Are you struggling to build muscle?

Have you been working out consistently but are struggling to see your body change?

Making improvements in your body composition is much easier in the beginning of your fitness journey than it is once you have more experience.

A lot of you have seen some improvements to your strength, your muscle, and your endurance but you’ve found yourself hitting a plateau.

You want to have more muscle definition and you want to burn more fat, but ugh, it’s so hard!

You’re doing what you did before, but now you’ve hit a plateau.

Here’s how to get over that plateau so you can build more muscle.

Before diving in, keep in mind this is about hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is the adaptation of growing your muscle tissue aka. making your muscles bigger.

In order to make your muscles bigger, especially if you’re experienced, you need to be “training” not just “exercising.” Exercising is going in, putting in the work, getting a good sweat, getting your heart rate up and feeling like you’ve accomplished something.

Training is thoughtful, it's purposeful, it's mindful, it's, I'm doing this because I want that.

In order to get results, especially if you’ve been exercising for multiple years, it's important to “train” rather than “exercise.”

I don't think that “exercising,” in the way I previously defined it, is wrong. But if you're “exercising,” you must know to only expect a certain level of results.

Oftentimes, you can only expect maintenance.

And for certain seasons of our life, maintenance is great. Maybe our schedule is super busy. Maybe you’re completely happy with the way you currently look, feel, and perform. That’s great. It’s fine to maintain during certain seasons of your life.

But if you're looking to grow more muscle, then here’s how to do it

Generally speaking, you can build muscle with rep counts anywhere between 5-30 reps.

Most of the time when you’re training, you’re doing somewhere between 5 and 30 but it’s not very intentional.

If you do less than 6, then you’re optimizing more for strength. If strength is your goal, then checkout last week’s blog on “3 Ways to Get Stronger.”

The great thing about 6-15 reps is that we’re able to maintain focus for the entirety of the set, therefore our form is more likely to stay in tact, and we can provide a loud enough signal to our muscles.

Be sure that when you’re doing the 6-15 reps, you’re abiding by the first rule of getting within 1-3 reps of failure.

You need to slowly but surely make things harder for yourself as time goes by.

Oftentimes people pick up the same weights each time they workout. 

They workout on January 1st at the beginning of the year and use one set of weights, and then on December 31st at the end of they year they’re using the same set of weights.

Same weights translates to the same results.

“Progressive Overload” means that you make it harder on yourself.

That doesn’t mean every single workout needs to be harder. But overtime, every few weeks or so, you want to provide your body with a different stimulus.

There are plenty of variables you can manipulate to provide a new stimulus to your muscles allowing them to grow.