Lifting Past Your Plateau

If you’ve been lifting weights for a while you may notice that your gains have slowed down. That’s because you may not be challenging your muscles enough.

Muscles adapt using progressive overload. This means that as you overload your muscle, it will grow until the weight you are using is no longer a challenge for that muscle. You then have to overload it again, with a higher weight, to get it to grow more.

There are other ways to increase the intensity of your lifts to bring muscle gains even faster.

Forced reps – Forced reps help you lift past your point of failure. The next time you are doing a shoulder raise, have a spotter stand behind you. Once you can no longer lift the weight, have your spotter help you lift a couple of more reps. These extra reps will really work your muscles. An added bonus will be that your metabolism will work even harder because of the intensity of this method. If you are working out alone, try training one arm or one leg at a time. Then use your other arm or leg to help out with the last few lifts.

Obviously, with this method, safety should come first. Do not do extra lifts where the weight is above your head or chest without a spotter.

2. Drop sets – Drop sets help you squeeze out as much out of a muscle as possible. This method has you do your full set of lifts with a certain weight. Once you can no longer lift that weight, you put that dumbbell or barbell down and immediately pick up a lighter weight and continue lifting. This will really fatigue your muscle so that you get the best gains possible.

Again, be very careful when lifting above your head or chest without a spotter. You may not realize just how tired your muscles really are.

3. Partial Reps – A lifting rep usually requires that you move your joint through a full range of motion. For example, a bicep curl starts with your arm extended and ends with it fully contracted. You will find that as your muscle gets tired, it becomes harder for you to move the weight up through the lower part of the repetition. At that point, bend your arm to 90% and do a few more reps from that angle, so you are only doing part of the rep. You will find these will be easier for you. Continue making the movement smaller and smaller as you are able to move the weight through less and less range of motion until you can no longer move it at all. You have reached true failure.

4. Superset – While you may do two or three different types of exercises for one muscle group, you probably rest between those exercises. This method requires that you do all the exercises back-to-back, without rest, so that you are truly fatiguing your muscle and hitting all the different parts or heads of that muscle.

Once again, we have to stress the need for safety for these methods. These should never be tried by beginner lifters and even intermediate lifters should use spotters. Also, be aware of over-training. These methods should not be done more than once a week. Gradually work them in and know the difference between good pain and pain that can result in injury. If you do these exercises safely, you will see gains like never before.