Muscle Confusion Principles, Part 1
By Tom Frase

These are advanced techniques and should be used with caution and supervision if necessary. Please understand that if proper care is not taken, injury could result.

100′s. Take 20% of your maximum and go for 100 reps. This works well with bench press, dumbbell press, shoulder raises, shoulder press, triceps pushdown, seated rows, and lat pulldowns. Ex: If your Bench press one-rep maximum is 250 pounds, strip the bar to 50 pounds and go for 100 reps. You may not feel the burn until you reach the 75th rep. If you fail to get to 100, stop at the failing point and wait the amount of time it would take you to make it to 100. If you stopped at 65 reps, wait 35 seconds and continue. 100 total reps – 65 reps = 35 seconds rest. This technique is the hardest to get used to, but the results are tremendous.

Skip a bodypart for a month. Do not do any exercises with chest or a different bodypart for a month. Continue to do the workouts on the other bodyparts, just give the one particular bodypart a rest.
This will keep you in a workout state of mind and you will give a specific bodypart a breather.

Skip a specific particular exercise within a bodypart workout. For example do not bench for month continue to do all other chest exercises, just give your body a rest from the specific exercise.

All day one bodypart workout. Good for Saturdays or Sundays. In the morning start your bodypart and get in a good workout. During the rest of the day, continue to hit that bodypart. If you workout at the gym, you may be limited to the effectiveness. Take the chest workout for instance; get in a good workout in the morning and then the rest of the day do pushups to continue the burn.

Intermix bodyparts. If you workout chest and triceps in a particular workout, change to chest and biceps or chest and back. This once again will alter the body’s routine. The result will be a better burn.

Interchange movements within the workout (Supersets). After you bench, get up and grab a bar and do some arm curls or chin-ups. Doing opposite movements work well together and will give you a different kind of burn.

Workout the same bodyparts the next day. One of my favorites. Workout legs as you normally do, the next day do about 75-80% of the workout you did the day before. This back to back workout targets a specific bodypart and puts demand on a muscle group that it normally does not receive.

Combine some of the above principals. Use one or two different techniques. Some of this will be very new to your workouts and over time you may become use to the grind that these techniques provide.
Combining two or more may really change your workout and confuse the muscles to grow and burn.

These are suggestions that I found to be useful to me. The helped me overcome my dependence on my bench press and I have continued to achieve my goals. People are different. All of the items listed above are guidelines, you may find it necessary to modify percentages, weights and repetitions to achieve individual goals.

Come back tomorrow to see part 2 of this great article.

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