by Mike Robertson
Plateaus in weight-training suck.
Plateaus in fat-loss suck, too.
Plateaus in our strength and performance? You got it — they suck!
No longer do we need to fall victim to the plateau; throughout this article, I'm going to give you 5 ways to analyze and break through your lifting plateaus.
Interested? I thought so!
In our article series Overcoming Lousy Leverages
Eric Cressey and I detailed how lifters of different body types could
overcome specific plateaus in the powerlifts. While this was great, it
got me thinking: How can I make this more general? More universally
applicable? How can I take this information and boil it down to common
principles versus specific information?
As the saying goes, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him forever." I want to teach you how to fish!
Before
we get into all the answers, though, we need to be clear on one thing —
if you aren't training intelligently, it doesn't matter what training
program you're on or what exercises you choose, you're probably not
going to see consistent results.
Let's briefly examine the ways you can screw up your training before we get into the solutions.
Just
like all guarantees, there's got to be some fine print. When you buy a
TV, the manufacturer gives you a guarantee that they'll replace it in
the first year if it goes kaput. I guarantee that if you follow the
ideas I outline in this article, they'll help you make progress towards
your goals.
But what if you take a golf club to your TV? I'd
put cash money on the fact that your TV manufacturer isn't going to
replace it. Hence the need for fine print and stipulations. The above
ideas will work assuming you choose the correct path and train intelligently.
Before
we discuss the stipulations, let's quickly look at the physiological
principles behind training and recovery so you understand where I'm
going with all this.
Your
body likes homeostasis; the less adapting it has to do, the better.
Homeostasis on the graph below is called "Baseline."
When
you train, you force your body to respond to the stimulus by adapting;
this could involve improving nervous system efficiency, strengthening
tendons, ligaments, and muscles, increasing muscle size/cross sectional
area, or a combination of all these factors.
Now if you were to
continue training the same body part day after day, or kept training
day after day intensely without a break, eventually you reach the
"exhaustion" stage." Whether you want to call it chronic overreaching,
overtraining, or anything in-between is irrelevant. You must give your body adequate time to recover to ensure long-term success.
As
your body builds resistance, it slowly becomes a bigger, stronger and
more efficient version of its previous self. This is what we're all
aiming for: Supercompensation. However, it doesn't stay this way
forever! If you train hard you'll achieve supercompensation a few days
or even a week or two later (depending on how much fatigue you have
accumulated), but you can't wait a month or two before training again
and hope to keep those gains! If you wait too long after the initial
session(s), your gains eventually trail off and the training effect is
lost.
Granted this is a long-winded answer but these principles are critical if you really want to smash current plateaus!
But enough with explanations; let's get on to the stipulations.
This
should be simple: I could give you the best information in the world,
but if you don't train hard enough to force your body to adapt, you're
not going to make progress.
In training terms, we have to
induce a certain stimulus to force our body to adapt. In the graph
below, this is called the "alarm" stage; you train your body hard
enough and it says, "Hey, I need to do something about this."
This stipulation is simple — once you understand WHAT you need to do training wise, you need to go out and do it!
Let's
assume you trained hard and forced your body into some level of the
"alarm" stage. The next goal is to actually recover and get into the
"supercompensation" area of the graph. Simple enough, right?
Let's
say you have a great squat workout and induce the right amount of
fatigue to see a training response. But instead of going home and
resting up, you go out and booze until 6 a.m., sleep two hours, and
then go out and train again the next day. Do you expect to achieve
results? If you do, you're a dumbass!
Just like we need to train hard enough to elicit a positive change, we need to recover
hard enough to achieve supercompensation. Entire articles have been
written on the topic of recovery so I won't bother getting into the
details here, but you must achieve supercompensation if you want to see
progress over the long term. Recovery is an integral part of this
process.
You've trained hard and supercompensation has commenced. You've won the battle right?
Yep
— but that's only a small part of the war. The goal is to continue
taking advantage of the supercompensation effect; to continue building,
driving your fitness levels to new-found highs.
As
you can see in the above graph with intelligent training your new
"baseline" keeps going up — you're getting stronger, losing body fat,
or developing bigger muscles. Just like you wouldn't make one deposit
into a bank account and expect the balance to go up (without interest,
of course), you can't train once or twice a month and expect to see
continual progress.
Here's a quick recap of our stipulations:
-
You must train hard enough to elicit change
-
You must recover hard enough to achieve supercompensation
-
You must train frequently enough to continually increase your fitness levels
I
only mention these stipulations because I have to; far too many
trainees aren't heeding to the basic, core principles of training.
These same people would say, "I used that information from Robertson's
article and it didn't do squat for me!" If you aren't following the
basic physiological principles of progression, you aren't going to see
progress, PERIOD.
With that out of the way, let's jump right into this — 5 GUARANTEED ways to smash your plateaus forever!
Many
of the lifts you make or miss are determined before you actually move
the bar. If your set-up sucks or is inefficient, it's going to affect
the rest of the movement. This concept was solidified in my brain in
the winter of 2004.
As a coach of the USA World Bench Press
team, I got to spend three days watching the world's best do what they
do — BENCH! How technical can a bench press be, though? You just plop
down on the bench and lift the weight, right?
WRONG!
These
lifters were extremely efficient with their technique, sure. But what
really stood out was their efficiency when setting up. These lifters
used everything from their feet, to their legs and hips, to their upper
back and arms to stay tight. This tension led to rock-solid set-ups and
absolutely ridiculous poundages being hoisted.
(If you'd like a thorough recap on how to set-up properly for the bench, be sure to check out Yo, How Much ya Bench? In the T-Nation archives.)
I
couldn't possibly go through all the exercises out there and detail how
to set-up. But if you continue treading water on one exercise, go back
to the beginning and figure out if your set-up is the cause. Leaning
too far forward on squats at the beginning? Not on the heels at the
beginning of your deadlift? Did you just plop down on the bench and
expect to move big-boy weight?
A rock-solid set-up is the first key to making plateaus a thing of the past. Don't discount the importance of this tip!
