Article By: John Fontana

Remember the days when you first started lifting weights? Whether it was years ago or just recently, I am sure you can recall those days. After the soreness and awkwardness of the first few weeks something amazing started to happen. Every exercise you performed, the weight used started to increase providing drastic results. Not only were you stronger than you’d ever been, but you rapidly started seeing physical results. You started off barely being able to peel the 45-pound bare bar off your chest and within a month or two you were pressing over 100 pounds. The gains kept coming and you felt like soon you would be moving 225 pounds 10+ times, like guys at the NFL combine.

Then all of the sudden, the gains in strength started to slow until you nearly hit a screeching halt. Even worse, your strength actually seemed to decrease from time to time. How could this have all happened so fast? What was once bright promising future got thrown into a whirlwind and tossed out the back end like all the other softie gym rats you see moving the same weight week after week.

One of the biggest issues is that you likely mixed up your workouts too much or not enough. In either case, doing so will get you a first class ticket to Plateauville where your strength gains are non-existent. You either changed up your workouts so much that your body couldn’t positively respond or you did the same thing over and over again boring your body to death.

When you change your workouts too frequently, you are not allowing your motor units (muscle fibers and neurons) to catch up and get stronger. Since you didn’t allow your body and mind time to familiarize themselves with the exercises and workouts, your never got optimum effectiveness from them. It takes time and practice to get your neurons to signal the correct muscle fibers in during an exercise. If you spend one week doing a bench press for 5 sets of 5 and the next week doing a chest fly for 3 sets of 10, your body will never be able to adapt correctly. A good example is the difference between your first and second set of an exercise. Do you notice that you are usually strongest in your second or third set? You may call this warming up, but what’s really happening is that your mind is learning to send the signal to the correct muscle fibers. Stick with the same workout for 4-6 weeks before mixing it up. Feel free to increase the sets, reps or weights that you use but don’t think that you have to be doing something brand new every time your train.

A very similar phenomenon happens when you perform the same workout too regularly. If you perform the same workout for months on end, your body will lack the stimuli required to produce results. Your body essentially will either get overtrained or too bored with the workouts. Overtraining occurs when you fatigue your muscles to the point where they cannot optimally perform. The majority of the time it will occur from lifting to much weight too consistently. What you need is what’s called an unload week in order to recover. Sometimes this means stepping away from the gym or mixing up the workouts completely and taking a class. Most of the time your unload week should consist of cutting your sets and reps in half. If you performed 4 sets of 8 for the last 9 weeks, it is time to do 2 sets of four for a week. During this time you will still give your body the stimulus of heavy weight but wont fatigue it too much. Stick with a workout for 4-6 weeks, take a week to unload and then get back to a new style workout.

Whether you are mixing it up too much or not mixing it up enough, you are bound to hit a wall at some point. Your body is a crazy piece of machinery and has specific needs in order for you to continue to grow. The problem is that there is no perfect equation to this workout game or we would all be doing the same things. One thing is for sure, you have to allow your body to adapt to the training stimulus and then right before it gets bored or tired of it, you have to mix it up.

In part two of this article I will discuss a couple other reasons that may be why you are not making any gains in the gym. For now, if this article hit close to home, follow the suggestions and either take an unload week or build a program that you will stick to for a few weeks.

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