8 proven ways to break through plateaus Part 1

When it comes to training with weights, there's nothing more frustrating than reaching a seemingly insurmountable plateau

If you've been training with weights for any length of time, you'll be familiar with this dilemma: you arrive at the gym each training day, loaded up with your pre-workout drink and determined to move more weight than your last training session.

You load up the bar with weight plates, turn up the music, convince yourself it's a light weight and go for your set with everything you've got...and then comes the humiliation. The weight feels crazy heavy and you end up doing the exact same number of reps with the same weight as your last workout (or worse).

What's going wrong? And what can you do to finally make progress again? Let's find out.

The physiology of progress when training with weights

The human body is very good at adapting to stimuli and whether we're talking about metabolism or muscle mass, its goal is to maintain a normalized state where things stay more or less the same (also known as homeostasis).

This is great when it comes to survival, but not so good for building muscle and strength. The more time passes, the better and better your body gets at adapting to training and this is the reason why so many people fall into a kind of rut: they simply don't push themselves hard enough to make further progress.

The bottom line is that once you get past your beginner gains, you need to work damn hard to keep pushing your muscles to get bigger and stronger

What you're after is known physiologically as supercompensation. This is the process by which your body strengthens its existing muscle fibers, tendons and ligaments to become more muscular and stronger.

And as you may know, the primary factor that drives such supercompensation is a progressive one - moving more weight in a given repetition range over time.

This is also the reason why plateaus in muscle mass gain are always accompanied by strength plateaus. You can be sure that people who look the same month after month will move more or less the same weights month after month.

And this is the reason why you should try to avoid such plateaus at all costs. If your workouts are exact duplicates of each other week after week - if you perform the exact same exercises with the same weights and the same repetitions - then you will maintain your current body development and performance level and make no progress at all.

A properly designed training and nutrition program will go a long way to preventing such plateaus, but plateaus are still part of the game - no one is immune to them and they will happen from time to time, albeit irregularly, even with the best programs.

So don't despair when you reach a plateau. Patiently use the strategies I will describe in this article to break through these plateaus and you will never fall into a real rut.

Before we get to the strategies for overcoming plateaus, however, let's first define what exactly a plateau is.

What a training plateau is and what it is not

Whenever people tell me that they are not making progress with their training program, I first ask them for details. What exactly do they mean?

It often turns out that they are making progress, but that this progress is not the progress they want to make. They can't increase their weights as quickly as they used to, or they can't increase all the exercises they do during a training session, or their progress doesn't meet another desired criterion.

In this case, I explain to these people what I will also explain to you here, which has to do with expectations and benchmarks:

Unless you're a novice exerciser, you're not going to be able to increase your weight on the bar every week while maintaining proper form and desired repetition ranges. Instead, your weekly goal for each training session should be to increase by 1 to 2 reps on at least one of your exercises and this will usually be your first exercise.

For example, if you did 2 reps of 200kg deadlifts the previous week, your goal is to do 3 to 4 reps this week (and you probably won't do 4). If you can do this and the rest of your training session is exactly the same as the previous week (same weight and same reps on each subsequent exercise), then this is a successful training session.

I know this may sound strange, but just increasing by 1 or 2 reps on an exercise is enough to induce supercompensation and you should be happy.

Based on my experience, you will probably see improvements in more than one exercise per session when your body is ready to progress, but sometimes it's just one multi-joint exercise where you will progress while the rest stays the same. Sometimes it's the first set or two of the second exercise. Less frequently, the improvements can also come from one of your sarcoplasmic sets. But regardless of where you ultimately improve, any progress means that you are not stuck at a plateau.

A true plateau is a situation where you are stuck at a certain weight with a certain number of repetitions for at least 3 weeks on each exercise of a training session.

This means that you perform the same amount of weight with the same number of reps on each exercise for at least 3 weeks in a row. When this happens, then it's time to address this plateau with one or more of the following strategies.

Could the plateau be related to your technique or mobility?

Incorrect exercise execution form can stall your progress, especially with heavy multi-joint exercises such as squats, deadlifts and bench presses. If you do not perform the exercises correctly, you will eventually reach a plateau and if you try to overcome this plateau, you may injure yourself.

When I reach a plateau (which happens from time to time even when everything is going well), I have someone videotape my execution of each exercise so that I can check the form of my exercise execution. I play the videos in close-up on my computer so I can see what's going on. And more than once I have found something obviously wrong with the form of my exercise execution, the correction of which has enabled me to make further progress.

For example, a few months ago I tended to lean too far forward during squats when the weight got heavy, which put too much stress on my hip flexors. This prevented me from increasing the weight further.

To correct this, I reduced the weight to give my hip flexors a break and work on my form. Within a month, I was able to rapidly increase the weight - this time with good form and no pain in my hip flexors.

Sometimes, however, correcting technique is a complicated thing - and in most cases this has something to do with mobility issues. Impaired mobility in the upper and lower body can seriously affect your form. Some people can't perform certain exercises correctly simply because their body can't perform the movements.

Fortunately, this problem is quite easily correctable. By using the right flexibility exercises, most of these problems can be eliminated. Another problem is that your body will not be able to perform optimally if you don't get enough sleep. And if you're asking a lot of your body in the gym, getting enough sleep each night is especially important for both recovery and performance during training.

Anecdotally, people have known this for a long time, and science supports it too. In a study of eight men between the ages of 18 and 24 who limited sleep to three hours per night for three consecutive nights, significant impairments in bench press, leg press and deadlift strength were observed and the workouts were perceived as much more tiring than usual (1).

Although this is a fairly extreme example of sleep deprivation, other studies have shown that even milder forms of sleep deprivation impair physical performance and the body's ability to recover from exercise (2).

Scientific research has also shown that increasing sleep to at least 10 hours per night can improve physical performance (3). The subjects felt better mentally, ran faster, shot more accurately when playing basketball and were able to exercise for longer before fatigue set in.

Of course, this doesn't mean you should sleep 10 hours or more every night.

In fact, studies have shown that only a small percentage of the population needs that much sleep (4). But we should give our bodies as much sleep as they need, and according to the National Sleep Foundation, adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night to avoid negative consequences of sleep deprivation (5). A small percentage do well with less sleep, while a small percentage need more.

Since genetic predisposition and age affect how much sleep your body needs, an easy way to determine what is optimal for you is to choose a two-week period, such as a vacation, and go to bed at the same time every night without setting an alarm for the next morning.

There's a good chance you'll sleep longer than usual at first, as you'll need to make up for some sleep deficit, but by the end of the second week your body will have developed a consistent sleep pattern that includes the same amount of sleep each night. And your body will be trying to tell you something: this is exactly the amount of sleep it needs. Stick to this amount and you'll never have to deal with the negative effects of sleep deprivation again.

Are you overtraining?

Overtraining can be insidious, especially during the early stages when symptoms are still mild and difficult to recognize. When overtraining starts to set in, the first things that will suffer are your strength and muscle endurance. Your training sessions will feel heavier. This is nothing more than accumulated central nervous system fatigue and something you can easily get under control (often a week's rest or an off-load week will do the trick).

If you find yourself a week or two before a planned break or unloading week and you are stuck and everything feels unusually heavy and exhausting, then it is very likely that you already need a break or unloading phase, after which you will make further progress.

However, if you're still stuck after a rest or an off-load then it's probably not an overtraining issue unless you've been seriously abusing your body over a period of 6 to 12 months.

In the second part of this article, I will discuss other strategies that have proven to be very effective in overcoming training plateaus.

Source: https://www.muscleforlife.com/weightlifting-plateau/

By Michael Mathews