Due to its being heavily marketed and sold on television, and otherwise, P90X has given the term ?muscle confusion? a prominent place in the vocabularies of just about every fitness enthusiast, personal trainer and bodybuilding professional.
Muscle confusion sounds like a highly technical term, but the truth is that it is nothing more than a phrase that?s used to describe the most basic muscle building philosophy around ? progressive overload.
As the muscles grow and adapt they require greater amounts of strain (or stress) to continue to grow larger. A common mistake made by weight lifters is that they aren?t intentional about continually applying greater levels of stress on their muscles, leading to premature muscle building plateaus.
Few things are more frustrating than training with weights for months on end and still looking the same after all of your hard work. If you?ve ever been there, you know the frustrated feeling I?m talking about.
The Lacking Results Problem
I personally considered giving up on using weight lifting to build a strong and muscular physique as a beginner bodybuilder on a few different occasions. I?d make excuses about how my genetics weren?t conducive to building muscle or I?d think there was some secret that all of the big and strong guys at my gym knew that I didn?t.
I was doing all of the same lifts and performing the same number of sets as they were, but I wasn?t growing!
The reason my muscles weren?t getting any larger is that I wasn?t giving them any reason to. I was lifting the same amount of weight for the same number of reps on just about every one of my lifts.
My muscles had long since grown and adapted to the resistances I was using and they needed to be ?confused? into growing once again.
In the process of trying to figure out how to confuse our muscles, we can easily confuse our brains if we?re not careful. As I alluded to earlier, muscle confusion needn?t be a term that seems overly technical or beyond your ability to grasp.
It?s a concept that?s been used by bodybuilders since the early nineteen hundreds, when muscle building science hadn?t really even gotten off the ground yet.
Old School Muscle Confusion
Think about the most impressive physiques you?ve ever seen: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Reg Park, Bill Pearl or John Grimek come to mind.
Many people don?t realize this, but before Arnold was competing in Mr. Universe contests he was a competitive power lifter. While he?s since admitted to a certain amount of steroid use during his years as a competitive bodybuilder, Arnold still owes much of his strength, power and muscular development to those early years as a power lifter.
Long before Arnold was posing on stage he was dead lifting seven hundred pounds, bench pressing 500 pounds and squatting bar-bending weights.
This allowed him to build mountainous muscles that gave him the base that won him a number of bodybuilding titles over the course of his career.
All of the guys mentioned above weren?t doing a dozen different P90X-style push up and pull-up variations to confuse their muscles into growing. They were pushing themselves to lift as much weight as possible and forcing their muscles to grow at every opportunity. And their muscles responded.
Muscle confusing to the early legends of strength and bodybuilding was as simple as putting more weight on the bar, and nothing has changed today. Gaining herculean amounts of muscle ultimately comes down to continually lifting heavier weights.
A Word on Nutrition
If you?re going to be intentional about adding five pounds to the bar every training session (which is a good goal to pursue), you?re going to have to pay attention to how you?re feeding your body as well.
You can?t be depriving your body of calories, and specifically protein, if you want your muscles to grow larger and stronger. In other words, it will prove to be very difficult to continually confuse your muscles when working on cutting fat.
When working on reducing body fat, you should still push yourself to lift as heavy as possible in your desired rep ranges, but don?t get too frustrated if your gains don?t come too quickly.
Once you get to a satisfactory level of body fat you?ll want to ramp up your nutrition so you can start seeing steady, consistent gains in muscle and strength. A good plan of attack is to daily consume one gram of complete protein for every pound of body weight you hope to get to.
Now, be realistic here. If you currently weigh 160lbs, don?t go throwing back 300g of protein because you want to eventually weigh 300lbs. Start with a more realistic goal of 200lbs.
As you get closer to 200lbs you can adjust your nutrition as you see fit.
Besides, eating excessive amounts of calories will make you get fat. The goal should obviously be to maintain a certain level of definition while bulking up. Big lean muscles that are covered by layers of body fat never impressed anyone.
So eat sufficient protein and monitor your overall calories. If you start to notice your body fat getting out of control, scale back your calories a bit by adjusting your daily carbohydrate and fat intake, while continuing to eat one gram of complete protein for every pound of your ideal body weight.
Simple enough? Good.
Muscle confusion has been around almost since men started lifting and moving heavy things to make their muscles grow larger.
Even though it may not have been called by the term ?muscle confusion? the premise of gaining muscle with this principle has always been the same: move heavier weights and your muscles will grow larger.
Source: http://www.myhealthandfitness.net.au/muscle-confusion-old-school-style/
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