Have you ever heard the term muscle-confusion? This is commonly used in the marketing pieces of fitness centres to tell you how you'll get better results by doing something different all the time. The premise is that when you do the same activity repeatedly the body 'learns' what you're doing and thus doesn't spend as much energy in order to do. While there is some neuromuscular efficiency that occurs with training it doesn't necessarily lead to the best results. One thing is certain when you perform new movements all the time. You are really sore after doing the first of whatever sport activity you're going to do. Think of how your butt feels after the first long ride on a skinny bike seat. Or how your legs feel after the first heavy powder ski day of the year. Or how your forearms after the first time going rock climbing. Yes it's true. New sports and activity will induce soreness. But I have yet to have one person come through the door of Okanagan Peak Performance Inc identifying soreness as their goal. Or to be sweaty. Or out of breath. How do we know that muscle confusion doesn't work? Because of the research. Recently I was down to Spokane for a conference and had the opportunity to see James Krieger present. During his presentation he showed a study that compared training frequency on size and strength gains. And there were a couple of interesting things about this study. James was the co-author of this study along with Brad Schoenfeld. For those that aren't familiar with Mr. Schoenfeld he is known for producing a lot of great of research on strength training. He is also contracted by the New Jersey Devils. I believe James's role in this paper was to handle the statistics....

When someone gets started with a new fitness routine there are a lot of questions that come up.Everything from 'What should I eat before training and after?', 'Should I do weights before cardio or vice versa?', 'Should I do more or less reps/sets?', 'How long should my workouts be?' and 'How often should I train?'Do any of these sound familiar?I'll bet that not only did they sound familiar when you were starting out with your fitness journey, some of these may still be questions going through your head.Let's take a look at one question for now: 'How often should I train?'.I guess before we get to answering that question, we need to know: why is somebody asking? If we know a little more about the person asking, and the context in which they are asking, it will help us to answer the original question.For example, consider if we had two different people asking the question of how often they should train.Number 1: The first person is a med-school student with a young family. This person is in class, the library or the lab every waking moment. The couple of free hours per day they can find are spent bathing, cooking meals and tending to their children.When this person asks how often they should train it is from a position of 'I know I need to do this but I don't have 30 free minutes per day'.I can hear the frustration and anxiety in their voice when they tell me their reality. For this person I might recommend 5-10 minutes of diaphragmatic breathing and some light stretching to begin or end the day. Anymore on their plate and it just won't get done. And it will leave them more frustrated and sad.Number 2: The second person who has come to me asking this...

In my last post I talked about how training with a sibling can help push you further than many other conditions can. And one thing my brother started doing with his training lead to great increases in size and strength.When my brother and I trained together it was very competitive. So much so, that eventually my brother started doing part of his training at school during the day between classes. You see typically we would train together in the evening. But my brother would start doing part of the program at school when I wasn't around.And soon he started making great gains. Part of this was probably due to the fact that he didn't have his older brother trying to psych him out and beat him on every set. But a bigger part of the reason was that he was being exposed to more frequent training episodes.More recently I have started to notice this trend in other areas of training. And so it seemed appropriate to summarize the various ways we can enhance our training with more frequent exposures.#1 - More Training ExposuresIt may have John Broz who said something along the lines of 'Your family has been kidnapped. You have one month to increase your squat 100 lbs to get them back. Will you train once or twice a week? Or would you consider training everyday?'Even without knowing much more than that we know that we would train more than once per week. And as it turns out we may be able to train upto 5 days per week. When you consider that you could use a different stance, grip, tempo, intensity as well as change up many other variables we can start to see how more frequent training sessions might be beneficial.Another way of looking at this might be...