THE ARTICLE
Our bodies are amazing at adapting to new challenges. When you started weight lifting, you probably noticed some good early results, pretty quickly, too. Your muscles became stronger, looked better, and your routine felt easier than before. Then, as the initial challenge wears off, you don’t experience the effects you’ve been hoping for. Perhaps you thought the initial weight routine would take you further than it has. When this happens, the key to improving results from weight training is to keep changing, to make your body adapt further. The same workout won’t deliver the same results forever.
Adapting your routine doesn’t necessarily mean making it more difficult, although that will deliver even faster results. The most important thing is to challenge your muscles in different ways, so they continue to be stimulated to grow and strengthen. Recruiting more muscle fibres of different kinds will wake up your workouts and start delivering results again. Here are some ideas for how to make these changes:
Change the resistance: Instead of using machines, use free weights. Be sure you have at least one session with a personal trainer to go over your technique to get the most out of a free weight workout with increasing your risk of injury. Or, once a week, design a workout using body weight (push-ups, pull-ups, squats, lunges etc) instead of machines or free weights. Push-ups are a particularly effective exercise that work many muscles and should be a part of your exercise routine.
Lift more: If you can complete your weight sets with ease, you’re not challenging your muscles enough. Try lifting more weight. If you don’t have dumbbells that are graduated every kilogram, just combine two (a 5kg and 1kg, for example). Every three to four weeks, you should be able to add at least a little bit of weight to your sets without risking overdoing it. If your joints feel strained, lighten the load.
Slow down: Slowing the pace of your contracting and relaxing recruits new muscle fibres to the task. Most people find it much more difficult to complete their reps slowly and with precision, because when you do them faster you make use of momentum and other muscle groups. Try moving very slowly, where you take 6 to 12 seconds in each direction. Another variation is to speed up the contraction (when you’re lifting) and slow down during the return phase.
Vary endurance and strength: You could complete a training phase where you focus on strength by performing 6-8 repetitions using heavier weight. Then, you can shift the focus to endurance by doing sets of 15 to 20 repetitions of a lighter weight, thus targeting different muscle fibres.
Schedule a session with a personal trainer: A personal trainer will be able to recommend ideas that will spice up your routine and deliver more results. You might want to work with him or her to try a periodisation approach, in which you plan a long-term weight lifting program in several cycles. The cycles could be weeks long or months long. Each cycle (or period) focuses on developing different aspects of fitness. For example, you might spend the first month or two doing 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps, followed by a cycle with added weight and only 8 to 10 reps. Finally you could do a cycle with an even heavier load and only 6 to 8 reps.
Circuits: Try a workout with no resting. Do one set of each exercise, move directly to the next exercise without resting, until you complete your entire round, and repeat the circuit two more times.This is a great cardio workout.
Small changes can make a big difference: Make your upper body exercises (biceps curl, shoulder raise, triceps extension and overhead press) more challenging by doing them standing on a BOSU, for example. Change the angle at which you do each exercise. For example, if you use a flat bench, incline it. If you do an exercise on a mat, try it on a bench or on a stability ball. Another option is to power train by adding jump drills in between each set. Hop on one leg or use a jump rope, or squat and power up into a jump.
Every 4 weeks or so, review your program and how you are feeling. If you are happy with your progress, there is no need to change every two months. However, improving results from weight training is possible in many relatively simple ways that will keep your workouts challenging and interesting.
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