Fitness Tips Body Blog

For most of us, building muscle mass can be a triicky and frustrating thing.Sometimes we’re going along great, getting stronger at every workout, adding muscle mass and then BAM! we hit that wall.

We struggle with weights that we nailed a few weeks ago, our body weight stagnates and we don’t even feel like hitting the gym anymore. Sometimes, we just need to get out of the gym and take a step back to go two steps forward.

After managing to stay out of the gym for a week, I’ve been back at it for the past two weeks or so and I feel great. My muscles feel recovered and I’m continuing to get stronger. I weighed 189 lbs. this morning. For those of you who subscribe to my free fitness newsletters, Fat Loss Secrets and Mass Building Tips you know that back in the beginning of October, I weighed 161 pounds, due to all my summer bike riding in preparation for a charity bike ride.

I’ve continued to make a number of changes to my weight training routine, which has allowed me to continue to make progress. I’ve documented many of these weight training routine changes in this blog, and go in more detail in my fitness newsletters (see above).

With my new split (see previous blog post), I’m able to implement both the deadlift and the squat into my routine, which is great since these are the two best muscle building exercises around. I’ve also been able to keep my progress going on both exercises by alternating routines of high reps (20 rep sets), low reps (sets of 5 reps) and variety day (various rep ranges as well as intensity techniques such as drop sets).

After finally taking my own advice and getting out of the gym for a week, I’ve been back at it the past two weeks. It turns out that week off did wonders for my body. I definitely needed the rest.

I made some changes to my weight training routine. Before my break, I was working each body part once every five days. I trained my chest, shoulders and triceps together, legs by themselves and then back and biceps together.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been training each body part only once per week. I’ve also made some changes to my split, working chest with calves, back with forearms, thighs alone, and then arms together (with shoulders). I’ve split my routine into four, where previously it was split into three. This has given me more rest between body part hits and also made each workout itself a bit shorter.

So far, so good.  I’ll keep you posted.