Thanks to the sophisticated French we have the word plateau to describe that frustrating time in your training when you stop making progress. They’re an inevitable part of the process, but what if there was a way to know when you’ve hit a plateau sooner rather than later? To have some methods of overcoming that period of purgatory and hop back on the gain-train towards Meatville? Oh, it’s your lucky day, because I’m going to give you the answers you didn’t know you needed, but that you deserve. Buckle up, let’s jump right in.
1. Load/reps staying the same for a few weeks
This is by far the most common indication that you’ve reached a plateau on an exercise. Before making this judgment call though, you have to be honest with yourself and run through the checklist of other potential factors affecting your performance:
Poor sleep
Poor nutrition
Poor stress management
Poor form
Poor programming (not managing volume and intensity)
Poor me
If you can confidently say that none of the above have played a role in why you seem to be tanking it on your squats lately, then you can start to assume that you may have hit a bit of a ceiling. As a rule of thumb, I tell clients that if they don’t progress in reps or load for 2 consecutive sessions (usually 2 weeks) and the weight isn’t feeling any easier despite being the same (RPE not going down), then we’re better off with an adjustment going forward. Nobody likes to feel like they’re not making progress.
2. Picking up aches and pains more regularly in training
This one is less easy to spot and people will often attribute it to incorrect technique, which can definitely play a role. At times, however, we may be reaching a point of diminishing returns with our volume and intensity. For hypertrophy and strength, volume is a dose-response relationship but only up to a point. That means that we can add volume to our programme in the form of additional sets or more exercises, and we’ll build muscle and strength. But this cannot and should not be done in a continuously linear fashion, because more sets over time will result in lower return on investment. Eventually, adding sets can result in a plateau and regression, as a result of the accumulated fatigue reaching unrecoverable levels. When that happens, it's not uncommon to start to get aches and pains in the hips, shoulders, knees, and elbows. The body is capable of handling crazy amounts of stress, but when that stress is applied in a haphazard way or the dose gets too high, it causes problems.
(the above graph is taken from The Muscle & Strength Pyramid)
3. Reduced mind-muscle connection
Being very aware of your muscle engagement may not be something that novices will notice, but it’s also true that novices are much less likely to plateau because the runway for progression is so long. For those with more time in the game this however, can be experienced in varying forms in the gym, such as an inability to feel the muscle working as much or feeling flat on a regular basis even though carb and fluid intake is sufficient, or not getting pumps in the gym as normal. You don’t know what’s going on. Last week you had a skin-splitting pump doing db chest presses, and today you feel like a Ken-doll. This is often related to your catecholamine system, which increases competitiveness, heart rate and contraction strength, muscle tone, motivation and drive, muscle strength, and more. Problems arise when this system is asked to function in overdrive for too long.
Okay, we’ve outlined plenty of problems, so what are some solutions?
1. Introducing exercise variation into your programme
Trainees usually look at exercise variation as a way to shock the muscle to keep it growing stronger and bigger, but this is only half of it. Yes, variation when implemented properly does allow this to happen, but it also allows some of the accumulated fatigue to decrease. In this case, the variation acts as a deload method for both volume and intensity, because the new exercise won’t be creating as much fatigue as before, and it will be recruiting slightly different muscle groups. This makes a lot of sense if you think about the fatigue you’ll be experiencing from something like conventional deadlifts in week 14 of a programme. By this point, both intensity and volume will be high, and fatigue will accumulate each week. If we introduce an exercise like DB Romanian Deadlifts, it will accomplish 2 things:
i) We’ll be lifting lighter weights (intensity and volume down)
ii) We’ll be targeting different muscles
Week 1 of DB Romanian Deadlifts will be nowhere near as taxing as week 14 of Conventional Deadlifts, and in this way, we can still train a hinge pattern but allow the body to positively adapt from the stimulus of the previous variation.
2. Reduce training volume or intensity
Sometimes we just need a lighter week to allow the body to “catch up” to the fatigue level that’s accumulated over the course of the weeks and months of training. Options for reducing training stress involve lowering the intensity, which can be accomplished in a number of ways from just lifting 10-20% less weight than what you were before, deciding to lift at a lower RPE (e.g. RPE 6), or removing 1 working set from each exercise. If this improves performance the following week, then it’s a sign that you were simply under-recovered and needed a break. If this lighter week wasn’t enough, then you may need to take a closer look at your overall volume/intensity going forward or think about organising your training more effectively across the week.
Nobody likes plateaus, but knowing some of the signs will let you move fast and make appropriate changes to your training. But, and this is a big but, there’s a fine line between understanding that all training should be hard, and reaching a plateau. Very often, people are lacking in effort in their training, which comes with a high degree of discomfort. That should underpin the whole debate. Plateaus are only realistic when the high effort is consistently applied in training. Once that requirement is met, the above methods can be implemented in various ways.