Getting confused about muscle memory

I've been thinking how best to confuse my memory.

My muscle memory.

My brain memory can get confused enough, thank you very much.

It's seems over the years I've developed quite a bit of muscle memory without even knowing it. There are two kinds of muscle memory -- fine and gross.

The fine muscle memory I've developed include touch typing and the fingering required to play a guitar. Fine motor skills even play a role in such mundane activities as combing your hair and brushing your teeth.

Gross motor skills are those actions that require large body parts and large body movements such as those required in exercise.

Good golfers -- and I'm not one of them -- say the key to a consistently good golf shot is the muscle memory that comes from constantly repeating the elements of a good swing of a golf club.

But when it comes to workouts in order to control my weight and maintain muscle, flexibility and balance, apparently I don't want to remember too much of a good thing.

What my physical therapist daughter tells me -- along with my gym rat friends and endurance athletes --is that with regular exercise the body can become too accustomed to what you're doing, thus reducing the effectiveness of a workout.

It's a matter of getting over that plateau that our body has reached.

If I go for a 4-mile run twice a week, for example, and I trot along at a consistent 9-minute mile pace, I'm doing my body some good but I'm not maximizing how my body could benefit more from that same mileage.

The key is to diversify. Television infomercials and web sites promote all kinds of routines to mix-up and confuse muscle memory for the sake of a better workout.

For my run, on occasion I could find a track. Do some fast laps, then some slow laps, run intervals. Or maybe just do the same thing on the treadmill -- vary the speed, vary the incline.

If I go for a 1-mile swim and crawl through lap after lap after lap at about the same pace, I'm not getting as good a workout if I varied the pace and varied the strokes -- do four laps at a very fast crawl, then do two slower laps using the breast stroke, and continuing that kind of variety throughout the entire time in the pool.

But all this can be a challenge for someone like me who tries as hard as he can not to be confused and who finds comfort in repetition and routine.

But I know I've plateaued and the fact that I'm still fighting the battle of the bulge has nothing -- nothing, I say -- to do with having chips and salsa as my primary food group.

I need to concentrate on being confusing on purpose, just not confused.