Plateauing while Gaining Muscle Mass

Plateauing is something that happens to everybody who tries to gain muscle mass, and it can be very annoying. Basically, plateauing is your body's way of adapting to the new stress that you put it under. After consistently doing the same exercises, in a similar pattern, you are going to see the plateau effect. This good that our body can do this (we couldn't live without it), but bad for gaining muscle mass. So, we need to break this effect. Here are 5 of the easiest ways to break a workout plateau.

1. Change up your exercises - The easiest and most effective way of breaking a plateau is to just change things up. Rather than doing pushdowns for triceps, do close grip bench press. Instead of using the "pec deck" do bench press.
   
2. Change weight and reps - Another great way to overcome the plateau and get back on to gaining muscle mass is to change the amount of weight and reps you are doing. Instead of doing high weight and low reps til failure, do low weight and high reps til failure.
3. Change number of sets - Rather than doing only one or two sets, do 4 or 5 sets.
4. Change Rest time - This applies to both in the gym and at home. You can take a week off if you see that you are starting to plateau. You can also simply take a little more or less time to rest between sets and/or exercises in the gym.
5. Change the tempo and intensity - Rather then performing an exercise super slow, maybe speed things up a bit and try to do as many as you can until you fail. Maybe time yourself and see how many you reps you can do in a given amount of time.

You may notice that every one of these muscle gaining tips has one common word; change. So, the main point that I am trying to get across is that to gain muscle mass, you need to change something. The plateau is happening because your muscles are adapting to what you are doing right now. The only way to do that is to confuse them. It doesn't matter if that means you change something as simple as the number of reps you do to as extreme as changing your whole workout routine. Maybe try doing yoga for a couple of weeks instead of trying to gain muscle. You aren't going to lose very much (if any) muscle mass, and when you come back, you can count on your muscles not knowing what you are doing and be prepared to start gaining more muscle mass for you.