Breaking Past Your Plateau 101

Everyone reading this will undoubtedly go - if they hadn’t already - through a plateau. What’s a plateau, you ask? Simply when you hit a period of time where you current exercise/nutrition routine just stopped producing the effects it used to deliver at the beginning. You’re not losing weight, you’re not gaining muscle, you’re not dropping fat and you’re flat out about to lose it.

As time goes by, you’ll find that plateaus are a natural part of your fitness journey. They’re merely an indicator that it’s time to switch things up. The human body is exceptionally adept at getting used to physical stimulus, so you always want to keep things hot and spicy. Don’t treat your body like you treat your significant other. You deserve better. The thing is about plateaus is that they will only get significantly tougher with time as you continue to make your routines more challenging in order to break out of the previous plateau. This post will discuss training methods exclusively in terms of dealing with plateaus as dedicating a single post to both exercise and nutrition on this subject would mean I quit my day job and dedicate myself full time to writing this crap. I am going to assume you’re in charge of your nutrition and know how to tweak it in order to complement your current fitness regimen and goals.

All of this can seem rather daunting, but it’s really a matter of efficient mixing and switching. It’s about changing up all the different variables in your training and nutrition, the different training methods to employ and surpassing one’s genetic limitations.

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Let’s start with a simple matter of prioritization.

We all have different muscle groups which respond differently to exercise. Some people have chests that seem to build themselves, legs that barely need a workout to look like plump oak tree stumps, and at the same time, their triceps seem unresponsive or just able to keep up. I for one am blessed with trapezius muscles that seem to be on a self-sustaining growth spur without the need of any direct stimuli while my forearms are dead set on never changing. Despite your best efforts, sometimes those smaller muscle groups just aren’t playing ball, and that’s when prioritizing muscle groups comes in handy.

First of, you need to identify which muscles or muscle groups are lagging behind. This will help you with the planning of your entire week/workouts. You can dedicate the beginning of your week after you’ve become well rested to those lagging muscles to make sure you hit them with all you’ve got. You can also target the weaker muscles at the beginning of your exercise if you’re training different muscle groups on the same day. At the same time, you can also start progressively increasing the workload on those lagging muscles while reducing or maintaining the workload on your other superior muscle groups in order to prompt more growth in the lagging parts. I realize about 10 guys reading this just shat out their pre-workouts as they read the word “reducing” but I can assure you that despite how much of a step back that may seem, maintenance of muscles is much easier than building them in the first place!

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Another issue seems to be that most people perform their workouts in the 8 - 12 reps range. While that’s all good and dandy, your body can become too used to this set up to influence any drastic changes. I hereby bring you…...the pyramid sets!

The beauty of pyramid sets is an amazing mixture of low, mid and high-repetition training which will leave your muscles in tears - and primed for growth! You can employ pyramid sets with virtually any kind of workout that requires resistance. There are three kinds of pyramid sets which one can incorporate into their workout routine to invigorate their training and push their body to new and uncharted limits to break out of that plateau.

The ascending pyramid set for instance relies on the premise of you increasing the weight with each set. Suppose you’re performing four sets of barbell chest presses or squats. On the initial set, you’ll dish it out using a weight that will enable you to hit 16 repetitions. On the second set, you’ll add more weight but only aim to dish out 12 repetitions this time around. By the third set your weight should progressively increase and aim for 8 repetitions and by your last and fourth set, you should be lifting at your maximal capacity and aiming to hit 4 repetitions - at full functional range and perfect form of course! Conversely, the descending pyramid set works the other way around with you starting out with the heaviest weight and lesser reps and working your way down from there. The third type is the full pyramid which is mostly restricted to more seasoned veterans or experienced bodybuilders and this one sees an average 6 - 10 sets per exercise with a split that’ll look something like 16-12-8-4-8-12-16 in terms of repetitions with weights changing as your reps change.

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Another trick in the book is using one’s near-maximal workloads when lifting weights. What does that mumbo jumbo mean? Basically that you should lift way heavier than you normally would, and that the weight should be challenging enough that your maximum reps - ensuring perfect form - could not surpass 2 to 5 repetitions. The majority of your muscles are composed of fast twitch muscle fibers which I’ve written about before. These fibers react best and are most recruited with heavy loads. That doesn’t mean that your other muscle fiber types are neglected with these lifts, on the contrary, they are most definitely involved, but since the majority of your muscles are made of the earlier type and you’re aiming for speedy growth, heavy lifts can definitely be a big game changer for you. Obviously this isn’t something you should do day in day out every day for weeks but rather something to incorporate for lagging muscles every now and then to break through the plateau.

And finally, let us not forget everyone’s favorite pastime event - cardiovascular training. 90% of us probably perform the usual run for 30-60 minutes on the treadmill or use the stationary bike using the same speed/resistance for the entire period of time. While this is all fun and dandy, it can become quite tedious and in fact counterproductive if carried on for a long enough period of time. The above constitutes as LISS cardio. Low Intensity Steady State cardio or LISS for short, labors under a simple premise; steadiness. Basically, to get a specific rate going and hold on to it for prolonged periods of time. Example: Perform 5-minutes of brisk walking to get your muscles warmed up and ready for what’s to come. Then, finding a suitable jogging speed (usually between 6-9 km/hr for most people) maintain this for a period of 30-45 minutes followed by 5 minutes of brisk walking for cool down.

What you need to be bringing to the table is some HIIT or High Intensity Interval Training if you like longer conversations at your local gym. HIIT focuses on something else entirely; intervals. After a nice 5-minute warm up brisk walk to get your muscles ready for what’s to come, alternate walking/sprinting speeds in set periods of time. Example: Sprint for 30-60 seconds followed by 2 minutes of brisk walking/jogging and repeat these intervals for 15-20 minutes followed by 5 minutes of brisk walking for cool down. You can apply that same basic premise to virtually any cardio activity, be it running, cycling, swimming, rowing the EFX machine, the treadmill, stair-master or otherwise. HIIT can even be applied to weight lifting where you dish out a set of 10-12 reps followed by 20-30 seconds on the stationary bike. The weight lifting bit is technically the slower interval here so you get the basic gist of it.

“Breaking your plateau can also mean that you’re getting closer to taking more instagram selfies with significantly lesser clothes”

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HIIT has the benefit of triggering a hormonal response which sheds body fat as well as adds on muscle. It’s preferable not to perform HIIT exercises more than three times a week (and always AFTER your weight lifting routine) with rest days in between as it has an impact on your muscles. You should avoid performing HIIT workouts on an empty stomach as it depletes your carbohydrates stores rather quickly.

Rest assured, plateaus are a very natural part of the fitness life. Your body will get used to what you do. You have to continuously give it something new, keep it guessing and challenge it and set new limits. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, nothing will change.

There you have it folks, some tips and tricks and classic lifehacks which can trigger your body into breaking out of a fitness plateau. Worst case scenario, you’re stuck in a plateau, nothing is working for you, rob a bank, get plastic surgery, bang a stranger, become an alcoholic, develop a festering ecosystem of yet to be discovered STDs in your genitals, become a scientific success story, die a happy yet unapproachable celebrity figure.