thenaturalone’s BodyBlog

I cant tell you just how many articles I’ve read in bodybuilding books and magazines about how you can achieve muscle growth by using muscle confusion and or muscle tricking techniques. Articles such as these seem to suggest that each muscle fiber has it’s own little brain and can think for it’s self to the point where when you train that your actually in a war of wits with your muscles and need to invent some clever strategic plan in order to trick your muscles into a growth response, ya know like a game of chess your having with your muscles where each muscle fiber is it’s own entity that can outwit you if your not slick enough for it’s formitable intelligence. I just have to laugh, roll my eyes and shake my head when I hear and read about theories like this. There does not exist one single iota of scientific evidence that suggests that it’s even a remote possibility to confuse your muscles. The only confusion thats taking place is the confusion that bodybuilding enthusiasts have when they read obsurd articles in books and magazines that suggest muscle confusion is real. The fact of the matter is that it is absolutely impossible to confuse a muscle! Our muscles are not that technical. Our muscles have only two fuctions, they contract and they relax, that’s it! Yes, you heard me correctly, contract and relax, that’s all! Although progressive resistance or muscle overload is absolutely necessary in order for your body to have an adaptive response to grow bigger muscles, there is no way, shape or form that you can confuse your muscles. Muscle growth occurs through a very simple process. You workout, you perform weight training exercises and if your going about it the right way you progressively increase the intensity of your training by subjecting your muscles to either heavier weights than what they’re used to or by using a the same weights for a higher rep range than they are used to in order to warrant an adaptive response by the body which is to ad more muscle to the body part under a now more stressful work load, in order to protect that body part from further assault that you may subject it to. Ounce you’ve tore up a muscle with progressive overload the next step is to get out of the gym, make sure you give the muscles sufficient time to recover so that they can actually grow, take in the precise amount of protein and nutrients to fullfill your muscles maitainance and growth needs, and ounce your fully recovered your muscles will now be bigger and stronger and you go back into the gym and follow this process all over again but now working with a heavier work load than last time, and it’s that simple. Don’t ever let anyone make you think that muscle growth is more complicated than that because it isn’t! One last note here. If when you go back into the gym to repeat a given workout, and your not stronger than you were the last time, then it’s because your muscles haven’t fully recovered yet and you need to incorporate more rest days between all future weight training sessions!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.