The Motor Unit

When I first started training weights 12 years back and I started to hit a plateau, my trainer said, “Confuse your muscles to make better gains”. I asked him what it meant trying to dig deeper into how I could go about “confusing my muscles”, so to speak, but he kept pushing it off. Needless to say, I continued to plateau in all my lifts. In hindsight, that was shit advice.

I’d wager many trainees have been told the same thing by their trainer and they’re all talking about the law of accommodation, but with different levels of understanding of the concept. I go into the law of accommodation in my previous post about progressive overload linked here if you’d like to know more about it, but, in summary, the law is all about how your body stagnates if the stimulus remains the same or isn’t challenging your body enough.

Progressive overload is one way of preventing this accommodation. The other way I like to implement in conjunction with progressive overload is changing the lift every 3 to 4 weeks with a week of deload in between the 3 to 4-week cycles. How’s that going to look like practically?

Let’s take the squat pattern as an example. Let’s say I’m training the back squat 3 days a week every other day for weeks 1 to 3 while I’m also implementing the principles of progressive overload discussed in my previous post in my back squat. I deload the fourth week to allow for my muscles to recover because of the lighter loads during that week. This covers an entire month’s back squat workout.

The next month I would use a different variation of the squat pattern but I wouldn’t use the same squat variation as the previous month. So, I’d probably go for front squats or Zercher squats or maybe even a single-leg squat variation like the Bulgarian split squat. The bottom line is that I change the squat variation but the squat pattern would still be there and I’d continue to progress through that variation throughout that month just like I did with the back squat above and then change the variation the next month.

Changing the variation has the following advantages -

1. You keep things fresh

2. Your muscles are stimulated differently

3. You also end up training additional musculature depending on the variation used which gives a more holistic development of your strength.

Should everyone be cycling their lifts every 3 to 4 weeks? It depends on your experience level and if your progress is stalling. Highly experienced lifters change the variation every week to stimulate while novice lifters are advised to stick to a variation for much longer (a few months) to help them learn the movement pattern and also because it takes them much longer to see stagnation.

I trust this helps in clearing a few things up if you start feeling like hitting the wall the next time you lift weights. As always, leave a comment or reach out to me if you’ve got questions or if you’d like to work with me personally.

Until next time!