10 Quick Muscle Fixer-uppers!

Bust Out of your Plateau and Start Growing Again Today

By Ron Harris

Stuck in a Rut Isn’t Where You Want to Be

“How’s your training going?” I bet you get asked this pretty often, and I bet you usually respond with the standard “good” or “fine.” This is analogous to when people ask, “How are you?” Unless something extraordinarily good or bad has just happened to you recently, there’s nothing to say and you tell them you are fine. But let me ask you, and think hard before you answer since I am genuinely interested, how is your training going? More importantly, what kind of progress have you made with your physique recently? If you really have to ponder this for long, odds are that you haven’t been making progress for a long time. You may have been going to the gym religiously and putting out solid effort, but nonetheless, you have hit a plateau. We all get into a rut now and then, as progress is never in a straight line when it comes to building muscle. Yet you shouldn’t linger in this limbo of stagnation for too long. If you do, you will eventually come to the mistaken conclusion that this is the best you will ever look, and you’ll accept defeat. With your expectations thus lowered, you won’t expect much from your training – and you won’t get much. This happens all the time, and it doesn’t have to. Usually all it takes to kick-start progress and get out of the rut you’ve been stuck in is to change something simple. Need some suggestions? I’ve got 10 of them for you, so read on and start thinking about which one you want to try first.

1. Change All Your Exercises for 4 Weeks

Our bodies are remarkably adaptive organisms, and they will get used to anything they do on a regular basis. That’s how people get used to things like extreme heat or cold, hard manual labor, getting by on less sleep, etc. If you have been doing the same exercises for quite some time, chances are that your muscles and neural system are exceedingly familiar with them. Once this happens, progress grinds to a halt. One very easy method for turning this situation around is to completely overhaul your workouts for at least four weeks. During this phase, you will only do exercises that you never do, or haven’t done in months or years. If you’ve been using barbells for chest presses, switch to dumbbells or Hammer Strength machines. Haven’t done squats in ages? That’s going to be your main exercise on leg day. If you can’t go heavy due to something like a previous lower back injury, use less weight and higher reps. There are various movements like upright rows, T-bar rows, pullovers, stiff-leg deadlifts, lunges, reverse curls, etc., that a lot of us just don’t include in our training. It’s time to stop avoiding them and to lay off all the old familiar exercises. Your body won’t know what hit it, and you will be very pleasantly surprised to see some fresh new muscle mass adorning your frame.

2. Change Your Rep Range

Nearly all of us have settled into a rep range that we use most of the time, and it’s typically 8 to 12. That’s fine, as it’s a great range for stimulating muscle growth, but just as the body adapts to doing the same exercises, it also adapts to using the same rep range. If you start going a bit heavier and doing fewer reps, or a bit lighter and doing higher reps, it’s a brand-new type of stimulus. It’s a mental challenge for a lot of us to ever venture out of whatever rep range we feel is the most productive. We have it in our heads that lower reps will only build strength, and higher reps are solely for endurance. While that’s not completely inaccurate, it’s also true that shaking things up with higher or lower reps will force the body to adapt to something new it’s being asked to do. You could incorporate this strategy by doing this new rep range only for a given amount of time, or you could merely rotate it into your normal workouts. One way high reps are often used successfully is as the final set for a body part, pumping it up with blood and truly testing your limits of endurance and mental tenacity. A 50-rep set of squats or leg presses, for example, is a radical yet highly effective way to finish up on leg day.

3. Take a Full Week Off

Often when we are in a rut, it’s both mental and physical in nature, and the underlying reason is that we are overtrained. If you have lost your zest for training and have been feeling tired lately, it’s safe to assume this is what’s going on. The solution is to take a week off. Don’t even look at a weight for seven days. Go out and do other things, like seeing a movie or visiting an amusement park. Take your girl out dancing. Catch up on your sleep. Take naps. By the time the week is up, your body and mind will be rested and recharged, and you will be raring to get back in the gym and attack the weights with vigor.

4. Try Rest-pause

Rest-pause training was popularized through the writings of the late Mike Mentzer in the 1980s, and later gained converts through the followers of DC (DoggCrapp) Training. Essentially, it boils down to taking a weight you can only use for a few reps, perhaps six to eight, and getting as many as 20 reps out of it. As a hypothetical example, you would take a bar off the rack for bench presses and get eight reps with 315 pounds, at which point you can no longer complete any more reps on your own. You rack it, then sit up and rest. In DC Training, these rest periods are however long it takes you to complete 15 deep breaths. You then take the weight again and do as many reps as possible, and perhaps on the second round you get four. Again, you rack it and rest, then have a third and final bout, grinding out a final two reps. You just did 315 for 14 reps. Although you could also look at this as several heavy sets with brief rest periods in between, it’s one rest-pause set. If you’ve never tried it, you will find it to be brutally hard but equally effective. Certain exercises like squats, deadlifts, and dumbbell presses for chest and shoulders aren’t well suited to rest-pause, given the amount of balance and coordination involved, but you can use it for just about everything else.

5. Get a Grip – a Different One

Sometimes all it takes to stimulate the muscle in a different way is to change your grip or hand position. If you’ve been doing your barbell rows or lat pulldowns with an overhand grip, switch to underhand. Try doing barbell curls with your hands closer or farther apart than normal. Instead of having your thumbs facing each other while you do dumbbell presses for your chest or shoulders, have your palms face each other instead (neutral hand position). This can also apply to foot position on squats and leg presses. Try setting your feet closer together or further apart, or higher or lower on the platform for leg presses or hack squats. You will be surprised at the soreness the next day from such a subtle change. And as with any change, your muscles will have to deal with it!

6. Use Shakes as Anabolic Turbo Chargers

We all know about the value of protein shakes, but you may not be using them at the key times to really turbo-charge your body’s anabolic environment. Sipping on a shake with EAAs and simple sugars like dextrose while you train will prevent you from going into a catabolic state, and having a big shake at the end with more of those two ingredients will ensure that your muscles are replenished with the amino acids and glycogen that was depleted during hard training. And here’s the shake very few bodybuilders take advantage of, the nighttime shake. You probably get up at least once a night to urinate. Keep a casein-whey blend protein shake (casein digests much more slowly than whey) in your refrigerator and take a few quick slugs every time you wake up. This extra protein, particularly because it’s being delivered at a time when your body is usually deprived of sustenance, makes a big difference in your ability to make gains.

7. Flex and Stretch Between Sets

Even though the positive effects of stretching and flexing your muscles between sets has been talked about for over 20 years, still only a small percentage of bodybuilders take advantage of it. The benefits are numerous, including enhanced muscle separation, better range of motion and flexibility, and most of all, superior muscular hypertrophy. Aggressively stretching a muscle when it’s fully pumped facilitates growth by means of breaking up the muscle fascia, a tough connective tissue that surrounds skeletal muscle and, many believe, constricts growth. This type of stretching is not for the faint of heart, as it is difficult and painful to endure. Stretches need to be held for at least 30 seconds. Flexing, in addition to improving muscle quality and density, gives you better mind-muscle connection, which translates into more efficient and productive training.

8. Focus on Progression

If you’ve been handling the same exact weights for years, should it really come as any surprise that you haven’t grown? Sure, it’s a lot harder to get stronger the longer you’ve been training, but you can’t simply go into denial and think it’s not crucial. Getting a pump and getting sore the next day may lull you into a false sense of accomplishment where you think your workouts are productive, but if your body looks no different than it did six months, a year, or five years ago, you can’t keep on pretending that getting stronger isn’t important. You know those little 2½-pound plates, and those little 5-pound bricks that go on top of weight stacks? Start using them! Try to keep your reps the same each week, but use a little more weight each time. If you can add just 5 pounds a week to your squat, that would work out to 50 pounds in 10 weeks. Don’t tell me your legs won’t be thicker and more powerful looking if the weight you can squat for 10 to 12 reps on squats goes up that much! Get back in the mindset you had when you first started training, where increasing your weights was a fun challenge, and you will start growing once again.

9. Set Specific Short-term Goals

The reason a lot of us never get anywhere with our physiques is that we don’t really know where we want to go. You might have a vague goal of getting bigger or improving a certain body part or two, but the lack of specificity makes these goals nothing more than a wish. Instead, try picking one thing you can accomplish in a certain time frame, with a deadline. Maybe it’s adding a half-inch to your arms in six weeks, 25 pounds to your bench press in two months, or gaining 5 pounds of muscular bodyweight in eight weeks. The point is, you know exactly what you want to do and exactly when it has to be done by. You will put a plan together and stick to the plan. Though these goals may not seem so significant, a series of small accomplishments compounded over time become big accomplishments. And in the meantime, you always have something specific you are working toward to keep you focused.

10. Join a New Gym

This might sound absolutely nuts, but enough bodybuilders have done this to prove it’s true. Something so seemingly inconsequential as joining a new gym will jack up your training intensity and provide you with renewed motivation. Think about it. You are the new guy. All eyes will be on you. There’s no way you are going to let these guys and girls see you slacking! You will lift as heavy as you can, and do as many reps as possible. You want the men to respect you, and the women to – well, you’d like them to be curious, put it that way. Then there’s the fact that a new training environment will always have different equipment than the last place you were a member at. You’ll be using new machines and trying new exercises for at least the first few weeks you are there. Yes, changing your gym can definitely spur new muscle gains.

Start Growing Again Now!

You now have 10 solid suggestions that can pull you out of your rut and have you growing again as soon as you put them into action. Try one or more right away if you have been at a plateau. If you don’t, then you are consciously choosing not to gain new muscle mass. You wouldn’t do that, now would you?

Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area.

Follow Ron on Instagram @ronharrismuscle and Facebook

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