Bodybuilding Plateau: How To Make Muscles Bigger?

No matter how hard you train, there will be times when you will notice that that you have reached a stable stage of little change. It is like a bad dream. You have been regular and faithful to your training schedule and reached a stage of visible results; your muscles had started developing, and then suddenly, everything comes to a standstill.

This is known as a bodybuilding plateau, and unless you try to get out of it, you are not going to build bigger muscles anymore and get the desired results. What is even worse is that you run the risk of going back to square one.

A bodybuilding plateau may sometimes be due to genetic factors, and it is not easy to build muscle beyond a point unless you do something about it. The encouraging part, however, is that if you make certain changes, you can revert to the muscle growth phase.

1. Rest

Sometimes, doing nothing helps a lot to overcome stagnancy. When you train, you are actually punishing your muscles; the harder you train, the harder the punishment. Take a two-week rest and let your body recover.

This sounds easy, but some people get so used to workouts that they cannot make themselves do that. If you are one of those people, force yourself and do whatever it takes to rest your muscles.

It may surprise you, but even professional body builders have to rest their bodies after months of hard training. Once they are start training again, they are able to build muscles at an even faster speed.

2. Avoid Overtraining

Overtraining does not necessarily mean spending more time training. Overtraining is when you are training a specific muscle or muscle group more than once or twice a week.

When you are training, you are damaging your muscles, and you have to allow them adequate time to recover. Your muscles grow when you are resting. When you are lifting weights every day, you are not allowing time for muscle repair, so make sure you lift weights on alternate days.

Another thing that you should keep in mind is that if you are training hard, your training time should not be more than an hour. A longer, intense workout leads to higher levels of cortisol, which is a muscle wasting hormone that undoes whatever you gain during a workout.

Besides giving yourself a day off every week, ensure that you get enough sleep every day. Eight to ten hours is ideal for people who are training hard. Apart from the much needed rest, sleep is responsible for the release of growth hormones for various body functions, including muscle building.

3. Use Proper Technique

Learning correct body positioning and how to perform specific exercises is as important as performing the right exercises. Correct exercise in an incorrect position can cause injury and keep you from going to the gym for a long time.

Besides, it is also necessary that you focus on every movement you make during an exercise. Instead of repeating the motions mindlessly, notice all that is happening to your body, pause, and squeeze the targeted muscles at the start and end of every set.

Never ever lift weights with the momentum of the swing or let weights be pulled down by the force of gravity. There must be a connection between mind and movement. You must feel the tension of the lift when you are lifting, which means that weights should be lifted and lowered slowly so that you are resisting the load all through the exercise.

Resistance plays an important part in building muscles. Not only do you need to perform exercises that provide adequate resistance, but you also need to complete them in a proper manner, which is to repeat till you are no longer able to complete the next rep.

Moreover, muscles grow only when you progressively overload them. If you are able to lift a weight easily for 12 reps today, it means that you need to increase the weight the next time you perform the same exercise.

4. Use Free Weights

Machines are good for training, but excessive reliance on machines may not give you the goals you desire. Machines not only restrict you to a fixed line of motion, but also stabilize the body for you. In addition, machines do not allow some of the essential movements and the resistance necessary for effective muscle building.

Free weights, on the other hand, allow you to follow the body’s natural line of motion, and since you are also stabilizing the body on your own, you put in more work within the same time period.

5. Focus on Combination Exercises

Combination or compound exercises put stress on two or more muscle groups. Compound movements like squats, lunges, pulls, deadlifts, and upper body multi-joint presses compel your body to work hard.

Your lower body is almost 60% of your body’s total muscular system. When you perform various types of squats, you work on the entire lower body. Squats are equally effective for developing abs.

When you are working on more muscles in one exercise, it is liable to give you the benefits of aerobic exercise as well. You will be burning calories even hours after you have left the gym.

6. Train Your Legs

There is a system for body growth. There may be some variations, but overall, it grows proportionately. One of the biggest mistakes that most people make is that they focus on building muscles in the upper body and neglect the legs just because training leg muscles can be pretty harsh.

The reality is that if you do not train your legs, the upper body can only grow to a point, which may not be what you want. For proper all round muscle building, you need to include squats in your workout.

7. Pay Attention to Your Diet

Getting a tight, ripped body is not only about improving the physique, but also about maintaining energy levels. Physical training is as important as dietary discipline because no matter how hard you train, if you are not disciplined about what you put in your mouth, you are not likely to achieve your goals.

Dietary discipline is also important because once the desired fat loss has been achieved, you need a follow up regimen which should be healthy and based on adequate nutrition to avoid any reoccurrence of the weight you have lost.

An appropriate diet is a precondition to any program for building muscles. In fact, if you are not getting the desired results from your fitness program, review your diet. There is bound to something wrong there.

8. Dietary Modifications: Proteins, Carbohydrates and Fats

There is only one dietary principle, and that is to eat healthy foods that provide recommended percentages of all the three food groups: proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. However, since your goal is to build muscles, you need to make slight changes- but the focus has still to be on healthy foods.

Proteins are your body’s building blocks and are essential for the growth and for repair of tissues. For massive muscle gain and preservation of muscle tissue, you need to consume slightly more protein than what is normally required by the body.

Make sure that you have at least 2-3 grams per kilogram of body weight from healthy sources. Meat, eggs, milk, and legumes are healthy sources, provided you avoid preserved and frozen commercial foods. You may also consider a protein shake, but make sure that you read the label before you buy one.
 
Too much has been said about carbohydrates and their effect on blood sugar levels. An intense workout reduces the amount of glycogen stored in the liver and muscles. This means the one time you can afford to eat foods with high glycemic index is immediately after a workout.

Even in your normal diet, you can afford to eat moderate quantities of foods with high glycemic index provided that you combine them with lean protein and healthy fats.

The glycemic effect of foods is reduced considerably by the overall composition of a meal. Fat and protein content and organic acids and their salts can lower the glycemic effect of foods to a great degree.

Make it a point to eat moderate quantities of carbohydrates sourced from healthy, unprocessed foods. Avoid junk foods as they are loaded with unhealthy carbohydrates and contain harmful preservatives.

Foods with high fat content mean consuming more calories, but the fact is that it is important to consume an adequate quantity of dietary fat to maintain healthy metabolic processes.

In addition, fats are more satiating. It is an established fact that the human body needs 20-40% of fat intake for the proper release and function of hormones. If you do not consume the recommended amount of dietary fat, it is going to affect our bodily processes and your training program for weight loss and muscle gain.

9. Drink Plenty of Water

Water is the most neglected nutrient. It is indeed an irony that water does not even figure in the list of nutrients. An intense workout means you are sweating a lot. A fair amount of weight loss immediately after an intense workout may be due to water loss. Drink at least eight glasses of water every day and at least 16 ounces after every workout.

10. Supplementation

As a serious bodybuilder out to make bigger muscles, you need to pay special attention to certain amino acids that your food does not provide.

Creatine is an amino acid that does not occur in proteins. Although it is not considered to be an essential nutrient since it is manufactured in the human body, it supplies energy for muscle contraction and speeds up the process of building muscles.

Most of the creatine stored in the body originates mainly from meat consumption, and if you are a vegetarian or do not perceive visible muscle gains after training, you may need to use supplements.

Similarly, there may be need for supplementing glutamine, another amino acid necessary for protein synthesis. Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in human blood and plays an important role in a variety of biochemical functions in the body, including the prevention of muscle wastage and helping in muscle repair.

Despite a strict adherence to these basic principles of muscle building, there is still a chance of reaching a workout plateau period as discussed above. To get out of that, you need to make changes to your routine. Give yourself a break, change the order of exercises, and make different combinations and permutation of sets, reps, and weights to make workouts more interesting.