Breaking through: What do you do when you hit a plateau?

Filed Under Exercise

I was reviewing my workout routine last night, going over the various exercises I do and the weights / reps involved. I noticed that there were a few areas where I had not been improving in a while. Usually, I can see an improvement in an area at least once every two months or so. It could be going up in weight or in number of reps, but there’s always something there that shows me I’m getting better. These exercises though were stagnant. The weight wasn’t going up, the reps were staying the same and I knew from the last time I performed them that they weren’t getting any easier. In fact, I had reached a plateau and couldn’t find a way to break through.

What is a plateau?

A plateau is a term that describes a type of geographical feature. It’s a large flat area on top of a hill or mountain range. In terms of performance, a plateau is a period in which you are not improving. It’s preceded by a period of constant improvement. Just like the flat area on top of the mountain, a performance plateau is a flat area on top of your performance graph. You had previously been improving, but now you’re just staying the same.

How do you spot a plateau?

It’s hard to tell when you’ve plateaued. When you first start exercising, the improvement can be dramatic from week to week. Later on though, the improvements are slower. So it’s hard to say if you’re still slowly improving, or if you’re at a standstill. For me, it’s part science and part gut feeling. The science part comes from looking at my workout spreadsheet and seeing an area where I haven’t seen any improvements in over three months. The gut feeling part is just knowing that things are not getting easier. I’m not getting better at something, despite my attempts to increase my performance.

Is a plateau a bad thing?

Not necessarily. There are some cases where the performance you’re at is fine either because further improvement is unnecessary or unreasonable. You don’t have to always strive for improvement if you’ve reached a place where your performance is satisfactory for your goals. For example, if you’re looking to tone up and be healthy, there’s probably no reason to bench press hundreds of lbs. It may look impressive at the gym, but the increased health benefit is minimal and the increased injury risk is significant. Another example might be cardio. If you’re just looking to burn some calories and get your body moving, then why push yourself to near collapse on the treadmill? There’s no point in it since you’re already achieving your goals with a milder workout.

Increased performance may also be unreasonable. For example, I currently run at 6.5mph. I would like to slowly improve that to 7.0mph. However, I know that anything past 7.0mph is probably unreasonable. It would place too much strain on my body and there’s just no way I could maintain that for a long period of time.

Breaking through

However, there will be other times when you want to break through the plateau, when you want to start improving again but are not sure how. Here are some options for you to consider:

Change things up - It’s quite possible that what you’re trying to do is just not right for you. For example, I tried out a form of overhead triceps extension for a while and was not seeing any improvement. It wasn’t strength that was lacking, it was more of a pain in the rear of my shoulder. Rather than beat myself up over lack of improvement, I simply changed to another form of triceps exercise and began seeing steady improvement. Remember, there are no “required” exercises. Your goal is not to improve at a specific exercise, it is to work out a specific part of your body. There are quite literally dozens of exercises for every possible part of your body. So find the ones you enjoy and work at them and don’t be afraid to change things up.
Overload - This is not recommended for beginners but I’ve found it to be effective. When you’re unable to increase your performance by a little bit, try increasing it by a lot. For example, I was stuck at 6.0mph for a long time. I just couldn’t run any faster. I tried increasing to 6.1mph and couldn’t keep up. So one day I got on the treadmill, set it for 7.0mph and ran for as long as I could. I lasted barely 10 minutes, but the next time I ran, I could easily do 6.1mph for the whole 30 minutes. By comparison to that 7mph run, 6.1 seemed easy. That can easily apply to weight training too. If you can’t increase the weight you’re pushing by 10, then try 30. It will make the 10lb improvement seem easy next time you try it.
Two steps forward, one step back - This is another technique. Every exercise involves multiple aspects. So if you want to improve one aspect but keep failing, how about decreasing another aspect? For example, let’s say I’m trying to increase the amount of weight I bench press. I usually do 4 sets of 10 reps with around 140lbs but I’ve been stuck at that weight for a while now and am unable to improve. Instead of trying to move up to 4 sets of 10 reps with 150lbs, how about I try 4 sets of 5 reps with 150lbs? I raised the weight but I lowered the reps. Now that I’m pressing 150lbs, I can slowly try to increase my number of reps back up to 10.

Summary

We all hit performance plateaus at some point. The question is, what do we do about them? Do we accept them or do we try to breakthrough?

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