Stuck At A Plateau
When you make continuous progress in your training, it motivates you to keep going much further. But there comes a time when you don’t see your muscles growing as fast as they should.
This often happens when you spent months performing workouts that are no longer effective and realize that you need to make an adjustment right away.
This is why you should always find ways of improving your physique so that you never stagnate and set yourself back for months at a time.
There’s more than one method to cause muscle hypertrophy than just lifting weights for more reps and sets, leaving you more overtrained and fatigued than when you first started.
Plain simply, your workout needs a better way to add intensity.
Different Ways To Improve Your Intensity for Workouts
For the purpose of strength growth, a jolt of intensity is needed to break through to that plateau that’s holding you back. Intensity can be improved in several ways.
Here are some methods you can use:
- Training to Failure: using an all-out effort to finish a set, even going to the past the point of exhaustion. This is a good way to force the muscles to grow, but it’s extremely taxing on your central nervous system. Best to use this occasionally, not frequently.
- Pre-exhaustion: involves exhausting smaller muscles before the larger ones in an exercise set. An example of this would be working out your triceps with weighted dips before working your chest in the bench press. This is most effective when the two exercises are done right after the each other (within 15 seconds)(see The Best Times To Add Isolation Exercises).
- Peak contraction Training: this training is where you focus on the peak contraction of the movement to induce most muscle fibers being used for each repetition. This is effective, but can be extremely taxing on your nervous system and should be used with caution.
- Forced Repetitions: Usually done with heavier weights and less repetitions to get the most force moved for each concentric (upward) motion. This is almost guaranteeing that you go to failure on each rep, so you’ll need a training partner for this one.
- Negative Repetitions: When we lift weights we’re weaker on the eccentric portion (when the weight is being lowered) than on the concentric portion of the movement. Because of that, training your muscles points of weakness in lowering weights will help you make progress in terms of muscle size.
- Rest-Pause Training: Uses very brief pauses after the failure of a set to complete the next set. This would be advantageous to someone looking to really build size since this would allow you to do more repetitions at a weight that’s heavy enough to force growth.
- Partial Repetition: a technique using a large amount of weight in a small degree of movement in order force growth.
There are a couple other techniques as well, but these are the most frequently used by intermediate and advanced level bodybuilders to grow bigger and/or stronger.
The Wrap Up
These seven techniques can be used to break through training plateaus and make further progress in the gym. This is especially true for your smaller muscle groups as they need more attention than your larger muscles. Training plateaus occur when you don’t see strength improvements for several months. Be patient with your progress, but know when you may be stuck and need to try an alternative training method.