Weight Training: Avoid Plateaus in Your Training Program for Muscle Building or General Fitness (part 2)

We have covered many important points regarding muscle physiology and exercise... so what does all of this mean in the context of an actual workout??? For example, imagine that you have just had the best leg workout ever and you feel great. You even achieved a personal best on a ten-rep max set of squats. Fired up for the next workout, you attempt to tackle the gym with equal fervor the next day-only to find that your bench press has decreased by about 20%! Common sense would tell us that if we have just trained legs and will train chest the next day, then we will be fine-even if the leg workout was very intense. The problem with this logic is that the CNS controls the ability of these muscle groups to contract. As stated above, muscles contract on an all-or nothing principle-the more fibers that contract the stronger the contraction. The CNS, after having been stressed during an intense leg workout, is still recovering and not able to fire up all those muscle fibers needed in the chest for maximum strength. The ramifications of this situation are extremely important: a fatigued CNS will not be able to generate the required workload to cause an overload in the target muscle. Translation: YOU WILL NOT GROW! This illustrates the very reasons that most people do not experience the progress with their weight training that they should. Your nutrition may be great, you may be getting plenty of rest, but you are still not gaining due to a dysfunctional training protocol that does not allow sufficient recovery.

We've all been in this situation before and pondered endlessly to the cause of the sudden decrease in strength….Was it the diet? Possibly stress? Or maybe you just forgot to wear your lucky underwear? The answer, of course is that all other things being equal (and of course you did not forget the lucky underwear), the CNS is still fatigued from the previous workout. If our pectoral muscles are capable of pushing 20% more than our CNS will actually allow on this particular day, it is no wonder that the chest workout will be unproductive. In order for a muscle to grow it must be overloaded, in order to achieve overload we must contract the muscles against heavy weights and these contractions controlled by the CNS. If the CNS is not recovered from the day before we cannot possibly hope to have a chest workout that will produce the desired results. We would be much better suited to have a day of complete rest and to train the chest (or whatever the next scheduled workout happens to be) when we are actually capable of doing so productively. Of course the reasoning of most serious trainees is that if they were not strong on chest day, then they simply need more chest work. Additional sets, reps, and possibly an additional training day during the week are then added-this only contributes to the problem in the first place, ensuring that with all that extra hard work we are breaking even, at best. It should also be noted that this is a cumulative problem, the deeper the ditch we dig into our recovery ability, the harder it is to get out.

So now that we have identified the problem what do we do now???

Unfortunately, there is not one answer to this question, but there are a few general strategies to manipulate your training program to keep the gains coming. The most fundamental rule here is that the human body responds very quickly to change. It is not adequate, however to simply change the workout in an arbitrary manner-we must have a systematic way of manipulating our weight training workouts to produce the desired results. Training an exercise from a different angle, or changing the order in which the exercises in a workout are performed are both good ways to achieve this end in the context of your more general weight training plan. This is not enough, however to avoid a training plateau-the overall volume and intensity of the workout must be cycled in a systematic manner.

Next: Putting it all together!