same exercise. The squat. Let’s get confused. Here we go.

One, two, three, boom! I squat, and now I’m confusing myself. But in a good way because now I’m doing a pause squat. You see, this pause squat is a tempo alteration that my muscles haven’t felt before and if you haven’t done pause squats before they’re a great way to introduce a new stimulus – i. e.

confusion – to your muscles that will demand that they adapt to it and get bigger, and stronger, and more able to handle that stress in the future. So by adding a pause squat I have to be in command of the weight. I can’t simply rely on momentum down, and back up again, or half-ass reps down, and up in order to handle that, or to achieve that. So now I have to demand that my muscles get used to being down there. That, in and of itself, is a form of muscle confusion.

But we can do other things, too. We can bring out the new exercises. I’m not saying “Don’t bring out new exercises. ” I’m all for new exercises, but with a purpose. This is where it blends into the whole aspect of ‘functional training’ that we’ve covered here before.

What is ‘functional training’? It’s one, and only one thing. It’s purposeful training. So if your purpose is to build strength, doing crazy acrobatics should not fit into your training because it ain’t going to serve a purpose. But, if your purpose is to be more athletic then maybe altering the way that you do certain exercises, instead of always lunging straight ahead, introducing a three-dimensional lunge; that’s a good thing.

We’re demanding more out of that. Or even this exercise here. This is called a fielder curl. We’ve actually put this into some of our programs as a way to get our guys to focus on their hips and their hip training, but in a way that we know we can get them to do it. Because, guess what?

We’ve included the biceps. There’s the magic word. Now, all of a sudden, people will do it because they’ve included biceps with it. Sometimes you have to break out those means if you need to get someone to start working the muscles they don’t tend to want to work on. But I can tell you this: from the ground up it’s an athletic based movement and we’re going to start working our hips in the frontal plane, which is a good thing.

But the bottom line is this: a form of confusion should always be sought after because, to me, that means that you’re looking for some way to challenge your muscles in a way that they’re not used to. Confuse them, but don’t start looking to gimmicky, stupid, acrobatic exercises – if that’s what you want to call them – to create muscle confusion. All it’s going to do is, like I said, leave everybody else in the gym confused as to wat you’re actually trying to accomplish in the first place, and probably leave you disappointed in the results that you see. Guys, if you’re looking for a program that puts the science back in strength, head to ATHLEANX. com right now and I’ll show you how to make the right progressions to always keep the gains coming.

We know that we can easily plateau, especially if you’re drug free in training. Plateaus are inevitable. But you need to have ways and strategies – whether you’re manipulating your volume, your tempo, the exercises that you’re doing – you need to have those methods to be able to keep those gains coming. I’m going to show you how to do that over in our program. In the meantime, if you’ve found this video helpful, or enlightening leave your comments and thumbs up below and I’ll make more of what you want to see in the future.

All right, guys. I’ll see you soon.