Suddenly—you've hit a brick wall. Gains have slowed down, or even stopped entirely. So what do you do?
Novice gains stopped? Coach Kevin Don breaks down some ideas to implement when the dreaded plateau occurs.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hi, I'm Kevin Don, the Get-Fit Guy, and I'm here to share my accumulated decade of knowledge in the strength and conditioning industry with you to help you become the best version of yourself!
So you've been strength training now for several months and things have been going really well. You've seen huge gains in your squat, your deadlift, your bench press, and your standing overhead press. But suddenly—you've hit a brick wall. Gains have slowed down, or even stopped entirely. So what do you do?
If you've been following along from my previous episodes, until this point in time you will have been following a standard novice linear progression. What this means is you have performed the same exercises and you increased the difficulty slightly week on week.
You monitor your progress based upon your ability to keep improving. This will continue until you have picked all of the low-hanging fruit and will become a victim of the law of diminishing returns. At this point, you want to start looking at some variation in your training protocols and maybe adding a little bit more complexity or even volume.
I have talked before about seeing training like a medical intervention and typically there are two things that can go wrong: either the medication (training) is wrong or the dose of the medication is wrong.
So once we see a plateau, we have to determine whether or not the medication (training) was wrong, or the training dose was wrong. If the training has been working until this point, we can probably say that the training intervention was correct—it’s just that now we have begun to adapt and we need a bigger training dose in order to create what we call the correct dose response.
Now we can begin to look at doing different things with our training. To get started, we can look at some specialty programming techniques, such as:
What do these mean and how can we implement these into our training?
Pyramid training is a group of sets of identical exercises that begins with a lighter load and higher reps, working up to a heavier weight and fewer reps.
Full pyramid training is the extended version of this, where you decrease the weight after you have reached the peak. You work back down the reps and sets until you complete the pyramid. Up and back down.
So you may do a set of 8 at a lighter load, then 7, 6, and 5 reps all the way down to a single rep, increasing the load as you go. Then potentially work from 1 back down to 8 again.
Ladder sets were developed by strength coaches in the Soviet Union and were often used in the training of Eastern Bloc athletes. They’re a tested and proven method for getting big and strong fast and they’re not hard to do.
A traditional ladder set is a series of sets of ascending reps with a constant load. For example, you do one squat, rest, then two squats, rest, three squats, and so on until you hit a goal number for the workout. Climbing, shall we say, from 1 to 10 reps, is one ladder. The second ladder starts over at one rep and works back up to 10 reps, or 8, or 6, or whatever suits your time and energy.
The whole point is to end up doing more work on an exercise than you’d normally be capable of. Instead of maxing out every set and burning out quickly, you leave a little in your tank and, subsequently, you’re able to get more total reps. Greater volume means greater overload for your muscles, and ultimately greater size and mass gains.
Contrast training is where you use 2 exercises with the same pattern but one is more explosive.
You might perform a set of heavy squats, (typically in the range of five to ten reps), and then follow it immediately with an unloaded, explosive movement that mimics the same movement pattern as well as the same number of reps, such as jumping squats.
Another example could be performing a set of heavy barbells or a bench press followed immediately by plyometric push-ups. Or a heavy standing overhead press followed by kipping handstand push-ups.
Wave loading is a progressive rep and intensity scheme. The lifter performs a series of sets with increasingly more weight and less reps per wave, followed by 1-2 more waves, each starting slightly higher in weight and running through the same rep scheme.
An example of wave loading would be three total waves, so nine sets with the first wave being three reps at 80%, two reps at 82.5%, and one rep at 85%. The next wave would be three reps at 82.5%, two reps at 85%, and one rep at 87.5%. And the final wave would be three reps at 85%, two reps at 87.5%, and one rep at 90%. This usually only works with intermediate and advanced lifters who know their one rep max, although you could wave load without this information but simply go heavier each set and wave.
So there you have it, a few ideas of new variations of set types to try out once linear progression has stopped working.