Training plateaus are going to happen the longer you have been training for. That’s the joy of newbie gains - in that season, which can last years, you are able to make noticeable adaptations on a monthly if not weekly basis.
And when that time ends, you have likely hit a training plateau. Meaning that you are unable to increase load lifted for a given amount of reps. Or you’re unable to increase volume at a given load. Basically nothing new is happening, and it feels like you aren’t making progress. Thus, a plateau.
Luckily training plateaus are part of the process, and not the end of the world.
If you haven’t taken a deload week, that is my first suggestion before getting fancy with anything, or adding more training stimulus to yourself. If you are not making gains with your current programming and you are pushing yourself, I assume deload would be the way to go.
Doing a deload allows the body and mind time to recover from training that has happened over the past weeks and months. Not only your muscular system, but also your central nervous system. During a deload week it’s not that you do nothing, but lower the volume and intensity of the work that you’ve been doing. These workouts should not be taxing. The point is to keep yourself moving, but not going away the taxes the body or requires adaptation. Which is what we want from our normal training, right? We are applying different stimuli to the body in order to require an adaptation that builds muscle or results in better movement patterns, better mobility, higher work capacity etc. etc.
So rather than adding anything, my first suggestion is always a deload week. Do less to hopefully be able to do more.
If you have done a deload week and or have been implementing deload weeks and you are still hitting a training plateau, then you have a few other options.
Play with tempo, variation, and range of motion. These are in contrast to playing with things like volume. Which we will discuss later.
When playing with tempo, you will likely have to lower the load whether you are making the tempo faster and working on power and velocity, or slowing it down and increasing overall time under tension. Both of these scenarios require a lighter load for maximum power output and development, or obviously increasing that time under tension.
I also want to go back to the idea that less is more.
So while I might play with a variable like tempo, I am not necessarily increasing or decreasing tempo on every single lift within a work out and therefore a training phase. I may just play with tempo on one or two exercises per day to give the body a new stimulus.
Variation in range of motion kind of go hand-in-hand. So sometimes if a client is plateauing on say a dead lift or a sumo deadlifts, I might implement sumo deadlifts from a deficit on their sumo deadlifts today, and maybe rack pulls or pin pulls from a limited range of motion on conventional deadlift day. The deficit on sumo day pushes the range of motion, and it also gets after that posterior hip capsule. The pin pulls on conventional dead lift day allow the client to pull a higher load, but for a lower range of motion. Therefore giving a new stimulus to the muscles.
And I might not change much with the accessory work. Because that single change in the main lift might be enough to push them through the plateau. Range of motion is a very very powerful variable of training that I don’t think people play with often enough. Different muscle fibers are recruited within different ranges of motion. Therefore we can possibly push past a plateau by recruiting more muscle fibers in a given area than we normally would. That’s the magic of science, and honestly, simplicity.
If a client is having a training plateau with a specific movement, I would look at their weakest point of the movement and use pauses or isometrics to work past that sticking point. That could be on some thing as simple as a pull up.
