We are all too familiar with the term “muscle confusion.” The concept of “confusing” our bodies by constantly switching exercises and training splits has been touted for years as an essential component to avoid plateaus and optimize results. The idea is that once a muscle gets used to a certain movement, it will suddenly stop repairing the damage done during training beyond simply maintaining current size and strength. Not only is this rationale biologically impossible provided that sufficient progressive overload—increasing volume in the form of either weight, reps, or time under tension whenever physically possible—is practiced, it also seems to disregard the nervous system’s entire role in the process of growing stronger.

Neuromuscular crash course

You know about “newbie gains”—that first year or so of intelligent training where the body is at its most responsive due to all the completely new stimulus. Well, part of that period, right in the beginning, includes the sudden, rapid jumps in strength, especially in previously sedentary individuals. This is not actually due to you getting stronger really fast. You’re becoming more efficient. Your nervous system is learning how to perform these new movement patterns, how to best fire signals to the motor neurons in the muscles being used, and how to use the baseline of strength you already have. With each practice of the specific movement, it gets a bit better at doing it, thus doing it better.

This is why light, easy training with meticulous form is so crucial in the beginning. You are literally teaching your body how to perform that movement from then on. Program a faulty code into the system, and that function will always be performed with the original faulty code you gave it. This is where another commonly-misused term, “muscle memory,” comes from—when your nervous system recognizes something it has done before, a program code it already has, it can quickly retrieve that code from its so-called library, without the same delay of the learning stage. Think of the “like learning how to ride a bike” effect. Muscle memory does not mean that you keep a certain level of muscularity forever because you played a sport once in high school. It does also refer to the myonuclear domain theory about the retention of myonuclei created via training even after detraining, but that’s a whole other article.

Once your nervous system masters one particular movement and is now fully utilizing the baseline strength you started with, you are finally able to actually use enough force to challenge the muscles themselves with that movement. Then, and only then, can hypertrophy and actual strength gain begin to occur. For this reason, beginning with low-volume, basic training focused on the core compound barbell movements (even body weight mastery first if necessary) with perfect form for a solid phase is crucial. Not only is it important for establishing correct motor patterns, but it’s also actually quite useless to try to jump into anything harder until the neuromuscular learning phase has occurred.

This process applies to every new exercise you introduce, no matter how long you’ve been training. Indeed, a new movement is a new movement pattern, even accessories and angle variations. While those certainly do not require as substantial a motor learning phase as compound movements, they still use up a bit of introductory time to figure out what they’re doing before any additional doing can be done. Therefore, if you’re constantly throwing out exercises for different ones in an effort to keep your body guessing, what you’re really doing is keeping your body constantly in the neural adaptation stage and allowing very little time, if any, to actually experience stressful loads from the movement and respond before you’ve replaced it with another new pattern to learn. This would be like constantly switching from class to class and expecting to learn the material.

After a solid phase of relearning the deconditioned primal movement patterns most of us lost after childhood due to unnatural lifestyles, a variety of exercises and angles can definitely be ideal in a well-structured program for complete physique development as well as reduced likelihood of overuse injuries... but the aspect of structure is critical. Instead of haphazardly barging through a never-ending list of new exercises and workouts every other week, pick similar exercises with tweaks in angle, grip, equipment, etc., and rotate them (tracking performance with respect to each variation and ensuring progressive overload), so your body’s motherboard is always operating with efficient codes that it knows. In this way, you can actually spend most of your time pushing limits and progressing.

To sum it up: don’t stray too much when it comes to the big compound movements, as those involve many simultaneous movements and demand a lot from the nervous system, especially if you are a performance athlete who obviously must practice the movements of the sport. Early in a macrocycle is an appropriate time to allow deviation from the "business" movements, as many periodized programs do—for example, a mesocycle or so of variations such as front squats, close grip bench press, or even unilateral-only variations can effectively address weaknesses, mitigate joint/ligament stress from the previous cycle, etc., and this is common. However, specificity is still crucial later in the program, where the competition lifts would be reintroduced in exchange—and the nervous system would more or less pick up where it left off, after some reacclimation, since it already knows those "codes."

Use your accessory movements as necessary after your most important lifts are accounted for. There is certainly something to be said for varying those to kick progress back into gear when it seems to have stalled, as well as for general enjoyment of training. But this should be done in a somewhat uniform, planned manner, and to a smaller degree than most people imagine—for example, choosing a different horizontal row variation after eight weeks and keeping your other accessories the same until the next eight weeks, or maybe changing one or two others along with it if you have some staleness in more than one. The idea is to allow exercises the space to actually work and realize the potential reward before moving on, and not moving everything on all at once. Mental freshness is valuable, but if progress comes first for you, be real with yourself: all your exercises are not plateauing all at the same time, and unless you've been using them for many weeks, chances are none of them are even close to plateauing. Let things work, until they don't anymore.

Keep the “confusion” somewhere like cardio time, where the goal is just some extra expenditure and/or conditioning. Efficiency is, in fact, undesirable when aiming to maximize caloric expenditure—you don’t want your body to get used to one modality and learn how to do it with less expenditure when the goal is energetic "fuel inefficiency." (This is of course with the assumption that you are not a performance athlete whose sport uses a specific type of cardio, such as track, in which case specificity applies in the same way: you better be training what your sport involves and getting efficient at it. We're talking specificity here in relation to your goal, no matter what it is—fill your own blanks in the concept.) But your strength/hypertrophy/power work depends on maximal movement efficiency. The way to do that is, in fact, to keep your body accustomed to the movements.