Training Plateaus
If you’ve been training for any extended period of time, you’ve hopefully been basking in a wealth of gains and the richness of a healthier life. What happens when those gains taper off and you’re stuck in a rut? It’s what we call a “plateau”.
Whatever strength and conditioning gains you’ve reached have leveled off and you can’t seem to break through to the other side. Plateaus come with the territory when you’re trying to improve both your physical and mental well-being, and are naturally frustrating.
They don’t have to be.
Hitting one of these plateaus in your training happens to the best of us, and it’s perhaps the best time to introduce some new methodology to your training program. Here are some tips to overcoming plateaus, but first a word about overtraining.
Signs of “Overtraining”
Some people simply work out too much. There are times where I can do a sprint training workout in the morning and a weight lifting session at night, but I can only sustain that type of work rate for a short period of time. If I persisted in that type of heavy-duty training year round, my body would wear down due to overtraining.
The symptoms are quite easy to pinpoint. They include, but are not exclusive to, prolonged muscle soreness, constant fatigue, elevated rested heart rate, increased irritability, emotional and physical depression, as well as poor resistance to illness or infections.
If you’re exemplifying one or a combination of any of these symptoms, the easiest solution is to reduce the frequency of your training. Try shortening the length of your workouts by cutting down on the number of total sets you endure as well as the amount of time you’re in the gym. You can also work out fewer times per week and include more rest days to give your body and central nervous system time to recover.
This may seem counter intuitive, especially if you are keen on your goals, but any overtraining can severely impact the pace your body, mind and spirit. Training smart is the first basic step to training properly. Sometimes there isn’t gain with a world of pain.
The Identifying The Plateau
The most common plateau that people complain about is the one revolving around strength gains. Usually people try to increase their loads by small increments every week, or they attempt to hammer out more reps than they did the week before with the same weight. An inability to do that is essentially regarded as a plateau. So how do you break out of one?
The Good News
Plateaus can be inherently frustrating. Nobody appreciates a lack of progress, especially in their personal lives. The good news about hitting a plateau is that your body and your mind are accustomed to training. In all likelihood, you can be considered an “intermediate” level weight lifter if you have already reached a plateau.
The premise of exercising is simple: you push your body beyond its physical limits in order to encourage growth. That’s the meat and potatoes of lifting weights for most people. By reaching a plateau your body is telling you that whatever worked for you before isn’t working now.
Do not worry. Now is a great time to start experimenting with new training techniques. You can incorporate more advanced methods, such as The Weider Principles, in to your training to help kick start your growth and smash through any plateau. Here are some quick tips to help get you started:
5 QUICK TIPS FOR PLATEAU BUSTING
1) Increase the Volume of Your Workouts
Depending on what you’re goals are, you’ll likely have been performing within a specific rep range. Strength training usually falls in that 6-8 rep range, while power training can go as low as 1-3 reps per set. Those gunning for hypertrophy, which is the fancy word for muscle growth, may want to stick in that 8-12 rep range. Conditioning athletes might go as high as 12-20 reps.
Look at your current workout program and identify which rep range you’ve been working in. If you’re a strength/power trainer who has been sticking with low rep ranges, then try to reduce the weight and go for mega volume. Do the inverse of that if you’ve been training for conditioning and endurance by increasing the load and working in a smaller rep range.
The key here is intensity. You should be reaching failure (or close to it) by the end of your rep range. Just because you’re going lighter, that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be easy. If you’re going heavier, don’t think that you can sacrifice the tempo of your lifts or proper form.
2) Push Your Body Beyond Failure
Failure is the point during an exercise where you can’t execute any more full repetitions due to muscle fatigue. Pushing your body past this point will invite your body in to a threshold it has never known before, and doing so isn’t always easy. It’s gut check time, people. Try these time tested methods:
- Rest-Pause Sets – Choose a compound muscle, such as bench press for chest or pull-ups for your back, that incorporate more than one muscle group. Select a weight that would typically allow you to achieve 8 reps until you get to failure. After a proper warm up, push this weight as hard as can for 8 reps, rest for 10 deep breaths and then get back under the weight and force out a few more reps. Rest for 10 deep breaths one more time then attack the weights again. You won’t be able to do 8 reps each set, but compacting three sets in to one giant set will leave you breathless and taxed. Now you can take a long 3-5 minute rest before you start the next exercise.
- Partial Reps – Grab a training partner or a spotter for these. The idea is to reach failure on a regular workload (e.g. 8 reps on bench press) and after you’ve reach failure have your training partner help you achieve a few partial reps. You won’t achieve full range of motion, but if you utilize 50-75% of the ROM for a few more reps you can definitely still reap some benefits. Please be careful when attempting forced or partial reps!
- Drop Sets – A personal favorite. On your last set of an exercise, perform what’s called a drop set. An example would be on your fifth and final set of leg press. After your final set has been hammered out, strip off 20-35% of the weight and hammer out a few more reps. When you reach failure a second time, strip another 30% of the weight off and hammer out another round of reps to failure. You should be gassed by the end of the third drop set!
- Increase Time Under Tension (TUT) – Think for a second about how fast you perform a particular repetition. How long does it take you to press the weight up (i.e. the positive, concentric phase) and how long does it take for you to bring the weight back down (i.e. the negative or eccentric phase)? If you don’t even think about this concept when you’re lifting, then now’s a pretty darn good time to start. Increasing the TUT is as simple as slowing down your reps. Take two full seconds to press a weight up, and two seconds to bring the weight back to the starting point.
The best part about focusing on your TUT is that you can play around with the tempo. You can do a 2-2 tempo (two second positive, two second negative) or even a 1-3 tempo or a 2-4 tempo per rep. It’s all up to you, so figure out which one you enjoy the best. You’ll ideally want to take increased rest times if you’re increasing your TUT as well especially if you’re increasing your work rate. By the way, I used the word “enjoy” sparingly – this might hurt (in a good way).
Learning how to incorporate these methods in to your training regimen can take time, but with practice you can easily perfect them. You can check out more by exploring more from the Weider Principles!
3) Take a Break
When was the last time you had a full week or two off from training? If it was more than two months ago, then you probably need one. Sometimes the body needs a bit of a break to re-energize for the coming training period. I prefer to take a week off weight training every six weeks, and during my time away from the gym I reorganize my action plan and chip in a few moderately paced runs outdoors to burn all the excess energy.
A break is a great time to back off, track your progress and reassess your goals. The fact is that you might have hit a mental plateau, which means you’re just bored with what you’re doing in the gym. Don’t worry – you’re supposed to get bored doing the same thing day in and day out. Variety is the spice of life, remember?
4) Check Your Diet
You are what you eat, and if you scarf down crap you’re going to feel like a piece of one. Are you eating well? Too much protein? Too little? Are you eating the right types of carbs from healthy sources such as whole, natural grains? Are you eating enough to satisfy your growth physically, or just enough to get through the day? Do you skip breakfast? Are you gorging on a huge dinner? Are you taking the right, or wrong, supplements? What’s your weekly alcohol consumption like, and is it killing your gains?
Remember that you’re typically in the gym for about an hour a day. That means there are 23 other hours where you’re supposed to be sleeping and eating right, and if you’re not doing one of those properly then that could very well explain why you’ve reached a plateau. Be honest with yourself about your goals and if you’re absolutely doing everything possible to achieve them. A proper diet custom built to fuel you on your road to success might be the missing link.
5) Hire a Personal Trainer
I know I sound like a shill for the business now, but one of the best things you can do is hire a personal trainer again if you haven’t done so already. Simply tell the trainer, “I’ve hit a plateau and I need to mix things up”, then show them the type of exercise program you’ve been doing so far and they can take it from there. The hands-on approach is sometimes the very best. If you’re unsure of how to get a personal trainer, ask the people at the gym who you see working with the in-house staff and ask them about their experiences. More often than not they’ll give you honest feedback.
Conclusion – Don’t Beat Yourself Down
Committing yourself to a healthy lifestyle is a marathon, not a sprint. If accomplishing your fitness goals were easy, then everyone would be in great shape and there’d be no use for me writing this article in the first place. The fact is that your fitness goals will hit roadblocks and veer off track at times, just like your career and your regular life. Overcoming the challenge is what makes this whole endeavor worth it.
Crashing in to a plateau can be very frustrating, especially if you’ve been enjoying gains throughout your current regimen. Now is the best time to mix things up, change your approach and start enjoying the benefits of all the different training styles that exist.
I like to live by an old saying that preaches, “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always got”. Don’t become complacent, and don’t let a common plateau derail you from your course. Plateaus are a negative entity in the world of exercise and training, but to me it has always signaled the ideal time to invoke change in my training programs, be they subtle or major in their scope. As is usually the case, change can be a very good thing.
Tim Quek is an avid health enthusiast, a C.H.E.K. Institute Exercise Coach and Holistic Health Practitioner, NSCA Certified Personal Trainer and is enthusiastically involved in Rugby, Soccer and Speed Training. He can be reached at timquek@hotmail.com
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