Avoid Strength Plateaus in Your Weight Training Program for Muscle Building or General Fitness

Anybody who has achieved a little success with their weight training is always bombarded by the same question: How did you build that physique.... high weight or high reps? Naturally, the majority of trainees who have been in a training plateau for the last several months (or years), seek advice from those who have proven to be successful. There are two types of people who just can't seem to stop gaining muscle: those with those one-in a million genetics that allow them to put on muscle with any haphazard training program, and those who have intelligently manipulated their weight training program to keep their training dynamic and the muscle gains coming. If you are one of those genetic freaks that respond to anything, then this article is not for you. If you are a person who religiously hits the gym like an animal with a good nutritional plan, but still seems to be merely spinning their wheels instead of making the progress they want, then this article will be extremely helpful.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of manipulating your weight workouts to avoid training plateaus, three important points need to be emphasized:

1. 99% of trainees are over-trained on volume and under-trained on intensity. More is not always better.

2.The human body will respond to any acute stimulus, but quickly adapts to maintain homeostasis. The workout that did wonders for the first few weeks will surely stall if no changes are made.

3. In order to keep the body adapting in a positive way to our training efforts, we must:

• increase the intensity of the training stimulus
or
• change the training stimulus all together

While while the three principles above are fundamental to program design, The following points also need to be considered in designing the any weight training/fitness program...

The all or nothing principle

Muscle fibers fire on an all-or nothing principle-the magnitude or strength of the contraction is dictated by the number of fibers that simultaneously fire. Heavier weights activate more muscle fibers/ rep. (although this is not the only means to influence the amount of fibers exhausted during a workout ) The more fibers exhausted the greater the overload, the greater the overload the greater the gains.

There can be too much of a good thing

There is such thing as too much of a good thing; with increasing amounts of overload in a given workout and decreasing amounts of recovery time there is a point of diminishing returns. The average trainee will see that things are working well and in an effort to keep the gains coming, they reason that if a little bit is good, then a lot must be better so they add more sets and reps and use heavier weights. Most people are constantly flirting with over training because of this. The actual weight workout is only a stimulus for muscle growth.....muscles grow when we are resting. In order to be efficient, we must perform just enough work, but not too much to send the message for the muscles to grow and change in response to the weight training workout. We need to create maximum overload with a minimal demand on the recovery ability to achieve maximum gains.