You can’t get past a certain poundage on a certain exercise no matter what? Sound familiar? When you’ve been lifting for two years or so, you might start hitting a wall in your training. It’s called a Plateau. Plateaus are when the training seems to be making no advancements but seems to get stale, tiring. Well, the fastest gains you make will be in the first two years of your training. After that, gains are hard fought.

Here are some techniques that all can use to spice up that training to break that plateau.
Warning: this is not for the beginner in training, if you been lifting less than a year and you’re hittin’ the wall, you’re just straight out not training right.

Technique:

1. Trisets – Using three exercises targeting the muscle group and performing them in quick succession with little rest.

2. Giant Sets – Similar to Trisets but the set range is 4-6 sets. It can target the same muscle group or two antagonist groups
(exp.  2 sets biceps followed by two sets triceps).

3. Continuous Tension – Moving the bar slowly over the entire range of motion.

4. Partial Reps – After taking the muscle to failure and you can no longer complete a full rep, take it only through half the range of motion.

5. Negative Reps – Your spotter takes a load that’s heavy enough you could not perform one rep of  the exercise. The spotter helps you get the bar to the finish point of the exercise. Then it’s up to you. You let the bar down to the starting point of the exercise while resisting the whole time.

6. Stripping Methods – Start heavy with low reps, strip off a couple of plates, do more reps with the lighter bar. So on
and so on.

7. Pre-exhaustion – Hitting the smaller muscle groups before the mass movement that targets the same area. ex.) pec deck exercise before bench press.

8. Supersets – Two exercises done back to back with little rest. Usually between antagonistic muscle groups.

9. Powerlifiting – Check out some of the sites on the net about powerlifiting (bench press, Squats, Deadlifts, etc.)

10. Rest – This one of the most underrated techniques of pushing past your limit. Have you been lifting a long time
with no layoffs? Try taking two weeks off and come back stronger.