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.
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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.
