Six
Surefire Techniques to Help You Bust
Through that Fitness Plateau
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Guest Article by Christopher William McCombs
It's
never fun, but it happens to every person who regularly
hits the gym at some point or another. You look back
at how much progress you have made over the course of
the last several weeks, and it all seems to add up to
a big goose egg. No noticeable muscle gains, no increase
in the amount of weight you can lift, and not even a
significant decrease in your body fat.
But
this is never a reason to despair, this is just a time
reevaluate things. If you continue following your exact
same training schedule and diet, chances are you will
stay at the plateau for a long time. If you make one
more of these changes, however, you will probably enjoy
seeing progress again very soon.
1.
Try Negative Training
"Negative
training" is where you take on more weight that
you can perform in a single rep, and then only perform
the negative portion of the exercise. The advantage
of this is that by focusing the negative portion of
the exercise, you activate certain muscles fibers more
than what might be activated through regular training.
To do this, you should use about five to ten percent
more weight than you lift in a single rep, and take
three or four seconds to lower the weight.
Do
this for three sets of eight repititons. With some exercises,
you can perform negative training without anyone's assistance.
With concentration curls, for example, you can simply
lower the weight, and then use your free hand to bring
the dumbbell back to the "top" position. With
other exercises, such as the bench press, you are going
to need a training partner to make sure you stay safe
and help you bring the weight back to the top position.
2.
Get More Rest
Many
instances of hitting a plateau are simply a case of
overtraining. If you feel you have hit a wall in your
fitness progress, try staying away from the gym for
a few days, and see how you feel once you come back.
In addition, you should make certain you get at least
eight hours of solid sleep every single night. Your
muscles heal the most when you are sleeping, and if
you are too busy to get sufficient shut-eye every night,
this is most likely your problem.
3.
Increase Protein Intake
Protein
provides the building blocks for muscle development.
If you aren't getting enough, you muscle and strength
gains will hit a standstill. Most trainers recommended
that you get about one gram of protein per day per pound
of bodyweight. But if this isn't working for you, you
might try to increase that amount up to 1.5 grams per
pound of bodyweight.
4.
Change Up Your Workout
The
human body is designed to be a very adaptive machine,
and it can quickly become accustomed to any kind of
routine weight training that you throw at it. So it
might do your fitness plan a lot of good to introduce
your muscles to exercises that they might not have experienced
on a regular basis.
5.
Increase Sets
One
of the simplest ways to increase intensity, and therefore
give you a better chance of leaving that plateau behind,
is to increase the number of sets you do for each exercise.
You should do what you can, however, to prevent this
form increasing your exercise time too much. Ideally,
weight training should last anywhere from forty-five
minutes to an hour. If it takes any longer than this,
you risk overtraining, and perhaps even causing your
body to eat away at your muscle.
6.
Decrease Rest Time In Between Sets
If
you spend a couple minutes recovering in between sets,
you might really benefit from cutting that down to about
a minute. The lactic acid in your muscles that causes
muscle failure can be removed from your system remarkably
quickly during rest, and decreasing the time in between
sets can put more stress on your muscles, which will
encourage muscle growth.
Christopher
William McCombs runs Positively Fit Personal
Training in Orange County, California. One day while
he walked out of an OC fish taco restaurant Chris stumbled
onto a radically different approach to losing fat which
he helps people all over Orange County do today. Chris
is also a Fitness
Marketing Expert and helps fitness professionals
all over to triple their income and cut their work hours
in half.
