#185: Why Switching Up Your Workouts Stalls Muscle Growth (The Myth of Muscle Confusion)

So the myth of muscle confusion.

This is something that I was taught for so many years, and when I started to learn more about how muscle is actually built and how to get stronger, I realized it was such a myth.

And I was just listening to Chalene Johnson's podcast a few days ago.

She was somebody who was one of these aerobic exercise type of e- instructors.

I think it was Pivo or something before my time anyway.

She was doing that online, and she said that it was all just this big marketing thing, that they were trying to get you to like do the next thing, because of course they needed you to buy their tapes and do their tapes.

And if they tried to tell you that, "Hey, actually all you need is this one thing and you can do this for a long time," then nobody would buy it.

It was really all about marketing.

And there's real science around not switching your exercises.

So the way that muscle is built and gets stronger is that you need to be pushing it close to its limits or even to its limits, right? Progressively overloading it.

And that's only possible to really do if you are repeating the same exercise over and over again.

So you need to be doing the same exercises for eight to 10 or even longer weeks in a row.

And just constantly, as you get stronger, so you do need to be getting stronger, so don't just start increasing reps and increasing weights just because you feel like you have to.

You have to actually get stronger.

When you notice that you're able to do more, you push yourself to do even a little bit more.

So I brought up this analogy before, like if you start jogging.

In the beginning, jogging around the block at a certain pace is going to feel hard.

You do that for a few weeks, and you notice that, hey, this isn't hard anymore, and you can go faster, or you start going farther.

Maybe you jog around one and a half times around the block.

That is progressive overload.

That is doing the same thing but more of it over time.

If you were training for a marathon, you would not be hopping and skipping one day, swimming another day, playing tennis a third day.

I mean, all those things will help your general fitness, yes, absolutely.

But when you're training for a particular result, what you wanna do is choose a set of exercises, stick to those, progressively overload them, and do that for eight to 10 or even longer weeks in a row.

So that's exactly how I design my programs.