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The first weeks of a new exercise routine can be hard – your muscles tremble, your lungs burn, your heart races. But after a month or two, it gets easier: you’re running faster and longer, or lifting weights with more ease. Then suddenly, progress slows or stalls. You’ve hit a workout plateau.
Such periods, when you stop seeing fitness improvements despite continuing to train, are common, says Chris Perrin, a personal trainer and co-owner of Cut Seven, a gym in Washington, DC. “I’ve yet to meet a fitness enthusiast who hasn’t hit one.”
Fitness plateaus can also be caused by insufficient recovery.Credit: iStock
Plateaus can happen once the body adapts to a new workout. After just a few training sessions, the brain can become more skilled at telling muscles to move. And, usually over the course of weeks or months, the body itself changes.
“The heart gets stronger and better at pumping blood to the muscles,” says Jeff Horowitz, an exercise physiologist at the University of Michigan.
But plateaus can also be caused by insufficient recovery – skimping on sleep or doing another intense workout too soon. With your tank half-full, you may struggle to push yourself, making it likelier you’ll get stuck in a rut.
For those who are satisfied with an exercise routine that feels similar from one day to the next, a plateau isn’t necessarily a problem. “I’m trying to maintain my fitness as I continue to get older,” Horowitz says. “So to me, a plateau is a good thing.”
But for those who want to continue improving, the key is to challenge muscles in new ways while ensuring you rest properly. Here are some strategies for moving beyond an unwelcome plateau.
Increase the stress
Exercising multiple muscles at once saves time, but it’s not the best way to increase strength if your body has adapted to it, says Jeremy Loenneke, an exercise scientist at the University of Mississippi. A bicep curl with a lunge is great for overall fitness, but it shortchanges your leg muscles, which can bear more weight than your arms.
Focus your workout with leg press machines or heavy squats, says Fiona Judd, a personal trainer in Orem, Utah. Or add a few pulses to every squat – lifting and lowering an inch from the deepest part of the movement.
Another option is to wear a cuff around a muscle during exercise. This practice, known as blood restriction therapy, limits blood flow to mimic the effect lifting weights has on the muscle. “It allows your muscles to work smarter, not harder,” gaining strength while lifting less weight, says Brian Grawe, a sports medicine physician at the University of Cincinnati.
While the tool is safe, Grawe recommended consulting a personal trainer or doctor before using one.
Go longer, not harder
For endurance training, such as cycling or running, athletes often encounter plateaus when they have too many intense workouts in a row, says Elisabeth Scott, a marathoner and running coach with the coaching website Running Explained. It’s difficult to add kilometres if you’re always going all-out. Although it may be counterintuitive, throttle down the pace so that you can make your runs or rides longer or more frequent.
“The bulk of your training – 80 per cent, for example – should be at a conversational pace,” Scott says. Round out your week with one to two faster workouts to develop power and speed.
Switch it up
Another way to challenge your body is to change the focus of your workouts every few weeks or months. Holly Roser, a personal trainer in San Francisco, suggests playing with variables such as weight, rest and the number of repetitions or sets. For example, add a kilogram to each hand in your dumbbell chest press and switch from three sets of 15 repetitions to three sets of 10.
The waxing and waning of race seasons creates another way to mix things up. You can train for a half-marathon in one season, for example, and then focus on speed or strength in the next, Scott says.
Don’t forget to recover
While you’re buckling down, don’t neglect recovery time. Without it, you can plateau or even regress, Perrin says. It’s important to get enough sleep, rest for a day or two between especially hard workouts and eat a balanced diet.
But rest doesn’t have to mean vegging out on the couch. Swap your bike for dancing or ditch the dumbbells for a yoga class. Switching gears like this gives your target muscles (and your mind) a break.
It’s also important to quickly supply post-workout muscles with nutrients to rebuild. Research suggests this window of opportunity is longer than once thought – up to 24 hours after exercise.
“Spread your protein intake out over the course of a day to maximise the benefits,” says Christoph Handschin, a muscle researcher at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Workout plateaus are an inevitable part of any fitness journey, but they’re also an opportunity to reflect, Perrin says. “It’s a chance to listen to your body, figure out what it needs to improve and reconnect to what you love about exercise.”
The New York Times
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