Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

8 Ways to Break a Weight Training Plateau | Weight & Resistance Training Tips

Hit a Plateau with Your Weight Training or Resistance Exercise Routine? Use These Proven Techniques to Jump-Start Your Training and Get Back On Track.

Training plateaus are inevitable.

Anyone who has been exercising or weight-lifting for an extended period of time will eventually hit one. It’s never an issue of will I plateau, but when. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual gym goer, a highly-conditioned athlete, an amateur body builder or a professional fitness model. You will hit a plateau eventually if you are exercising and training on any kind of regular basis. 

Training plateaus can be particularly frustrating because they will typically occurr when you feel the strongest or following a period of rapid progress. So psychologically, they can be demotivating because they take the shine off from all of that progress you’ve made over the previous weeks or months. You’ll feel like you are spinning your wheels and going no-where fast, and it can make working out less rewarding.

The good news is that there are a number of proven techniques that you can use to break through a weight training plateau.

In some cases, you’ll be able to break your plateau fairly easily with just one or two of these techniques.

In other cases, especially if you’ve been training for for several years and are already in a very good physical condition, you may have to try multiple approaches or some of the more advanced techniques.

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Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) | Preventing & Treating DOMS

Muscle soreness after exercise can put a real kink in your training. Find out what DOMS is, how to prevent it and what you can do to ease delayed onset muscle soreness if you get it.

Nearly anyone who works out regularly has experienced sore muscles after exercise. Sometimes you’ll feel it later that night, or the next morning … and in some cases, you may actually think you’re out-of-the-woods, only to wake up two days later with stiff, tender muscles that feel as tight as rubber bands.

It’s known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (also called “DOMS”), and it’s both loved and reviled by exercise fanatics. Loved, because many people view DOMS as a sign that yesterday’s workout was effective, but hated at the same time because in severe cases, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness can prevent you from comfortably hitting the gym again.

And in the case of calf muscle soreness — which plagues runners as often as weight lifters — it can literally make going down a flight stairs in the morning a three minute ordeal.

Symptoms of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

You probably have a case of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness if you experience any of the following symptoms:

• Muscle tenderness
• Muscle soreness
• Stiffness
• Swelling
• Pain
• Loss of mobility or reduced range of motion
• Muscle tenderness, including when the muscle belly is pressed with the fingers
• Loss of strength
• Acute muscle twitches or spams

The extent and duration of these symptoms may vary from person-to-person and are largely dependent on the amount of resistance — especially eccentric resistance — placed on the muscles during exercise.

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