How can you confuse your muscles

Follow this process for months at which point you have probably gotten really good at the exercises you are doing and THEN change up the exercises themselves. Utilizing this strategy will give you the best odds of plateau free progress for a very long time. Sal is one of the hosts of the Mind Pump Podcast.

At the age of 18 his passion for the art and science of resistance training was so consuming that he decided to make it a profession and become a personal trainer. By 19 he was managing health clubs and by 22 he owned his own gym. After 17 years as a personal trainer he has dedicated himself to bringing science and TRUTH to the fitness industry.

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The bottom line. Read this next. The 10 Best Sustainable Activewear Brands for Those are common refrains around muscle confusion, a principle often discussed in the fitness field, whether via your online training app , trainer, or your social media feed. The thinking goes that to best challenge your muscles and boost your fitness, you have to constantly switch up your workouts. But is muscle confusion really a thing? One of the tried-and-true tenets of strength training is to add challenges to continue to see results.

Behm , Ph. Think about it this way. You run a target minute mile and do 10 push-ups every day. At first it might feel pretty challenging. But over time, as your body becomes stronger and builds aerobic endurance, that same fitness feat starts to feel easier.

But you keep running that same minute mile and doing those 10 push-ups. Behm explains. And to do that, you have to keep challenging yourself. You may think you are, though, because the workouts probably leave you super sweaty and spent.

The other side of the fitness-adaptation coin, progressive overload is all about systematically and consistently increasing the stimulus on your body to keep it adapting. Most of the time, progressive overload takes the form of lifting heavier weights, doing more reps, running faster or longer, or swapping out an easy exercise for a more challenging variation of that same movement.