Ignite New Muscle Growth With These Steps
Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, hitting a plateau is almost inevitable in your fitness journey. If you don’t know your way around the muscle building barriers, you might find yourself at a dead end.
You can break through the overhead ceiling by making a few adjustments and continue your progress. While following the steps mentioned in the article will get you through a plateau, you might reach the same standstill at some point in the future.
When you hit a progress roadblock again in the future, all you need to do is come back to this article and switch different things than what you did in the first time. Bookmark this page so you can come back whenever your progress halts.
Change Your Training Routine
If you’ve been following the same training program for over 12 weeks, it might be time to switch things up. Your workouts should have a combination and right mix of compound (multi-joint) and isolation (single joint) exercises so your muscles get the best of both worlds.
If you want to build muscles or lose body fat you might also need to adjust your cardio. To ensure the overall development of your muscles, you will have to train your muscles from all the angles with variations of exercises.
Fix Your Diet
Diet is an integral part of building muscle mass. If you’re unable to add size, you might have to adjust your macros by increasing your carbs and protein intake. To reduce your body fat, you might have to cut back on the carbs.
If the changes in your diet don’t seem to work, it might be a good idea to try a new diet like IIFYM (if it fits your macros), keto, Intermittent fasting, etc. If you’re not sure how to fix your diet, you should take the help of a professional.
Emphasize Recovery
Some people focus too much on their training and ignore recovery. Many of these people wear their low daily recovery time as a badge of honor. You need to understand that you break muscle while you train and build muscles while you’re resting.
Recovery from your workouts is vital to building muscle or losing weight. If you feel sore for more than two days after your workouts, you should consider taking two rest days in a week as compared to one.
Advanced Training Techniques
Your muscle tissues are quick at getting used to your training style. Don’t let them settle down by using advanced training techniques. Some of the most effective training techniques include BFR (blood flow restriction) training, supersets, drop-sets, intraset stretching.
You constantly need to shock your muscles if you don’t want to hit a muscle plateau. Some of the advanced training techniques might require you to buy additional equipment like occlusion straps, resistance bands, etc. but this investment will pay for itself in no time.
Use Supplements
Supplements are incredibly effective at helping in igniting new muscle growth. There are different types of supplements you can take to enhance your performance and recovery which lead to building muscle mass.
Pre-workout supplements can get you ready for your training, while intra and post workout supplements aid in muscle recovery and growth. Make sure you don’t overly rely on supplements and keep real food as your main source of nutrition.
Be Patient
Building muscle mass doesn’t happen overnight. It can take some time depending on your genetics before your body starts to show changes even after you’re following the right training, nutrition and recovery plan.
One more thing to note is, the more you have, the harder it will be to progress. The more muscle you have, the harder it will be to gain lean size. The lower the body fat percentage you have, the harder it’ll be to shed extra weight. As they say, patience is a virtue.
Which is your favorite muscle to train? Let us know in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow Generation Iron on Facebook and Twitter.