What to Do When You Hit a Plateau in Weightlifting
If you lift heavy weights, you will become stronger. Briefly, this is the principle of progressive overload . As you get stronger, you need to lift heavier weights to keep getting stronger. The numbers are constantly growing and growing, like Milo of Croton , who carried a calf every day until he could carry a full-grown bull. Or are they?
While the basic idea is true—you’ll get stronger if you keep challenging yourself—that doesn’t mean you can always lift more weight than you did last time. So let’s look at some of the reasons and what to do instead.
Line win for beginners
If you can add 5 pounds to your squats every time you go to the gym, that’s not normal. Experienced lifters don’t gain weight like that—at least not for months on end—but beginners can.
Think of it like the honeymoon phase when your body is just starting to learn how to lift weights. This also happens when you return from a break. This also applies if you’ve made some progress but haven’t been training consistently. Some people refer to this phase as “beginner gain”, which has led to the myth that the clock is ticking from the first moment you touch the bar and you better take advantage. In truth, you get linear gains (the ability to put on weight every time or every week) simply because you are relatively weak.
So it’s not about if you can ever put on weight, it’s about when … After a few months of consistent training – maybe more, maybe less, it could be different – the day will come when you get to the gym and can’t lift five pounds more than last time.
Fatigue masks profit
The stimulus you get from exercising makes you stronger in the long run and makes you more fatigued in the short term. Combine multiple workouts and over time you will get stronger and stronger, but you will always be a little tired.
That’s not bad, and you don’t have to worry about whether you’re “recovered” enough to head to the gym. If you waited for full recovery between workouts, you would never make progress.
But you must know that fatigue can hide your true strength. If you want to perform at your best on a particular day—for example, if you’re planning to compete in a powerlifting competition—you’ll strategically plan your workouts to take some time off before the big day.
As a result, it’s okay not to be at your peak performance every day in the gym. If you did 10 pull-ups once, but most of the time you do a set of eight, that’s fine . You’re still capable of doing 10+ a day when you’re fresh, but a typical training day is just not the day .
Other stressors also affect this. If you haven’t been getting enough sleep, haven’t been eating well, you’re having period cramps, you might have caught a cold, and you’ve had a lousy day at work, you probably won’t succeed. PR today no matter how you trained. It’s all right. Nobody is under constant stress.
Focus on what you do, not how you work
Training days are dedicated to work, so as long as you come in and do something hard, you are making progress whether the weights are going up or not.
However, it must be the right job. If you’re using the same weight all the time and it’s not difficult, you’re not lifting heavy enough to make progress. Just put your 5kg dumbbell on the rack and use a 10lb one instead. But if you’ve tried heavier weights and are sure you can’t add more, here are a few approaches worth trying:
Less frequent increase
Even if you can gain weight fairly regularly, that doesn’t mean you can always lift every workout. If you are lifting 10-pound dumbbells, switching to 15-pound dumbbells will be a huge power jump – 50 percent! So stick with the 10s for a while longer.
Microdiscs are often recommended for barbell lifting. If you can’t add 5 or 10 pounds to the bar, you can use light weights to add 2 pounds. But weight gain is not the driving force behind your progress, so these are really optional exercises. Instead of lifting 65 pounds, then 67.5, then 70, you can just lift 65 pounds for two weeks in a row before jumping up to 70.
Submaximal training
This is where a good program comes in handy. Instead of going to the gym every day with the intention of lifting as much as possible, you just do what your program says. It may not be top notch every time, and that’s by design. You can achieve tremendous results by doing most of your workouts, say, at the 8 out of 10 level. You will also probably enjoy your workouts more and not feel overwhelmed after them.
More volume
Many beginner programs are minimalistic, just a few sets of a few exercises and you’re done. This works well for the beginner profit phase, but for future results it really helps to get more work done. Instead of three sets of five reps, why not six? Why not 10 reps? Remember, if they’re submaximal ( don’t take each set to failure), your body will be able to handle it without getting too tired.
Various exercises
It’s okay to have favorite exercises, and if you’re training for a competition, you’ll need to keep them in rotation. But a wider range of exercises can help you become a more versatile athlete. If you bench press a lot, why not add an overhead press? If you do a lot of dumbbell rows, have you thought about barbell or cable rows? Different exercises involve different muscles, and variety is good for the brain.
As a bonus, when you start working on a new exercise, you’ll get a bit of that “beginner’s” fast track, simply because your body and brain haven’t mastered the new exercise yet.
Patience
I know this is the hardest part! But once you’re past the beginner stage, progress becomes less predictable. You may not make any progress for a while, and then suddenly break a bunch of personal records.
This is where periodic programming really helps. You will spend a block of training (several weeks or months) with a specific goal, and then switch to another job. If you’re competitive, your training can be general for a while while you’re building your base, and then more specific as you reach your competitive peak.
If you’re just training for fun and health, you can still use this approach. You can spend time on a block of workouts designed to build muscle and general fitness, and then complete a block that allows you to do more intense work with more opportunities to test yourself and see what you’ve done. Part of the patience comes when you realize that you can’t test your one-rep max often—if at all—during this basic phase.
This does not mean that you do not have any indicators of progress. You’ll be setting rep PRs (say, the maximum weight you’ve ever done at 10 reps) or you may find yourself learning better technique or improving your fitness so you can rest less between sets. These are all signs that you are getting stronger and more enduring, even if you don’t increase the weight on the bar all the time.