Quote:
Originally Posted by bkreigsr
I resumed lifting on New Years and I am at a plateau
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I know what you mean about plateaus, the human body is quick to adapt.
You could just try doing more reps, but my personal experience (
which was recently backed up by something I read recently) says to "
change it up".
Add a new exercise to your routine, could be something with body weight (calisthenics), free weights (dumbbells/barbells), or aerobic based.
About every three weeks I find an exercise which really nails it, we are talking immediate results. And in about three weeks those fantastic gains level out pretty flat.
I call them "threshold exercises", stuff that pushed you though the next doorway.
Trying to remember a few of these thresholds in the past two years.
1. Pushups have many variants - experiment but be careful
2. Running up stairs
3. Sprinting
4. Walking on hands and feet back and forth and in circles
5. Chin ups, pull ups, and hand over hand going the length like a kid on the monkey bars (
also see Scooby1961 Youtube video on walking the plank)
6. Dips, reverse dips, and pulling yourself up from underneath the dip bars.
7. Trampoline
8. Jump rope (
gets my heart thumping like nothing else)
9. Heavy punching bag
10.
Deadlifts, plus something you saw someone else do, or saw in a magazine and online.
WARNING
Just like with automotive repair videos on Youtube where someone takes a hammer to his engine and damages the cooling fan trying to get it off, you will find idiots telling you to hyper-extend your tendons with heavy weight at unnatural angles resulting in you hurting yourself. Add to that they are selling you stuff so they can make a buck. I mentioned
Scooby1961 because he is an older guy, and his primary concern is that you do not hurt yourself. And he's not selling a thing.
Don't get bored with your routine or hit a plateau, change it up constantly, at a minimum every month introduce something new. You decide what to drop in exchange, you will be coming back to it, so don't worry.
NOTE:
Warm up and get your heart going before attempting to stretch, don't try to stretch a cold muscle. About 1/3 of my time is spent on warming up and stretching before I do anything serious. If it's a 90 minute workout, the first 30 is just getting warmed up, but that's just me. Find what works for you, everyone is different.