Intermediate Training (part 1 of 2)

The ups and downs of leaving newbie-hood
Ok, so you're past the first, trembling steps on the road to physical excellence.
Great! You've probably packed on a couple of pounds of muscle during the past months, and you're starting to feel confident in the gym. You know what you're doing, and you have most of the exercises figured out by now. The weights go up, up, up, and it's getting harder and harder to resist the urge to pull off your shirt and flex your biceps every five minutes.

Another thing that happens about now, is that progress seems to be slowing down a little.
Six months ago, your entire body would ache from just looking a barbell, but now you seem to not only have gotten used to the workouts, but also have lost some of the effect.
Well, guess what - you're right! The workouts HAVE lost some of the effect! That means, that in spite of the fact that you use twice as much weight now, your muscles are still more prepared and able to handle that workload, than they used to be.
When the muscles get less stimulus, they grow slower, or perhaps even stops growing altogether. You don't want this. Therefore, we have to figure out ways to get around this problem.

Keeping a sound perspective
Keep in mind though, that you will probably never see such results as you did during your first months of training. That was a one-timer in your life. Even if you gained 10 lbs in the first two months, you should mentally adjust to slower progress. 10 lbs a YEAR is to be considered great gains!
Now, you have to focus on consistency and intensity - the keys to long-term progress.

Increased body split and more rest
One thing you've figured out is how to actually make USE of your muscles more. That is partly the mind-muscle connection, where you've actually trained your nerves to use your muscles more efficiently, hence making you stronger. It might be surprising to you, but just like we only use a few percent of the brain's capacity (except Dan Quale), we never make 100% use of the muscle fibers in our bodies. It can be trained to higher efficiency though, and as you may have guessed, weight training is the number one way of doing this. Let's say that you've gone from using 50% of your total muscle fibers (!) to 75%. That is quite an increase in strength right there, without even counting in any gains in muscle mass into the equation.

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