What to Do When You Hit Your Weight-Lifting Plateau
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Loading... - Angela Auge
- 22 Jul 2022
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If you lift heavy weights, you’ll get stronger. That’s the principle of progressive overload in a nutshell. As you get stronger, you need to lift heavier weights to keep getting stronger. The numbers go up and up forever, like Milo of Croton carrying a calf every day until he was able to carry a full-grown bull. Or do they?
While the basic idea is true—you’ll get stronger if you keep challenging yourself—this doesn’t mean that you’ll always be able to lift more weight than last time. So let’s look at some of the reasons why, and what to do instead.
Linear gains are for beginners
If you can add 5 pounds to your squat every time you hit the gym, that’s not normal. Experienced lifters don’t pile on the pounds like that—not for months on end, anyway—but beginners can.
Think of it as a honeymoon phase that occurs when your body first starts learning to lift weights. It also happens when you come back from a break. It also applies if you’ve made a little bit of progress but haven’t been training consistently. Some people call this phase “newbie gains,” which has led to a myth that a clock is ticking from the first moment you touch a barbell and you better take advantage. In truth, you get linear gains (being able to add weight every time or every week) simply because you are relatively weak.
So it’s not a matter of if you’ll someday be unable to add more weight, but when. After a few months of consistent training—maybe more, maybe less, it varies—there will come a day when you walk into the gym and can’t lift five pounds more than last time.
Fatigue masks gains
The stimulus you get from a workout has a long-term effect of making you stronger, and a short-term effect of making you more fatigued. Stack a bunch of workouts together, and you’ll end up getting stronger and stronger over time, but you’ll always be just a little bit fatigued.
This isn’t a bad thing, and you don’t have to worry about whether you’re “recovered” enough to hit the gym. If you waited to fully recover between workouts, you’d never make progress.
But you do need to be aware that it’s normal for fatigue to hide your true strength. If you want to perform your best on a specific day—like if you plan to compete at a powerlifting meet—you’ll strategically time your workouts so that you get some rest before the big day.
As a result, it’s normal to not be at peak performance every day in the gym. If you did 10 pullups once, but most days you top out at a set of eight, that’s normal. You’re still capable of doing 10+ on a day that you’re fresh, but a normal training day is simply not that day.
Other stressors also affect this. If you didn’t get enough sleep, haven’t been eating well, you’ve got period cramps, you might be coming down with a cold, and you had a crappy day at work, you probably aren’t going to hit a PR today no matter how you’ve been training. This is all normal. Nobody is stress-free all the time.
Focus on what you’re doing, not how you’re performing
Training days are about putting in the work, so as long as you show up and do something challenging, you are making progress whether the weights are going up or not.
It has to be the right kind of work, though. If you’re using the same weight all the time and it’s not challenging, you’re not lifting heavy enough to make gains. Just go put your 5-pound dumbbell on the rack and use the 10 instead. But if you’ve tried heavier weights and you’re sure that you can’t add more, here are some approaches to try:
Less frequent increases
Even if you’re able to add weight pretty regularly, that doesn’t mean you’ll always be able to go up every workout. If you’re lifting 10-pound dumbbells, upgrading to 15-pound dumbbells would be a huge jump in strength—50 percent! So stick with the 10's for a while longer.
For barbell lifts, micro plates are often recommended. If you can’t add five or 10 pounds to the bar, you could use little bitty weights to add two pounds. But the increase in weight isn’t what drives your progress, so these are truly optional. Instead of lifting 65 pounds, then 67.5, then 70, you could just lift 65 pounds two weeks in a row before jumping to 70. Read More...
