Climbing a plateau

In weight training, there comes a time when you hit a plateau and discover that no matter what you do you’re not gaining strength or muscle mass. This typically happens if you have been following the same regimen for a while, exercising your muscle groups in the same pattern or sequence. Muscles get used to the same exercises and, after sometime, their tissues don’t regenerate the way they did at the beginning of the training phase.

One of the best ways of breaking out of a plateau is to jack up the intensity of training. Instead of low weight-high repetition sets, move to high weightlow repetition sets. Say, you are unable to increase the maximum weight that you can bench-press and are getting stuck. Increase the intensity of training. If you were doing three sets with 10-12 repetitions in each set, increase the weight you were pressing to a level where you can squeeze out just 6 or 8 repetitions.

The higher intensity pushes your muscles to work harder and, therefore, gain strength. The other benefit of a high-intensity workout is that it helps to burn more calories in the same period of time as compared with a low or moderate intensity training regimen.

The second way of breaking a plateau is to mix and match your exercises. Suppose you are used to exercising your chest (bench presses, dumb-bell flys, etc.) on the same day as your triceps (cable pull-downs, French curls, etc.) and your back (lat pull-downs, rows, etc.) on the same day as your biceps (dumbbell curls and barbell curls, etc.), mix it up. For instance, pair your chest workout with your biceps workout and your back workout with your triceps. What typically happens when you combine chest and triceps workout is that your muscles can get overtired. This is because most chest exercises also deploy the triceps muscles with the result that by the time your chest workout is over and you’ve moved to the triceps, they could be too fatigued to do much work. Likewise, most back exercises also deploy the biceps muscles.

So, if you shuffle them and do chest and biceps together, the combination could well be more beneficial to both muscle groups.

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You could also have hit a plateau if you have been over training. So, a third way of breaking out from a plateau could be by taking a couple of weeks off hard training and substituting it with light jogging and freehand exercise. The respite from heavy weights can give muscles time to recuperate and bounce back with vigour. If jogging or freehand exercise is not your cup of tea, go swimming instead of heading to the weight room. Swimming trains the whole body and isn’t fatiguing either.

Generally, people hit training plateaus because of doing the same old exercises over and over again. Keep changing your exercises. For your chest workouts, replace bench presses with dumb-bell presses or even weighted push-ups. For your back, do dumb-bell rows instead of barbell rows and so on. Keep your muscles guessing what they’ll be asked to do and you’ll see how well they respond. Hey, that kind of thing even works while dealing with people sometimes, doesn’t it?

Muscles Mani

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Caveat: The physical exercises described in Treadmill are not recommendations.
Readers should exercise caution and consult a physician before attempting to follow any of these.