Plateaus: Why do they happen? How to break them...
If you have trained for an extended period of time (years), I can almost guarantee you have dealt with a plateau at least once or twice when it came to your progression. If you don't know what a plateau is, it is when you are continuously training but you stop seeing results or your results slow to a crawl. Whether you're training for fat loss, strength gains, mass gains etc. plateaus are just a part of training. They are super frustrating and can KILL your motivation in the gym. You work and work day in and day out with little to no positive results and let's be honest...it sucks. There are obviously ways to help stay out of plateaus but when you train for years on end they are essentially inevitable and it is important to have the ability to identify when you're in one and get out of it ASAP.
Step 1: Don't fall into one...
There's ways to keep yourself from plateauing or at least reduce the chances of one as much as possible. When I first started seriously training as a young teenager I can confidently say I don't think I plateaued for at least a couple of years. Reason most likely being that my body was simply shocked by the stress of weight lifting. As a younger athlete I was able to not be on a super strict training or diet plan, just worked my ass off in the gym and kept getting bigger and stronger. However, I did have the luxury of some fantastic coaches writing my workouts which was a large factor in continuously progressing.
A rule which you MUST understand with training is that muscle confusion is a totally real concept and it should honestly be at the foundation of everything you do in the gym. As trainers we hear it all the time: "I've been doing the same routine for months, years etc." THIS IS A DIRECT AND GUARANTEED PATH TO A PLATEAU. If you have a strict routine and you're not changing anything about your training you will not gain results as fast as possible and your body will become accustomed to the stress and will stop adapting (getting stronger). You can physically feel an example of this if you stop getting sore after workouts. Why are you not sore? Your body has adapted. It needs more stress.
I've Hit a Plateau, What Now?
Now, just because you have a fantastic training regiment and you aren't getting stuck in routines doesn't mean your body is immune to plateauing. There's been periods where my training was meticulously planned to confuse my body and I still fell into plateaus. You need to realize that there are many factors to plateauing and the faster you can identify what is wrong, the faster you can break them.
Factor 1: Muscle Confusion
Yes, I just talked about this and yes, I'm going to talk about it again. BECAUSE ITS THE MOST COMMON CAUSE OF PLATEAU DISEASE. If you aren't getting better step back and look at your last macro and micro cycle of training (long and short term). If you see that you've been doing 3x10 bench every chest day for the last 6 weeks, stop what your doing and rewrite your program. You HAVE to confuse your body. We have heavy days, we have light days, we have days where we will shoot for 300-400 reps of bench press JUST because it will confuse the hell out of your muscles. The best part of this factor...it's super easy to correct. Simply change your program (AND KEEP CHANGING IT) and you'll fly off your plateau quickly.
Factor 2: Diet/Lifestyle
So your training program is 100% on point. You're mixing it up, your body is as confused as I was in calculus class, you're still feeling sore after workouts BUT your progress has hit a dead stop or is just super slow...time to look at your life outside the gym. This is a tough one because everyones schedules, eating habits, metabolisms, sleeping patterns, stress levels are all different. Diet is a relatively simple fix but not an easy one. Depending on your goals maybe you need to up your caloric intake, maybe some of your macronutrients are too low or maybe your lacking some essential vitamins and nutrients. Be honest with yourself here...sometimes it is just a matter of not eating crap food and your gains can skyrocket. If your diets on point, try getting some more sleep. We recover and grow when we sleep and that is also when essential hormones are at their highest levels for growth. Point here being is if everything IN the gym is on point...take a step back and look at what you're missing the other 85% of your day.
Factor 3: Overtraining
Some of my worst plateaus have been simply because I wasn't getting the correct amount of recovery outside of the gym. Now... I am a huge advocate for working out almost every single day and to be honest that's basically what I do. While I keep getting stronger doing that, the main reason I do it is because I love it. There's days where I know for a fact I shouldn't train and I should let my body rest but I don't because well...I feel like lifting. However, if you are following a routine like that and you hit a hard plateau it absolutely can be that you just need to relax and take longer breaks between training sessions. If you're like me this SUCKS. In my mind I feel like if I'm not training I'm not getting stronger BUT you have to at least give it a try. Realistically, if you're someone who's been training for years on end there should be times where you take a week totally off to get an absolute full recovery (this can break a plateau on it's own). Just try to think long term...take some more time between sessions and see what happens. It could be the key back to positive results.
Factor 4: Under training
If you hit a plateau maybe the first thing you should do is ask yourself how hard you're working in the actual gym. If you spend 50% of your session looking at apps on your phone you shouldn't expect much progress to begin with. If you've hit a plateau and you've been training hard two to three times per week for the last 3 months...simply train more. Add another day or two in a week and you will get out of that plateau. This doesn't need a huge explanation. Under training is a simple fix and honestly just requires more effort.