4 Quick Fixes to Break Through a Workout Plateau - Arena District Athletic Club Skip to main content

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Bill Brown
Jan 25, 2018

4 Quick Fixes to Break Through a Workout Plateau

Ever found a workout routine that just clicks? Before you know it, you’re getting stronger and burning fat. But then something changes. Despite sticking to your regimen and eating your usual healthy meals, the results stop coming. What gives?

 

“Your body is a very smart mechanism,” explains Julia Falamas, program director and certified trainer at Epic Hybrid Training. “Your workout becomes easier and easier, and then eventually it stops being effective.”

The plateau you’re facing is common at all fitness levels, but luckily it’s easy to fix. If you’re totally new to a workout program, stick with it for about 12 weeks. That may sound like a long time, but hear us out. When people first begin working out, they frequently notice big gains right away (score!). But those adjustments—mastering a particular movement or sequence of exercises—are neurological. In other words, your brain is learning how to best recruit the muscles needed to perform the task, explains Tony Musto, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist at the University of Miami. That learning process can take up to eight weeks depending on how frequently you work out.

After that, Musto says, you’ll start to see changes in hypertrophy, the technical term for an increase in muscle size, or muscle fiber cross-width. “But after about 12 to 16 weeks, those adaptations become less significant,” he says. That’s when you need to change your routine.

1. Increase weight and decrease reps.

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