Everybody who practices bodybuilding has or will experience a plateau. A bodybuilding plateau is where you reach a point where your muscles have a hard time continuing to grow. This happens all of the time. You will be making great gains and then all of a sudden nothing. It seems that no matter how well you eat and how good your form is in the gym your muscles just refuse to grow any bigger. The cause of this is more than likely the fact that your muscles have become used to your workout and therefore no longer gets stimulation from it. To cure this you need to change things up, increase the intensity. Below are some different lifting techniques that you can do in order to bust through these plateaus and give your muscles the shock they need to begin growing.

These are one of my favorites. A drop set is where you lift your normal amount of weight for the normal rep amount. After you have reached your last rep instead of resting take 10-15 lbs off and then lift the weight again for the targeted rep amount and then do this one more time. After that your muscles will be screaming with exhaustion. Do this on your last set of the exercise, or if you can do it for all sets its up to your discretion. So if you do 3 sets of 8-10 reps of the bench press on the 3 set you would implement this drop set technique.

This is one of those techniques that also leave your muscles begging for mercy. A super set is where you do 2 exercises that target the same muscle group one right after the other. So if we were to do bench pressing you would do your 1st set of bench press then immediately do a set of say pec flyes. With this exercise you can do this for all sets. This technique will help to use more muscle fibers, and will help to stimulate our muscles.

Partials aka X-reps are only half repetitions of a given weight. So using the previous bench press exercise, you would do your targeted reps. On the last rep it should be almost impossible to push another rep. This is where partial reps come in, lower the weight to your chest and then push it up about half way, and then bring it back down to your chest. Do this for as many times as you can in quick but controlled pace. This will help to target all the muscle fibers of the muscle, a great way to add some intensity to the mix.

Every 3 months or so, you should mix up your workout regimen. This can be done by changing your rep range, your weight amount, or simply changing your exercises, or workout days. The reason this works is because muscle can only grow when it is stimulated and broken down. When muscle becomes used to a certain workout it no longer becomes stimulated, mixing things up will keep the muscle guessing. If the doesn’t know what is coming up next then it has to be ready for anything and therefore is more easily stimulated.

Using these different workout techniques and methods have helped many people stuck in plateaus break through them and start back on the road to building a better more built physique. When practicing these techniques it is advised that you use caution not to over-train your muscles as these exercise increase the intensity of your workouts