Don’t let Your Workouts Get Stale!
Going to the gym and doing the same workout over and over again is a sure way to prevent progress when it comes on to muscle growth. Repetition is a surefire way to make progress… in moderation. Too much repetition will leave you tired, bored, sore, lazy, and overtrained. Enough emphasis cannot be placed on the necessity of having a properly designed fitness program.
 Don’t let your progress plateau like this guy. |
Your Body Enforces Homeostasis
Your body was designed for homeostasis and weightlifting goes totally contrary to the body’s intent to maintain equilibrium. Your muscles are placed under extreme stress during weightlifting and the body has to find a way to cope with it. This is why you will find that exercises and routines fail to be much of a challenge after a while. This is your body’s way of fighting back to ensure homeostasis and continuing along this route will be ineffective.
Designing a Fitness Regime
This is essentially why you have to keep changing your workout routines to prevent your body from enforcing equilibrium. You have to keep your muscles guessing, therefore, a lot of effort has to be put into designing a fitness regime that will continually challenge your body to adapt so you continually build muscle. This can be done by changing exercises, increasing weight, varying reps and changing up the order that exercises are performed. You must not let your body adapt to a routine.
Continually Challenge Your Muscles
Once you get accustomed to lifting a certain weight, you know it is time to increase the weight so that it can offer more of a challenge for your muscles. Try to hit your muscles from every angle by incorporating as many muscle specific exercises as possible. For example, in targeting the chest you have a wide variety of exercises to choose from such as the bench press, incline dumbbell bench press and pushups to name a few. It is a good idea to rotate exercises so that nothing gets “stale”.
Conclusion
Change is the greatest enemy to your body, it’s how we were made and in a way necessary to our survival. Weightlifting pushes our bodies to reach goals beyond our current physical limits. Our body adapts by getting stronger but there has to be continuous incentives for you to continually progress in building muscle.
About the Author
Chris Brown blogs at Gain Build Muscle
Tags: basics, exercise, fitness, plateau, tips, Weight Training, weightlifting
Just found the blog and will definitely be back. Also, couldn’t agree more on the need for variety. Even small changes to traditional workouts can be enough to shock your muscles back into growth mode.
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Boot camp workouts are sweet.
I find change essential, not only does it constantly challenge my body, but it keeps my mind fresh. I never get bored with my workouts because I vary them all the time. It is through this lack of boredom that I train consistantly, which in my opinion is the most vital component of any training regime.