*UPDATE* You should read this article. It’s way better than mine (darn you Caleb): http://doubleyourgains.com/muscle-confusion-101-why-muscle-confusion-and-p90x-is-bullsht
I will do my best to keep this discussion of confusion as confuseless as possible, despite the fact that I’ve already written the first sentence in a confusing manner.
I’m sure you’ve heard of calorie confusion (Josh Bezoni’s 7 Day Belly Blast Diet is based on it), muscle confusion (P90X anyone?) and other forms of “confusion” for fitness.
Personally, I have an opinion that probably goes against a lot of people. First of all, how can you confuse parts of your body that don’t have a brain? My muscle does what my brain tells it to, so I can’t confuse it, I can only confuse my brain. So right there I’m a little skeptical of these confusion theories.
Josh Bezoni says calorie confusion prevents your metabolism from figuring out what’s going on, so you change things up (but his way, not anyone else’s because you’ll be doing it wrong and you’ll get poor results) ever 7 days and you lose weight insanely fast…
If this is true, how come so many other experts just give you nutrition guidelines and tell you to eat the same forever, and the people that follow their programs get insanely good results? They don’t use calorie confusion.
Then there’s the muscle confusion theory. We’re told that if we don’t change up our routine every 3 seconds we’re going to plateau and get crappy results. Therefore we need to confuse our muscles and change up our program constantly.
Again, I don’t see how it’s possible to confuse something without a brain. By definition it’s not possible. But even if it was, how come people who do manual labor get huge when they’re doing the same thing day in, day out?
Let’s take lumberjacks for instance. Not the ones nowadays with all their machinery, the ones back when they used to cut trees down by themselves. Those guys were huge and insanely strong. Did they change up their routine all the time? Nope.
Neither did the ancient Greeks with those bodies people started trying to duplicate (which is how bodybuilding started). They just did the same stuff and got some amazing bodies.
Ok, so I hear some people saying that they only get a certain size though. Fair enough, they got big enough to get their job done and then they didn’t push their muscles harder so they didn’t grow any more.
Maybe they would need to change it up at that point for some reason if they decided they needed to compete for Mr. Olympia or something but I don’t think that’s true. I have seen no need to change up a program all the time in order to keep getting results.
Yes, you need to constantly be pushing yourself harder and either increasing the frequency or intensity of your exercise to get huge muscles, but you can stick with the same exercises and get increased results.
I cannot say from personal experience as I have no desire to get huge, so I don’t try to build huge muscles. However, there are a lot of people that train without the muscle confusion method and continue to grow and get great results.
In essence, I think the only benefit of the “confusion” theories is it keeps things more exciting if you get bored easily. Otherwise, there is no need to try to confuse every part of your body.
Shawn Horwood
P.S. I think my article may have been a bit confusing, so I went and found someone who shares a similar opinion in a much better form. I think it’s pretty much mandatory reading, so check it out! http://doubleyourgains.com/muscle-confusion-101-why-muscle-confusion-and-p90x-is-bullsht
