Posted on August 22, 2013 by Jenny Cromack

When you’re getting to the gym 5 days a week, you’re working hard, watching your food and pushing so far out of your comfort zone you think your dancing with fairies the last thing you want to discover is that your results have stopped. This can be extremely frustrating and many individuals, instead of pushing through the plateau, get discouraged and start slacking off.

Everyone hits these plateaus in their training. Earlier this year I was stuck at the same weight with my deadlift for 5 weeks but being a personal trainer I knew I had to manipulate certain training variables to start seeing results again. Once you master these variables, which I have kindly let you into the secret of below, the only thing that will stop you going where you need to go is not willing to put in some hard work. There is no plateau that you can’t blast your way through and that means there is no roof to the potential you can achieve if you put the effort in.

If you are currently hitting a plateau with your training follow my top 5 tips below and watch that plateau fade away into the distance:

1. Flip your sets and reps– instead of doing 3 sets of 10, do 10 sets of 3. Shifting between strength and hypotrophy programs is a great way to keep the body changing and adapting.

1. Throw in a giant set– do three exercises for the same body part, back to back using a 6-12-25 rep scheme in one huge 43-rep set. This ensures you’re activating all muscle fibres and really stimulating the muscle to change.

1. Count time– Are you shore your resting 30s or 45s or maybe 120s, is your strength going up week to week or is the rest intervals creeping up. Keep your workouts honest and consistent, you need to manage every second of your workout.

1. Reverse the order of your compound lifts– doing the bench press first every chest workout or the back squat  every legs workout will not help you progress. Shuffling your compound lifts around so that each workout you start with a different compound lift will really smash those plateaus.

1. Get a personal trainer– having a knowledgeable individual there to motivate you through your workouts can breathe new life into your workouts and is often more effective than a new training routine.

So follow these steps and don’t let any plateau get in the way of you achieving your goals.