Overcoming Training Plateaus

Coming to a plateau whilst weight training is quit common and to be expected, however, most should be short lived as there are many techniques to overcome training plateaus. In fact, the slow down in progress will likely only show up in one or two exercises out of an entire weight lifting workout. These yellow flags indicate it's time to make an adjustment in your strength training routine before full-blown stagnation sets in. This is a simple concept, yet I've known guys who've trained three days a week and never noticed they had four months of no progress whatsoever! Please use these following tips on how to gain weight.

Here are three things that will bust any weight training plateau.

1) Take some time off. The number one cause of lack of progress is overtraining. By simply not lifting weights for a week or two you will allow your body to fully recover and to add any new muscle growth you've already stimulated so you can return to the gym and resume a muscle building workout effectively.

2) Space your weight training workouts further apart. This keeps you from falling into the same trap over and over. A fixed training frequency usually doesn't work for building new muscle mass. It works for aerobic exercise, for martial arts techniques, kayak padding skills and many other things but it won't work for building new muscle mass. As you get stronger your weightlifting workouts need to be spaced further apart.

3) Do heavy leg exercises. By far, the best exercise you can do to increase your body's anabolic activity is heavy squats. The legs contain the largest muscles in the human body and when those muscles are forced to operate at the limits of their capacity the systemic anabolic effect spills into every muscle group in the body. It is literally true that heavy leg training gives you bigger arms!

Most people work out way too often!

I'm talking about lifting weights here, not jogging or cycling or yoga. The primary function of cardio exercise (despite its name) is to simply burn off excess calories. Since fat gain is a result of "calories in" versus "calories out", running or cycling provides a way to increase our output of calories and keep our weight in check. That's why even walking, which barely taxes the heart, is still productive for weight loss. This type of low intensity activity can be performed every day.

Stretching exercises can also be performed every day. Flexibility is probably the most neglected aspect of fitness. How many people in your gym are stretching compared to those doing cardio and pumping iron?

Also many people rely much to heavily on supplements as apposed to correct training techniques. Supplements will only help so much if at all especially if a correct training program is not employed. I recommend Jason Ferrugga's new program. This covers everything you ever needed to no about effective weight training. For a review see howtobuildmusclenaturally.blogspot.com howtobuildmusclenaturally.blogspot.com/

With the correct training techniques you can get much better results whilst spending less time at the gym, giving you your life back. As the approach to body building becomes increasingly scientific we will see better and better training methods come about, which will streamline the muscle building process and reduce the time and effort involved even further.