Exercise Plateau
This is a leveling off or lack of change your muscles experience once they begin to adapt to an exercise. Your body will acclimate and become more efficient, using less energy for the same exercise. This means you burn fewer calories and gain less muscle mass.
This is common among anyone who has exercised for a long period of time. If you are consistently doing the same exercises week in and week out your muscles will adjust to those exercises and it becomes difficult for them to change. It's normal for this to happen at some point and it's important to recognize when it happens. Many people don't recognize when it's happening and they become so frustrated they stop exercising altogether. Don't let this happen to you.
You can avoid this by creating muscle confusion. Muscle confusion is really just adding variety to your workouts to maximize the stress on your muscles. The two best ways to create muscle confusion are by varying your exercises and varying your repetitions. For this example, let's take someone who is strength training. Every Tuesday this person does the same 5 back exercises with the same amount of repetitions. Eventually, this person’s muscles adapt to these back exercises, and he/she doesn't experience the same gains he/she did in the first few weeks of this. By changing what back exercises you perform each week, and by changing the repetition amount, your muscles will not become accustomed to any one exercise. The result is you will burn more calories and gain more muscle.
For each body part pick out 8-10 exercises you can perform and vary them week to week. Each week add different exercises for the same body part and vary when you do them in during your workouts. A simple way to vary your repetitions if your are strength training is by going on this 3 week plan. It goes as follows:
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