Muscle Confusion Principles
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.

One Movement 12-15 sets. Take the bench press for instance, instead of doing 4-6 sets, perform 12-15 sets. You will see/feel the difference around the 10th set, which will continue until your final set. Start out slightly lower then your normal weights.

Chest-Arms-Chest. Do your normal chest workout and then do your secondary workout ( biceps, triceps, or back ). After your secondary workout, go back and hit your chest again. Listen to your body; pick weights and/or repetitions that give you the best results.

Bench-Incline-Bench. Do your normal bench routine, go to the incline press and do your normal routine, then go back and do the bench press again. By doing this you break your regular work out.

Change the time of your workouts. If you workout in the mornings change to evenings and vice-versa. This will alter your mind set more than your muscle, but it can be effective.

Split up the workout during the day. Do 65% of your chest workout in the morning and than do another 65% of your chest workout in the evening. You will force your muscles to adjust to a different set of rules.

Change your workout days. If you workout 3 days and then have a day off, change to 2 days on, one day off or 3 days on and 2 days off. The key here is to alter the pattern.
Usually day to day life will alter this for us, but if you are in a rut, a subtle change may give your body extra rest or pump it up a notch for those diehards out there.

Calves and Abs. You can work these two muscle groups almost everyday. Work them into your other workouts and they may help youovercome a bad day in the gym. I have found that when I work my calves, I can get a very good burn and it puts my mind in a better mode for the rest of my workout. Good athletes have very strong abs. An examples is: good boxers and baseball players both have strong abs to help transfer power generated in the legs to the upper body.

Grip Placement. Changing the grip on the bars will force different angles and difference muscle groups to be effected in the workout. The narrower the grip in bench press or chin-ups is different from wider grips.

Change degrees of the lift. Shoulder raises and arm curls will work well with this idea. In shoulder raises, alter the angles at which you raise the dumbbell. Directly in front of your body or at a 90 degree angle. Or doing the raise from a full swing to only the top of the swing.

Change the type of weights that you use. Go from free weights to nautilus. This will alter your angles and will change the “feel” you get from lifting. It will feel different, but the whole idea is to change the way our
muscles are worked.

Dips, Pull-ups, and Squats. I am a firm believer in these three exercises. If I could pick the three best exercises in to do, these three would be at the top of the list. They hit almost every muscle group and you can almost improvise each one without weights. I strongly suggest that caution be placed on doing squats. The body takes a beating while performing squats, I suggest at the most 2 days a week with one day being a “light” day while the other day is all out.

Combine some of the above Principles. 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.

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