A well-balanced approach to fitness involves more than just getting on a treadmill or bike on a regular basis. Strength-building exercises are important not just to build the muscle that keeps you vital and strong, but they can also reduce your rate of injury while working out and even speed up your metabolism, helping your body burn fat quickly. However, if you’re being as mindful as you should about your efforts, it can lead to you seeing progress more slowly than you would like or even hitting a plateau. Here, we’re going to look at some ways you can bust past those walls and ensure the results you want to see.
Make Progressive Overload Your Priority
If you’re doing the same exercises in the exact same way week after week, then your body is going to stop adapting. Progressive overload is the core of any strength training program. This means increasing the challenge to your body every week. This can mean increasing the weights that you work with, increasing your number of reps, adding more sets to your workout, or slowing down your tempo to spend more time activating your muscles. Make sure that you don’t start stagnating by keeping a workout log that tracks everything that you’re doing. You should also aim to incorporate more compound movements like squats, deadlifts, or bench presses, as they target multiple joints and muscles, meaning more growth.
Don’t Skimp Out On The Protein
Anyone with experience will tell you that muscles aren’t built in the gym; they’re built in the rest period that follows. Workouts stress your muscles, breaking them down so that they repair and grow in the process. However, they’re not going to grow if you’re not eating the protein that sustains them. Without the right protein intake, your recovery process is going to be a lot slower. Finding the right protein powders and supplements is great, but you should aim to spread protein intake evenly by ensuring that you get high-quality sources like eggs, chicken, fish, beef, and Greek yoghurt in your meals routinely.
Muscles Are Built In Bed, As Well
Your sleep can be just as important to your strength training results as anything else, yet it’s frequently the most overlooked aspect of any health plan. When you’re not getting your 7-to-9 hours of quality sleep each night, then your body doesn’t get the rest time or the hormonal balance needed to repair muscle and help the nervous system recover. When you’re deep in sleep, your growth hormone and testosterone levels both reach their peak, which are vital for building lean muscle and increasing strength levels. To sleep better, limit caffeine after mid-afternoon, avoid screens before bed, and keep your room dark, cool, and quiet. Consider a wind-down routine that includes stretching, reading, or meditation. Quality sleep can truly be the difference between making consistent progress and getting stuck.
Give Yourself A Biohacking Boost
While many may focus on supplements to improve their protein intake, biohacking can go a lot further, targeting the specific nutrients and compounds that help your body make better progress. You can buy MK677 and similar compounds, which are gaining traction in research for their potential to help increase the rate of release of natural growth hormone, as well as IGF-1, which can play a critical role in muscle growth, fat metabolism, and recovery. While the impact of these compounds is still being explored, some tests are reporting faster strength gains, better sleep, and improved recovery when using the right biohacking tools alongside structured resistance training. Any supplements should be taken with the advice of your doctor, however.
The Importance Of Periodisation
If you’re serious about strength training, then you should take the time to learn about periodisation. Rather than relying on random workouts to challenge your body, you could see a more sustained process by systematically changing the volume, intensity, and exercise selection over the long term. A periodisation plan can help you avoid plateaus as well as overtraining in the long term, splitting your programme into different phases. This can include a hypertrophy phase, where you focus on higher reps and volume, then a strength phase, where you do lower reps with heavier weights, followed by a deload week for recovery. This creates a kind of managed unpredictability, where you’re pushing your body in new ways so that it continues to adapt, but with a structure that you can follow.
Don’t Rely On The Scales Alone
If the only metric that you’re looking at to measure the progress of your body is the scale, then you’re not going to get the valuable insights into your progress that can really make a difference. Muscle weighs more than fat by volume, so you might gain weight even while getting leaner and stronger. Instead of obsessing over your weight, track multiple metrics: strength improvements, muscle measurements, and even your energy levels from day to day. A great way to see your progress is to take progress photos so that, after a few weeks or months, you can look back to see how your physique changes in direct response to the work you’re putting in.
Avoid Overtraining
While it’s already been mentioned in passing, it’s important to take the time to really address the damage that overtraining can do. While you’re looking to make micro-tears in your muscle to stimulate healing and growth, if you train too often or intensely without rest, you can end up feeling fatigued, have achy joints, and even experience hormonal imbalances. Each of these issues can stall your results significantly. o recover effectively, prioritise rest days, get high-quality sleep, and eat a recovery-supportive diet rich in protein, antioxidants, and omega-3s. Incorporate active recovery activities like walking, stretching, or yoga, as simply resting in one spot can actually do more harm than good.
Everyone has a limit as to how much muscle they can build with their current efforts. Pushing further and working smarter can ensure that you don’t hit your limit anytime soon.
