The Plateau

If you stick with athletics or fitness long enough, eventually you’ll plateau.  By that I mean you’ll see improvement until a certain point, and then suddenly you’ll level off.  You’ll keep doing the stuff that was going gangbusters for you and suddenly you’re not making the progress any longer.  Sometimes it can even be worse… you can start to regress!

Why does this happen?  The halting of improvement happens because your body loves you, which means that it hates the frequent exerciser.  In order to really be successful in changing your body you need to think about how it works from an evolutionary point of view.  The body responds to stimulus (exercise and diet) with a protective mechanism (adaptation).  What we’re trying to do is mess with that adaptation mechanism to create the body we want (big, small, lean, strong, fast, whatever).  Different ways of stimulating (loading the organism) will result in different adaptations.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t go on forever.  The body either successfully adapts to a stimulus, or can only adapt so much to a certain stimulus.  Let’s say you can bench press 200 lbs for three reps.  Your goal is a bigger chest.  Every week you try to bench press this same 200 pounds three times.  It’ll get easier for a bit, and your chest will probably grow.  Soon, the press is easy and your growth will stop.  Now try to complete four reps… success!  Your chest probably grew by a few shreds.  Repeat this process for a while and eventually you’ll be pressing it ten or 15 times and your chest will be bigger.

That’s great, but you’ll still stall.  Next you try to eat a little more, and you’ll see more growth.  You could try to add more weight, and probably further stimulate your chest.  This type of thing can go on for a long time and move you towards your goal.

Entire books are written on the study of these changes to avoid plateaus, called periodization.  I’ll get into it with some future articles, but primarily what I want to talk about today is how to handle plateaus in the short term.  Quite frankly, the answer is to change what you’re doing.  There are obviously methods to this, rather than simply a willy-nilly switch, that will bring more success than others.  At the heart of it all the answer is that if it’s not working, do something different.

This is another situation where keeping an accurate journal is important.  Not only can you get a good handle on what you’re doing, you can see what your past has been like.  I’ve noticed that I tend to be make more progress on my bench press when I’m doing direct triceps accessory work.  My education and other experience tells me that I shouldn’t need to be doing any direct triceps work, since I’m fairly triceps dominant.  They should, in theory, be somewhat ahead of the rest of my benching muscles and shouldn’t add to my overall bench press.  However, the journal and personal experience tells me that’s not the case.  When I get away from it my bench press starts to plateau.  I add tri work in, and my bench starts going up again.

So maybe your plateau isn’t your bench press.  Maybe it’s your 40 time, or your waist, or your body weight.  Well, the bottom line is that what you’re doing right now isn’t working anymore.  What’s something you can do to change it?

Stay tuned for some future articles on exactly what to do in order to change it, or consult a fitness professional.  Right now what I want you to do is examine what you’re currently doing and look at whether or not it’s working.  Find a pattern.