Inevitably as we continue to exercise we run into the ogre from under the bridge known as the plateau. It happens in many different ways, all of which sum up to I’m not getting any stronger, I’m not adding muscle, or I’m not losing weight. Every one of us has experienced this and it can be frustrating to the point of debilitation for some, quitting for others, and my personal favorite “this is what happens when you start to get old” for those special people that use age as the default response for exercise pitfalls and roadblocks. Trust me, its not age, some of my strongest clients would fall into the “seasoned” category and age isn’t slowing down their ability to make progress.
The thing we have to remember is that we usually make our biggest leaps and bounds when we first start an exercise regimen or if we haven’t exercised for an extended period of time. The stimulus we are providing is new and the body has to adapt to the new mechanical and hormonal demands placed on it. Provided nutrition is adequate this normally results in added muscle, increased strength, and body fat reduction. Birds are chirping, grass in green, air is sweet, life is good.. Until it slows and ultimately stops.
The body is a homeostatic organism that is constantly trying to achieve balance from all the stimulus’s that it receives on a minute, hour, and daily basis. After you’ve been at your routine for a few months and you have seen some progress and then you have also seen that progress start to slow and maybe even stop that doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you, with your exercises, or your program (provided you are eating and sleeping well). It means that your body has done what it is designed to do: it has achieved a balance with the stimulus provided and doesn’t need to adapt to the demand. You have plateaued. Dun dun dun.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you as a person have plateaued it means that the stimulus you are providing is no longer initiating a process of growth. When this occurs your stimulus must change in order to push the body to make new adaptations. This is the most common thing I see on a daily basis, we are routine oriented people and we tend to go to the gym and do what we know, do it the same way, and somehow wonder why things aren’t changing the way we like. To continue to make progress we have to continue to provide a stimulus for growth keeping in mind that as we continue to progress, that progress becomes more incremental, but it should still be moving forward and not stagnating. The following are some easy recommendations to change how you format your exercise routines so that you can continue to provide the body with new demands.
Periodization. I have written about this before but in summary it means changing up the reps and sets on a weekly basis. For example you may do 2 sets of 15 one week, 2-3 sets of 12 the next, 3 sets of 10 the next, 3-4 sets of 6-8 the next, and 3-4 sets of 5 the next two weeks just as an example. The important thing to remember regardless of how you set up your reps and sets is that each week you are providing a different stimulus; the weights for each exercise should increase to match the lowered reps thus increasing the intensity of each exercise every week. A new stimulus.
Intensity. I touched on intensity with periodization, intensity must continue to increase if we are going to create a demand for the body to continue to have to adapt. Three sets of 10 every time you come in the gym is a recipe for stale bread, you won’t see many changes. I know some of you are saying there is a point where I won’t be able to increase the weight. I agree. The trick is in controlling the tempo, tempo being how fast you perform each movement. The slower you do an exercise the more intense it becomes and the fewer reps you can do. So when I’m continuing to advocate for increased intensities with periodization we can achieve that by adding weight and by slowing the tempo down so we can work in the desired rep ranges. A new stimulus.
Rotate your movements. I’m a huge advocate of having your basic routine consist of squats, lunges, pushing movements, and pulling movements. That doesn’t mean you have to do the same exact exercises each time. For example, one workout you might squat, the next leg press, the next deadlift. Those movements are all in the squat family and will allow you to perform that movement in a variety of different exercises that provide a different type of demand with each one. You could do that with each type of general movement and thus have a large variety of exercises that were each providing a slightly different stimulus.
Take a vacation. That’s right you don’t have to exercise 52 weeks a year. If you workout really hard for 2-3 months take a week off from time to time. Trust me you won’t lose any muscle and you’ll allow your body the time it needs to fully recover from the stresses of your workouts. Another thing this allows is for your body to not receive a workout stimulus for 7-10 days, Brian Haycock calls this “strategic deconditioning.” The thought being that after not receiving a workout stimulus for 7-10 days and having not received a stimulus for 2 sets of 15 for about 8 weeks, due to the continuing advancement of intensities over your program with periodization, your body will once again receive a demand that is fairly new and thus be forced to adapt.
Remember, to continue to make progress in strength and body composition we have to continually provide the body with an environment that forces it to adapt. We cannot do the same thing every time we go into the gym and expect a change to happen. I think that may be the definition of insanity.
