Muscle/body confusion -- any experience anyone?

Hi.
I'm fishing for tips and advice for those of you who might have had any experience being stuck in an exercise rut.  An expert has advised that I've grown too "comfortable" in my same daily routine. On and off -- the story of my exercise in the first place -- I'd felt that exercise had helped me in the week or so after starting, but once I became regular it didn't _seem_ to do much of any good.

So.......

I'm supposed to shake things up a bit and get my muscles confused (and working harder) by new activities.

Problem is : I have a hard enough time doing my "routine" in the first place. I'm pretty sure that venturing off in some new direction would go a long way to increase my "I'll start {aGAIN} tomorrow" song and dance.

Anyone else experience this?

Hey Erik,

   It was great meeting you today. Before I offer my opinion, I would be curious to know what your current routine looks like...

oKAY..
You caught me.
Knee jerk reaction -- post a photo of me putting my tennis shoes on -- what my routine "looks like". .

I was in the process of improving/cleaning out/up my health tracker items but wound up mostly gutting stuff out. So, nothing to show from there at present. I DID, however have some text from an article I had started working on. Self descriptive, but in a tentative authoritative tone. Feel free, please, to critique the heck out of it. Thanks!

“Lazy" Workout

I couldn’t sleep very well last night.  I woke up later than average and the sun was shining bright. (I usually only jog before the sun gets out).  Dragged myself outside and pretty much took a 45 minute walk.  Did make half a dozen attempts at jogging, with each attempt lasting a minute or two.  Nice show of athletic intent to the neighbors but felt like a wasted morning. At least I got some activity in.  Or, more usefully, at least I was in a situation where if for some reason I caught a second wind…er,I mean my first wind, then I would have been all dressed and in the right place to exercise. No such wind came, however.
 

 “Normal"  Workout

Same route, but this time I was in more normal form, meaning that I ran about half of the time once I reached the park where I run laps. Running past the park benches, I put in some perfunctory push ups during two of my laps, but only with my hands on the top of the bench; way too much bird doo doo on the seat bench itself. I just wasn’t in the mood; this sealed my fate. Toward the end, got up the gumption to totally sprint at full speed across the length of a soccer field.  Spent the next 15 minutes slowly walking home. Good enough.  Disappointed, though, at 5 strait days in arrow now by now without any actual muscle building.
 

  “Hard" workout

For reasons I wish I understood better, I woke up without feeing exhausted. Actually got right out of bed.  Hit my own drive way jogging and slowed down for only about 5 minutes worth of walking to the field where I do laps. Then spent the next 35 minutes pretty much running non stop. Would run 5/6 of the perimeter and then walk about 1/6 while catching my breath. Started running again just before I started to actually feel rested.  After I was warmed up on this I did the cross-field sprint-at-full speed (long way across a soccer field) about four laps in a row, getting a good 5 minutes or so of overall above target heart rate cardio in. Moreover – and I’ll be in heaven once I can better figure out what factors put me in this mood/state in the morning – I found a park bench where I did a round of 40 push ups with my hands down at the bench level, and did this five laps in a row. First lap was a fast 40. The Fifth lap I copped out after 20 push ups, rested 30 seconds, then took another 30 seconds straining to pull off a wobbly additional 8. 

 Note on Evening Exercise

Tracking how well one did on various intentions day by day is important.  The evening workout row here documents ongoing reasons for not taking place.  There is some value in maintaining a potential success slot.  The intention was to have multiple slots where the probability of hitting at least one slot would be higher. For example, imagine laying out very good reasons why a morning workout AND an afternoon workout AND an evening work out could all, hypothetically, take place in the same day. Moreover, imagine, ideally, at least one day ever where all three actually DO take place.  Down stream of this, imagine achieving at least one or two days with any two out of three workouts.  With such feasibility worked out,  a multi slotted day may be worth maintaining where at the very least one of the three would take place. Assuming one day of rest, six days times three slots per day would be 18 exercise slots.  Into this domain of self-motivated possibility, imagine setting a goal of, say, 8 workouts per week.  That would be something above a near-habitual five.

 
At least getting yourself to the level of opportunities

Taking the above themes together, there’s value in focusing on the means of making oneself more likely to succeed.  On a per-workout basis, the ideal is the “hard" workout.  Whether or not one actually achieves this might be harder to control. An intermediate step might be to focus on at least having a “lazy" workout.  At the very least, a “lazy" workout is an opportunity to be in the right place at the right time in the right attire to have a hard or even average workout.   Likewise, planning to work out, say, twice a day might or might not actually result in 12 workouts over 6 days.  Going through at least _some_ real effort to attempt this, however, might drastically increase the likelihood of having 6 workouts a week – which is by many standards perfectly decent and sufficient.  The key is finding and maintaining that balance of “could" versus “would feel like a failure if didn’t", where the standard of “hard" or “2 times every single day" happens at least some of the time, but if it doesn’t, then the result isn’t complete failure.

Hey Erik,

That's kind of funny and true how you catagorize your workouts. So, it sounds like you are trying to get the bulk of your fitness from running, with some strength training sprinkled in (Push-ups etc). Since most people who run / power walk want to improve cardiovascular fitness, many also would like to build a fair amount of muscle along the way. So here is how I do my weekly training, and this is congruent through all three disciplines of triathlon... Swim, Bike, Run...

Each week I try to have 3 specific workouts for each discipline whi*****lude a strength sesion, an endurance session, and a speed session. For example:

Run.... Workout 1: Strength - Hill repeats... Find a hill that takes roughly 2 minutes to ascend light jog down, rinse and repeat 8 times, or run flights of bleachers. I also do steep trail runs for strength as well.  Workout 2: Endurance - A longer run typically 15-20 + miles at a slower steady pace that I can maintain without stopping for the entire run. Workout 3: Speed - This is great because it sounds like you run on a track alot anyways. I will typically do 8 x 800 meters (2 loops around the track or 1/2 mile) with 1 minute jogs in between sets for recovery.

While you may not be at the same distances, you can certainly apply this approach to shorter runs and or jogs. Keep in mind that when you are light jogging or power walking, your heart rate is low and you are in your Aerobic zones which means you are burning fat for fuel. When you are sprinting, you are in your anaerobic zones meaning you are burning carbohydrate for fuel, which is not a good source and is typically in short supply compared to fat. Anyways, I think the three different, purposeful workouts keep your muscles pretty confused, especially if you mix between uphill / downhill, street running / trail running, etc... I hope this helps a little, have a good one!