5 Ways To Break Through A Plateau
Every week since the beginning of the year, I have covered a number of fitness training and nutrition topics. In the weeks ahead I will cover chest training, shoulders, arms, legs, calves, forearms, and ab work (and yes, we will be hitting on more nutritional topics and motivational/personal development topics as well!)
Those who have followed my writing on magazines and websites know that I am an advocate of brief, but intense workouts. The goal is to maximize the amount of work you place on a muscle group in the shortest amount of training time possible. Workouts should not take more than 75 minutes, with less than an hour be more optimal.
Your number one goal is to create a stress great enough so that through the adaptation process your muscle responds with growth and strength.
If you are just starting out, you will require very little stimulation in order to achieve gains in strength and muscle size. As a your body adapts to workouts, changes need to be implemented to keep progress from coming to a halt. The process of working out is an endless cycle of stress and adaption: stress the muscle putting a load on them that they temporarily cannot accommodate and, in response, your body grows additional muscle tissue.
Many of you have trained to a point of hitting a plateau. A training plateau is a point at which no further progress can be made without a change in training. Breaking through a training plateau and continuing to make progress is a simple matter of changing the quality or quantity of your training.
If you have hit a plateau recently, here are 5 ways to in order to push through the plateau and continue to make progress:
1. Make Sure You Are Not Over-training. Over-training is one of the most common causes of hitting a plateau in your physical development. The first thing you should do if your progress comes to a halt is to rule out the possibility that you are over-trained. If you are experiencing: aching muscles and joints, frequent colds or illness, low energy and motivation, and sleeplessness, you may be over-trained. If you are, the remedy is to take a couple of days off to allow the body to completely rejuvenate itself and then ease back into training. This works wonders!
2. Try Some New Exercises. Perform a different variation of the exercises that you normally do for a muscle group. For instance, when training my chest, you probably perform you bench presses with a barbell. For variation, substitute dumbbell bench presses for this movement. As simple as this may appear, it will place a different stress on the muscles and could help break through a plateau in chest development. The second chest exercise may be dumbbell flyes. Instead of dumbbells, do the equivalent exercise with a cable or machine. The idea is to vary the exercise enough to place a new stress on the targeted muscle group. Variety in exercises not only helps you to keep the muscles growing, but it will keep your interest fresh. Variety is definitely the spice of life!
3. Switch Up Your Rep Ranges. I am big on incorporating a periodized plan where each phase changes the stress that is applied on a muscle group by changing the amount of weight used on an exercise. This is impacted by the number of repetitions that is being aimed to perform. For hypertrophy, I normally recommend no more than 8-10 repetitions per set, utilizing a heavy weight and carrying the muscular group to failure (i.e., the point at which you cannot perform another unassisted repetition.) Decreasing the weight that you use in your exercises by as much as 20% on every third or fourth phase will allow you to perform more repetitions on each set, before reaching muscular failure. For example, let's say that you normally perform eight reps in the bench press on a maximum set. On a third or fourth phase of a periodized plan, you would decrease the weight used and perform 15 repetitions. This higher repetition scheme taxes different elements of the muscle and can stimulate new growth.
4. Change the order in which you perform exercises. Coming back to the example of the chest in number 2, if you normally start with some sort of pressing movement such as the bench press (or the dumbbell press), followed by a flye, you can flip-flop them. Start with flyes first, then follow that with the pressing exercise. Changing the order of exercises once again varies the stress. Performing isolation exercises (exercises that involve one joint) such as the flyes first "pre-exhausts" the muscle group. Then the muscle group is "overloaded" by the compound exercise (exercise that involves more than one joint) which in this case would be the bench press. Other days, choose to do the compound exercise first, using as much weight as possible. Each regimen has its distinct benefits.
5. Use forced repetitions and drop sets. Forced repetitions (or assisted repetitions) are one of my favorite training tools to use with my clients.. Once you have reached the point of failure on a set (the point at which you cannot perform another unassisted repetition) your partner assists you in performing another 1-2 repetitions. Your partner should only give you enough assistance to keep the weight moving. Once you to raise the weight, you should lower the weight under your own control. These are called "forced reps." If you train alone, after performing a set to failure, drop the weight by about 30% and rep out to failure a second time. A tremendous amount of muscle intensity can be generated using these two techniques so they must be used sparingly, and I recommend that beginners stay away from them completely until they have at least 2-3 years of training experience. I typically use forced reps and drop sets on the last set of an exercise, and then only in a high intensity training phase. Don't overdo them as they will quickly lead to over-training.
Physique development progress is seldom a linear event. You are going to have highs and lows. Use variety in your workouts whenever you hit a plateau in order to keep progressing. If you have hit a sticking point, try out some of the techniques I have outlined in this Article of the Week and send me an e-mail at jimcip72@aol.com to let me know how they are working for you.
By the way, make sure that your diet will support your training. If you are not getting adequate nutrition and protein intake, your training is for naught. There are a variety of excellent sports nutrition products that can help you keep those lean muscle gains coming: Check out Lean Body® meal replacements and 2:1 Protein Bars, Complete Protein Powder® and SizeOn® Complete Peri/Post-workout drink. Check out our Online Store for our complete product line.
Article Of The Week
4/10/2006
James Cipriani
Cutting Edge Personal Training
