Advanced training techniques

After a while in your strength training that you might find yourself plateau so what do you do if this occurs?

Well the reason you have plateaued is because your body has become accustomed to the current level of intensity and stimulus in your training, so you need to throw a curve ball and 'shock the muscle' as they say to create a new level of stress that your body is not yet used to doing.

This is where you can throw in some advanced training principles.

What are these? Well they are some simple principles that you can use every so often to really increase the intensity of the training sessions and keep the muscles guessing.

Drop sets - This is where in the final set when you reach fatigue or the desired reps, reduce the weight by 20% and continue on until fatigue is reached again.

This allows you to reach total failure.

Pyramid sets - This is where, like a pyramid as you get higher and there is less. Starting with lower weight and higher reps, increase weight and reduce the reps each set. This creates another form of stress challenge your strength aswell.

Super sets - This is combining 2 exercises into a single set with minimal rest. As an example: perform 10 reps on the bench press and then with minimal rest performing 10 reps on the seated row and then resting before starting again.

These are some of the techniques you can use to create a higher intensity and break through plateaus in your training.

I would recommend doing these once every 4-5 weeks rather than on a daily/weekly occurrence so that you don't overload yourself and create another plateau.