By Pete Sisco - Developer of Static Contraction Training
I've hit a plateau in my
training and haven't made any progress for weeks,
what can I do?
Some plateaus in training are inevitable but they
should be very short lived. That's because there are
things you can do to get your progress moving again.
If you are training very efficiently and effectively
you should spot a plateau the first day it occurs.
In fact, the slow down in progress will likely show
up in one or two exercises out of an entire workout.
These yellow flags indicate it's time to make an adjustment
in your training 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 five months of no progress whatsoever!
Here are three things that will bust any weight training
plateau.
1) Take time off. The number one cause of lack of
progress is overtraining. By simply not lifting weights
for a week or three you allow your body to fully recover
and to add that new muscle growth you've already stimulated
so you can return to the gym and resume training effectively.
2) Space your workouts further apart. This keeps
you from falling into the same trap over and over.
A fixed training frequency will not work for building
new muscle mass. It works for aerobics and for martial
arts techniques and kayak padding skills and many
other things but it won't work for building new muscle.
As you get stronger your weightlifting workouts need
to be spaced further apart.
3) Do heavy leg training. By far, the best exercise
you can do to increase your body's anabolic activity
is heavy leg presses. Surprised I didn't say squats?
Squats are a great all around exercise but they are
limited by how much weight you can comfortably support
on your shoulders. Many people I work with do 3,000-pound
leg presses. Accounting for the 45-degree angle of
most leg presses, that's equivalent to a 2,100 pound
squat and nobody in the world does that. 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!
