Your Solutions to Common Gym Mistakes

Hi, reaching a plateau is frustrating especially if in the gym where many people are results-oriented. Plateaus are normal occurrences. Identifying when you are falling back in progress is the first step, but here are a couple other strategies that can help you break through the plateau:

1. Evaluate your workout routine: Are you training to failure for compound / isolation exercises? Are you consistently feeling muscular fatigue at the end of your sets? Oftentimes your body gets used to the same rest time, exercises, reps, sets, and more. Without shocking your body your muscles aren't able to develop, thus ensuring you are mixing up reps, sets, exercises can break through the plateau.

2. Modify Exercises: Change the number of compound/isolation lifts. Find complements for certain exercises. One of my personal favourite strategies is doing two exercises right after another or 'supersetting' 2 exercises. This will train your body with an increased intensity. (ie superset shoulder press & lateral raises so you complete one set of one exercise after the other and repeating that 3 - 4 times)

3. Increase Intensity to "Shock Your Muscles": If you're using the same weight try changing the weight so the number of sets / reps consequently change so your body doesn't adapt to the same exercises. Another great way to increase intensity is through dropsets, where you train a certain weight to failure then drop the weight and so on until the total mass reaches 0

4. Rest and recovery: Less is sometimes more. Overtraining or not recovering – nutrition or sleep – may hinder protein synthesis, and thus progress. One of the most common reasons behind slow progress is nutrition, or more specifically inadequate protein intake. For a rough guidance you should be consuming around 1 gram of protein for 1 pound of body weight.