Reading the title, Muscle Confusion Workouts might leave you confused, at least if you are in the beginning phases of your strength training journey. I know that I would have been confused if I had seen it several years ago. I think I might have said something along the lines of, “Muscle Confusion Workouts, huh? Is that what they call it when you’re head hurts after hours of searching for the perfect workout?” The truth is that we know there is no such thing as the “perfect” workout. However there are tons of great workouts that will work for whatever your goals are.
What is a muscle confusion workout?
The trick is to know when you need to change your workout and how much change you actually need. Typically you want to switch it up every 4-8 weeks so that your muscles don’t get too far accustom to the stressors you’re placing on them. This is where the term “muscle confusion” comes into play. Now, whether or not your muscles actually get confused is a different topic, but I think it would involve skeletal muscles thinking.
There are too many ways to change up your workouts to go over in one article. So, instead I’m going to share a muscle confusion workout that I think applies to many people’s questions about how to attain strength, endurance, and muscular size. This workout is an endurance workout, meant to be one part of three different workouts rotated month by month. In a future article I will go over some good strength and muscle building workouts that you can rotate this one with, but right now I recommend starting the sequence with the endurance portion.
By starting with the endurance workout, we ensure that we are building a safe foundation for being able to handle heavier weights in the later months. You’ll workout three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and this will be a full body workout. Start off by warming up with 30 to 60 seconds of jumping rope or jumping jacks, and then jump into your first legs exercise which are lunges. Depending on your conditioning you may want to start off with using no extra weight. The sets and reps scheme for this workout will be approximately 1 set of as many reps as you can handle for each exercise 3 days a week.
After Lunges are Pushups. Everybody knows about these. There’s nothing new here, and there’s a reason for that. Pushups work. Period. Then we have Bent Over Rows for the back muscles, Leg lifts for the abdominals, and Hip thrusts for your other legs exercise. To do the Hip thrusts lie on your back with your knees bent. Push down with your legs until your thighs and and abs are in line with each other. On the fourth week take the top numbers from week 3 and only do 75% of those reps for each of week 4’s workouts. On the fifth week switch over to a muscle building routine. There you go, a quick and effective home workout that can be done 3 times a week that will go along way to improving your endurance.