How to Beat a Plateau

It is entirely natural for your body to hit a plateau in your fitness journey, whether you are trying to gain muscle or lose fat. One of the best ways to battle this is to adjust your program. Your muscles adapt to the workouts you are actively doing and begin to show less progress. People often work in cycles of 4-12 weeks and then change some of the following variables.

o   Rep Range. This is how many times you complete each exercise within a set. For example, you may do shoulder presses 12 times, take a rest and then repeat several times. Your number of repetitions would be 12. Depending on your goals, these rep ranges can look anything like 1-20+. You can use a small range of numbers so that you can increase endurance and strength within your rep range. You can use 1-4, 4-8, 8-12, etc. You can also use a smaller range within these. When you can easily hit the upper limit of these numbers with one weight, you can increase your resistance/weight and drop back down to the lower edge of these numbers.

o   Exercise Selection. It’s important to hit the main muscle groups in all of your cycles but this can be completed with many different exercises. You can change from unilateral movements to bilateral movements or choose different ways to target the muscles (ie focus on deadlifting instead of squats).

o   Adjusting Your Split. Some gymgoers use full body days, an upper/lower body split, and others focus on various muscle groups such as Chest/Triceps, Glutes/Quads, Back/Biceps, Hamstrings/Glutes, Shoulders. Some (including myself) switch between Push/Pull/Legs. This focuses on how the muscles are being asked to work. There is no right or wrong way to do this as it all depends on your goals and how many days a week you have time to spend in the gym.

o   Timing. You can control your timing within your repetitions that challenge the muscles to work hard in a different way than you normally do. If you normally go down in a squat for 2 seconds, don’t take any pause in the bottom, and raise yourself up for 2 seconds, this would be a 2-0-2. You can use pause methods or you can slow down your movements on the way up, focusing on the feeling of contracting the targeted muscles as you come back up. This could look something like 2-4-2 or 2-1-4. This is called time under tension.

The next time you notice your growth slowing down, take a second to think about how long you have been doing your workouts the way you currently are. Having a hard time remembering? It might be time to switch things up. A personal trainer can help you do this so that you are challenging your muscles in a different way while staying safe. Need help? I’m just a message away!