John Cardillo, Premier Fitness Expert Talks About How To Overcome Workout Plateaus

Everyone at some point during their workout routine will hit a plateau. More often than not, this is usually caused by overtraining and during this time, your strength gains are minimal and your muscular improvements are non-existent. This can be very frustrating for the avid exerciser but luckily, this is not a permanent condition and you can easily start progressing again by making specific changes to your workout routine. Here are a few strategies that you can try to help break your plateau:

1. Rest 

Take one full week off training and give your body and specifically nervous system a complete rest. This will do wonders for you. Eat a healthy nutritious diet with plenty of whole foods. It will help your body to recuperate and get its energy back.

2. Introduce new exercises

Once you get back to the gym, changing your exercises will rejuvenate your muscles. Over time your body has come to adapt to specific exercise movements and in order to continue to see improvements, you have to start doing new exercises to give that body part a new feel and different angle of attack. For example, switching from using barbell presses to dumbbell presses, substituting machines for free-weights, or doing standing instead of seated exercises will help to stimulate new improvements.

3. Days off between workouts

 Weight training every day is tough on the body and in order to continue making improvements, you should have at least 72 hours of rest between workouts.  This rest time will ensure that you are recuperating between workouts and ready for the next gym attack!

4. Repetition schemes

The number of repetitions that you try to complete on each set of exercise has a big impact on how your body will improve. Instead of always aiming for 8-10 repetitions, try aiming for 11-12 repetitions with the same weight, and going to muscular failure. This will jolt your muscles to new growth!  Increasing time under tension and performing harder muscle contractions will greatly impact your results and give you a premier fitness advantage.

 5. Reduce the number of sets

 By training to muscular fail and  increasing the intensity per exercise, you are giving your body something it hasn’t felt before. If you were doing 2 or 3 sets per exercise, reduce it to one set.  Intense training whereby you are training to muscular failure induced more growth than any other form of training.

6. Get a training partner

 This is critical to making new strength and muscular gains because you always have someone there to spot you and push you harder. It will help you capitalize on every single set that you perform when you otherwise wouldn’t get that level of intensity working out on your own. Your training will become more intense and will maximize your level of efficiency in the gym.

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