Muscle Definition, Workout Plateaus & More

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Q:

Dear Mr. Sisco,

It seems that I've hit a plateau in my training and haven't made any progress for weeks; what can I do? I need my pump back.

Thanks,

Bruce Collough, CA

Hi Bruce,

Some plateaus in training are inevitable, but they should be short-lived. That's because there are things you can do to get your progress moving again. If you are training very efficiently and effectively, you should spot a plateau the first day it occurs.

In fact, the slowdown in progress will likely show up in one or two exercises out of an entire workout. These yellow flags indicate it's time to make an adjustment in your training before full-blown stagnation sets in. This is a simple concept, yet I've known guys who've trained three days a week and never noticed they had five months of no progress whatsoever!

Here are three things that will bust any weight-training plateau:

1- Take time off. The number one cause of lack of progress is overtraining. By simply not lifting weights for a week or three, you allow your body to fully recover... and add that new muscle growth you've already stimulated so you can return to the gym and resume training effectively.

2- Space your workouts further apart. This keeps you from falling into the same trap over and over again. A fixed training frequency will not work for building new muscle mass. It may work for aerobics, martial arts techniques and many other things, but it won't work for building new muscle. As you get stronger, your weightlifting workouts need to be spaced further apart.

3- Do heavy leg training. By far, the best exercise you can do to increase your body's anabolic activity is heavy leg presses. Surprised I didn't say squats? Squats are a great all-around exercise but they are limited by how much weight you can comfortably support on your shoulders. Many people I work with do 3,000-pound leg presses. Accounting for the 45-degree angle of most leg presses, that's equivalent to a 2,100-pound squat — and nobody in the world does that.

The legs contain the largest muscles in the human body and when those muscles are forced to operate at the limits of their capacity, the systemic anabolic effect spills into every muscle group in the body. It is literally true that heavy leg training gives you bigger arms.

Good luck,

Pete Sisco

Q: I need to focus on my lagging chest development because it's obvious that it's small in proportion to the rest of my body. What are the best exercises that you would recommend?

Please help,

Harry, Canada

Hey Harry,

A study was recently done to measure the relative overload intensity of common chest exercises. The results were published in Power Factor Training - Chest and Arms .

The ranking of these exercises was as follows:

Straight Arm Barbell Pullover - 12.8%

Nautilus® Machine Pullover - 33.7%

Flat Bench Cable Crossover - 43.9%

Dumbbell Fly - 45.5%

Incline Barbell Press - 53.8%

Nautilus® 10-Degree Chest - 57.5%

Unilateral Cable Crossover - 70.2%

Bilateral Cable Crossover - 91.5%

Decline Barbell Bench Press - 96.9%

Flat Barbell Bench Press - 100%

Just look at all those time-wasting exercises! If you are doing those exercises to work your chest, you are operating at far less than maximum intensity and shortchanging your progress. Build a specialization routine around the last three high-yield exercises and your chest will start growing like a weed (don't worry, that's a good thing).

Train Smart,

Pete Sisco