Training Tip Tuesday: Muscle Confusion

Most of us get in a rut with our exercise.  We do the same thing repeatedly.  This can obstruct our goals of increasing fitness or losing weight, due to a little phenomenon called "muscle memory".  Basically, when we do things over and over our muscles get trained to do them more efficiently.  Sounds good, right?  Yes, if you're training for a marathon or long bike ride.  When your muscles are efficient they use less energy, or calories, to do said exercise.  But for weight loss and muscle gain,
we want more!

What we want is for our muscles to work hard and burn more calories.  The way we can get this is by creating "muscle confusion".  This means keeping our muscles on their toes! It helps us avoid a fitness plateau, where we stop gaining strength or losing weight.

Some common ways to achieve muscle confusion are HIITs, cross-training, and bricks.

HIITs are High Intensity Interval Training.  It's just what it sounds like.  High intensity in short duration.  They involve every muscle group and keep your muscles doing different actions.

Cross-training would be mixing different activities on different days.  Running or walking, bike riding, HIIT, weight training, swimming, roller blading, trampoline jumping, basketball, soccer, etc. This ensures that we strengthen all our muscles including our lateral-movement muscles (important for women in avoiding injury), our core, our arms, backs, etc.

Bricks are usually what triathletes do.  It means doing 2-3 different exercises in one session.  The three disciplines are swimming, biking, and running.  The toughest is to go from a bike ride to a run, which is the order of events in a triathlon.  Even though running and biking are forward motion leg-centric disciplines they use vastly different movements.  When you start running after a bike ride, your legs really do feel like bricks!

From this we can learn that the best way to avoid efficient low calorie burn movement, and the best way to burn lots of calories is to create muscle confusion.

During your workout hour, mix it up by doing a combination of two different exercises;

Walk + 15 min squats and arm presses

Run + jumping jacks and plank

Bike + 15 min running

HIIT + 15 min Yoga

These are a few examples but the sky's the limit!  If you have 30 minutes, do 15+15, and so forth.  Play with your kids, shoot hoops with your hubby, climb on the jungle gym, do the monkey bars, have a family dance party.  Fitness and muscle confusion doesn't have to happen only with typical "exercise" disciplines.

Confuse those muscles today, and get your max calorie burn for your time!