Is muscle confusion a real thing?

If you’ve ever worked with me in the gym or downloaded one of my exercise guides, you know I program workouts to be repeated for ~ 4 weeks and this is because I use the principle of progressive overload in my coaching. 

👉 You try a new movement/exercise/lift, allow your brain and body to adjust by repeating it, adapt to it and then progress by adding more weight, increasing reps, changing a double leg exercise to a single leg exercise, etc, etc.

You progressively make the exercise harder over time to continue getting stronger and making adaptations. You don’t do the exact same thing forever, but you also don’t change it up every workout.

On the flip side, if you’ve ever tried a bootcamp or HIIT workout class in the past, you may have noticed that no workout was ever the same, even if you saw the same coach each time. It’s always different and this style of exercise is called “muscle confusion”.

The idea behind muscle confusion is that you are constantly changing your workout to “shock” your muscles into stimulation and achieving results.

So… which style of workout is better?

Disclaimer: I truly feel that whatever type of workout you enjoy doing is going to be the best one for you! 

Any movement that you enjoy and will actually stick with is going to be better than a type of workout you loathe or no movement at all (which is eventually what happens when you try to stick with a workout you hate).

But in my opinion, progressive overload is favorable because we’re accomplishing something in a more structured, straight forward way. We get where we’re going faster and we aren’t constantly learning new workouts, which for tired and busy people, can be a nice weight lifted 😉 mentally.

Through research we know that our muscular system responds to load (stress) and overtime will need greater load (stress) to continue making progress (or gainz if you prefer 🤣).

Any type of workout can make you tired or feel like you “got a good workout”... but beyond that, are we accomplishing something? 

Again, I’ll never be a gatekeeper for movement so I won’t say that I think muscle confusion is bad, but I also won’t recommend it beyond just getting some movement in your day and the benefits that come with that.

But at the end of the day, I want you to get more than just a workout. I want you to improve your muscular strength, I want you to improve your bone density, I want you to feel more agile and yet balanced and most importantly, I want you to feel confident as you progress through a workout and physically feel that it’s getting easier over time. 👏