Break Bodybuilding Plateaus By Increasing The Intensity Of Your Workouts

Bodybuilding Advice From Lee Labrada

by Lee Labrada, IFBB Bodybuilding Pro and Fitness Expert.

By now, most of you realize that I am an advocate of brief, but intense bodybuilding workouts. The goal is to maximize the amount of work (read "stress") you place on a muscle group, during the shortest amount of training time possible. Workouts should not take more than 30-45 minutes.

Your workouts should create sufficient stress on the muscle group that you are training so that the muscle group will respond in kind through the adaptation process to create new muscle growth.

Beginners who are just getting started in bodybuilding require very little stimulation in order to achieve gains in strength and muscle size. As a beginner's body adapts to workouts however, changes need to be implemented to keep progress from coming to a halt. Bodybuilding is an endless cycle of "stress, adapt; stress adapt." In other words, during training you place a stress on the muscle. You put a load on the muscles that they temporarily cannot accommodate. In response, your body grows additional muscle tissue i.e., it adapts.

If progress comes to a halt, we call this "hitting a plateau." A training plateau is a point at which no further progress can be made without a change in training. Breaking through a training plateau and continuing to make progress is a simple matter of changing the quality or quantity of your training.

If you have hit a plateau recently, here are several things to consider in order to push through the plateau and continue to make progress.

Next Page: Lee Labrada's Plateau Busting Tips