It happens to all of us. We begin a training regimen, and after a few weeks we notice ourselves getting leaner, looking more toned and getting stronger. This continues for a while, but then sort of tapers off, until we hit the dreaded "plateau" in our training, where we feel like no matter what we do, there's nothing that can be done to improve our physical conditioning. We've hit the ceiling.
Can anything be done to reverse this trend? Of course. But first, let's take a look at a couple things that may be causing you to plateau.
The process of working out breaks down muscle. Over the course of the following days, the muscle rebuilds itself, becoming stronger and larger. From looking at this, one obvious culprit of stagnation is a lack of proper rest time. By breaking down the muscle even further rather than allowing it to fully recover and grow, you may actually be deteriorating the muscle.
A good rule of thumb is to only exercise a particular muscle or muscle group once or twice a week. If you are working out your chest by doing bench press one day, don't turn around and workout your triceps heavy the following day.
Another possible reason your training may have stalled is due to a lack of relative intensity. I use the term relative, rather than absolute, simply because of the fact that as your muscles grow stronger, the workouts you performed and weights you lifted as a beginner will not have the same effect as they once did. Your muscles can become accustomed to a certain routine, and, in turn, performing the same routine over and over again will break down the muscle less and less over time, allowing for less muscle growth.
So what can you do about overcoming plateaus in your training? All of these solutions revolve around one key theme: INTENSITY!
Try mixing up the style of lifting you do every two weeks or so. Used to doing bench presses every week with a barbell? Try it out with dumbbells for a few weeks. Experiment with doing squats in a wide stance and a narrow stance to target different areas of the thigh.
If you're comfortable doing a given weight for a desired repetition range, increase the weight. If you've been doing sets of 8 reps for the past few weeks, increase the weight incrementally and see how you do. You may also experiment with lower weights for a few weeks just to target the slow-twitch muscle fibers.
Probably the most important factor in overcoming training plateaus is pushing your muscles beyond failure. This is typically done by performing assisted reps or drop sets. With an assisted rep, a spotter can help you lift a small percentage of the weight so that you can perform a few more reps at a lighter weight. The concept of the drop set is the same, where you perform as many reps as you can at a given weight, drop the weight, and without any rest in between, continue pushing out a few more reps until failure.
Drop sets can be especially handy at the end of a workout. For my leg workouts, I like to get on a leg press machine and perform a drop set with 3 iterations. The first set I will do as heavy as possible for about 10 reps, the second set will be typically 50 pounds lighter for another 8-10 reps, and the third and final set will be about 50 pounds lighter for as many reps as I can push out until my legs can't move anymore.
You can also try lifts that use the same primary muscle but target different secondary muscle groups. For example, try performing a set of upright rows immediately followed by a set of military presses. In both cases, the primary muscle is the deltoid (shoulder), but the secondary muscles shift from the biceps to the triceps, allowing you to target your shoulders for just a little bit longer because the triceps are fresh. These are excellent at the end of a shoulder workout.
Try working in some of these into your workout regimen and say goodbye to your plateaus!
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