Tips to Break Plateau in Muscle Building
Has your gym progress suddenly stalled? Do you feel like you’ve reached your genetic potential?
Then you’re in luck because we’ve got some excellent tips to help you break your muscle building plateau.
HOW TO BREAK A PLATEAU IN BUILDING MUSCLE
CHANGE EXERCISES
In resistance-training there’s something known as the “repeated bout effect” where the body gradually adapts to a given stimulus and what was once an excellent exercise for building muscle transitions to one that provides less and less of a muscle building “punch” to the body.
If you’ve been using a select few exercises for the past several months, it’s time to swap out a few of them for some other variations.
For example, if you’ve typically been training your chest primarily with the bench press, switch to incline bench or dumbbell bench presses. The new movement pattern will provide a novel stimulus for your muscles which will hasten the gains along.
CHANGE REP RANGES
So often we get locked into the standard 3x10 rep scheme when trying to build muscle, but the truth is that you can build muscle using very low rep sets (3-5) and very high ones (20-30 reps per set). Using a mix of rep ranges in your training also helps you stimulate both slow and fast-twitch muscle fibers, allowing for maximal muscle development.
INCREASE TRAINING FREQUENCY
Most guys follow a bro split where they’re hitting each muscle group only once per week. While you can build muscle this way (for a time), after a while, it necessary to increase training frequency so that you can increase your overall training volume. You’ll also increase the quality of your working sets by dividing them across 2 or more days of training rather than trying to fit all 15-20 sets in a single workout.
Using chest again as an example. Instead of just training chest on Mondays, perform half of your working sets on monday and put the rest on another day, such as Thursday.
