To build your muscles, your workouts should be intense. They should be demanding and much focused. The intensity in training should be followed with time for recuperating. This allows your muscles to heal and have enough rest. During rest, they grow.
What is a plateau in bodybuilding?
This is not allowing your muscle to recuperate after intense exercise. It’s a point where muscles can’t handle the demands during training to muscle growth. You reach where you no longer grow your muscles.
The muscle plateau in bodybuilding happens when it seems that you can’t progress any further. This can happen not once but many times. However, with the following steps, you may never hit a plateau again.
Proper rest and recovery from working out are so important, it is the deciding force behind results and no results. We need an in-depth look as to how to fully recuperate and ensure max recovery.
Here are some steps you can use immediately to avoid overtraining and hitting a plateau.
1. Keep Your Workouts Short
You train to stimulate muscle growth and not to annihilate them. Effective workouts should be short. Don’t mix your workouts too. If training with weights avoid cardio.
Muscle growth should be progressive with slow addition of weight loads. Master the loads you’re using before adding another. The short workouts and insets are to maintain your muscle endurance.
2. Reduce the Number of Sets
To achieve quality muscle growth, your sets should be two but heavy. More may make your muscles endure rather than grow. The idea is not overload but stimulation.
Remember that weight training is a longer-term goal and can’t be achieved quickly. The few sets but over a long period is effective. You can know when to add a load after you repeat sets.
Don’t be in haste to increase the heavy sets as they lead to over-training. The feel of enough is better than exhaustion. Know your limits with less-intense workouts. Overcome your limit with weight load, not sets. Don’t look for quick results but slow sure muscle growth.
3. Rest Between Your Sets
Rest is effective for recovery. There’s no achievement in a fatigued body. Let your body get rest to recover energy for the next sets and stay hydrated. You’ll achieve more with rest by lifting a heavy load.
When you hurry to sets, you tire fast and no endurance attained in the following set. This may lead you to carry less weight and you under-achieve your goal. Rest should not be timed; it’s the body to guide when rest ends.
Adequate rest provides the energy to carry the next load and reach your high point. Exercises with rest help you carry weight with ease in the next set
4. Rest Adequately before Reworking the same Muscle
The intense the weight workout, the more muscle tissues get damaged. The muscle repairing takes time during rest. The rebuilding leads to the growth of muscles. The muscles when rebuild add more fiber to achieving your goal.
However, after the workout without rest, you continue to damage the muscle. Without rest, more damage to the muscles may lead to a plateau. To avoid this, workout other muscles in your next day up-to a week.
When you damage the muscles without recovery, the results get diminished. This may discourage you as you don’t realize muscles growing bigger. The frustration may make it worse as you become impatient. To avoid all these, rest adequately while working on other groups of muscles.
Adequate rests are 5 to 7 days and then start on the same muscle; if you’re still aching wait another 2 days. Start the week plan with workouts for other muscles. Truth is if you’re resting biceps, they’re not fully idle since you’re training other muscles. They benefit from exercising other muscles.
5. Take Total Break after Two months of Intense Workouts
Bodybuilding exercising is intense because of the increasing loads. It is progressive as you add load overload. The effect is a toll on the muscles. They need time to recover fully.
Two weeks of recovery allows all the muscle tissues to rebuild, repair, and grow bigger. The goal is to grow your muscles bigger and strong. The growth of muscles happens during recovery and not during the workout. The two weeks are for actual growth and healing of damaged muscles.
In the weeks of rest, you’ll be achieving your goal faster than when you don’t take a break. After every two months, the two-week break is a milestone.
How to Avoid Hitting a Plateau
Be a great listener of your body. Know when to allow body rest and recovery. You’ll emerge stronger and better. When it’s time to break; rest adequately.
You may go for cardio workouts regularly, but cardio reduces the ability of the body to heal. Reduce your cardio to 3 days a week. You need more production of testosterone to build and heal damaged muscles. More cardio workouts limit your body’s ability to heal.
Proper nutrition remains a great ingredient to your achievements. Even during recovery maintain the diet that you’re taking. Note that healthy nutrition is maintained throughout. Take the recommended diet and drink more water.
Salman is a prolific environmental writer, and has authored more than 500 articles in reputed journals, magazines and websites. He is proactively engaged in creating mass awareness on renewable energy, waste management, sustainability and conservation all over the world.
Salman can be reached on salman@cleantechloops.com
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