8 Ways to Break a Weight Training Plateau

Hit a Plateau with Your Weight Training or Resistance Exercise Routine? Use These Proven Techniques to Jump-Start Your Training and Get Back On Track.

Training plateaus are inevitable.

Anyone who has been exercising or weight-lifting for an extended period of time will eventually hit one. It’s never an issue of will I plateau, but when.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual gym goer, a highly-conditioned athlete, an amateur body builder or a professional fitness model. You will hit a plateau eventually if you are exercising and training on any kind of regular basis.

Training plateaus can be particularly frustrating because they will typically occurr when you feel the strongest or following a period of rapid progress. So psychologically, they can be demotivating because they take the shine off from all of that progress you’ve made over the previous weeks or months. You’ll feel like you are spinning your wheels and going no-where fast, and it can make working out less rewarding.

The good news is that there are a number of proven techniques that you can use to break through a weight training plateau.

In some cases, you’ll be able to break your plateau fairly easily with just one or two of these techniques.

In other cases, especially if you’ve been training for for several years and are already in a very good physical condition, you may have to try multiple approaches or some of the more advanced techniques.

Why Training Plateaus Happen

Training plateaus occur because the human body is constantly adapting to the stress we place on it.

The body’s natural inclination is to keep things nice and balanced (known as homeostasis.) It doesn’t really like change, and when you try to create change, it responds by trying to make those unusual circumstances (like lifting more weight than you normally do) the norm. It does this by rebuilding the muscle so that there is nothing extra-ordinary about moving that amount of weight in the future.

The way you increase musular strength, endurance or muscle size is by continually and progressively overloading your muscles, so that in their effort to adapt, they grow and become stronger.  However, the body is pretty smart, and at some point starts to put the brakes on things.

Humans also have some inherent genetic limitations on how strong they can become or how much muscle mass they can put on — so the closer you get to “peak performance” the slower your progress becomes. This is why beginning weight lifters or exercisers often make a lot of rapid progress, while individuals who have been training for years find that their gains come much slower. In fact, the more conditioned you are, the more frequently you’ll hit training plateaus.

Eight Ways To Break A Training Plateau

Breaking a training plateau always involves change. Most plateaus happen because you’ve simply been doing the same thing in the gym over-and-over again for too long. You assume that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow.

There are eight things you can try when you think you’ve hit a plateau. There are a number of other plateau-breakers out there as well, but I’m going to on these eight for now.

It’s best to do them in order — advancing to the next tactic only if you’ve found that the previous one didn’t work. The final three tactics are more advanced, and will generally be most effective for more highly-conditioned or experienced lifters.

Training Plateau Buster #1: Use an Exercise Log

If you think you’ve hit a plateau, but aren’t tracking all of your performance in the gym (exercises, weight used, reps and sets) using an exercise log, then the first change you need to make is to start writing things down.

Because you’ve been tracking everything in your head, you may have a distorted perception of your progress. It could be that you’ve plateau-ed because you simply haven’t been progressively challenging yourself each workout. And how could you know if you aren’t recording it?

Start a log today and track your actual performance going forward. Each workout try to best your last lift in some way: either by using slightly more weight, another rep or an additional set. If you still can’t increase your strength or endurance after 2-3 weeks, then go on to the next tactic (but keep tracking things going forward.)

Training Plateau Buster #2: Check Your Diet and Mind-Body Factors

Things like diet and sleep can have a huge impact on your overall health, fitness and training progress. Take a close look at your calories, the types of foods your are eating and sleep.

For instance, if your goal is to add more lean mass, but you aren’t eating a slight surplus of calories each day, you are going to have problems. Additionally, low-energy levels could be negatively impacting your ability to perform up to your potential in the gym. So if you aren’t getting enough sleep, or not eating enough food (or the right combination of complex carbs, healthy fats and protein), this can stall your progress.

Keep track of your food and sleep using one of the free online Apps like Cronometer, MyFitnessPal or Lifesum Food.  Lose It and WeightWatchers also have similar tracking tools.

Keep notes in your exercise log about how you feel during a workout and your relative energy levels and then compare the peaks and valleys against your food and sleep. Sometimes breaking a plateau is as easy as making some adjustments to your diet to give you more energy during your workout.

Training Plateau Buster #3: Take A Break

If you’ve truly hit a plateau and know it because you’ve after reviewing your exercise log and diet you can see that you’ve stalled in strength or endurance gains, then it’s time to give yourself a rest.

Yes, I’m actually recommending that you workout less, instead of more, to break a training plateau.

You can do this one of two ways:

1. Active Rest: Active rest is when you continue your exercise routine for a week, but lighten the resistance to between 30-50% of your One Rep Max (1RM). This will feel very light, and will probably allow you to do seemingly endless reps. That’s the point. The idea of active rest is to give your body a break, but to still remain active during that rest period. This high-rep, low-intensity workout keeps your usual workout patterns and habits intact, but allows a recovery period.
2. In-Active Rest: This means taking a break for seven days from any weight or resistance training, period. During this time you can continue to perform cardio if you like. Or you can just give yourself a break from all exercise for a week. Many people find that when they return to the gym the following week, they feel stronger and actually can lift more weight or perform more reps than before the rest.

If you are concerned about muscle atrophy or loss of strength or endurance during either active or in-active rest periods, don’t be. It takes longer than a week for muscle to begin to break down. Continue to eat healthy during your week off and don’t be surprised if you’re plateau has disappeared when you return to your normal workout routine.

Training Plateau Buster #4: Change Your Rep Ranges and Specificity

If you’ve checked your sleep, diet and given yourself a rest – but still are hitting a wall — the next thing to do is change some aspects of your existing workout routine — typically weight used and rep ranges.

Take a look at your workout log and see if you are consistently training within a given rep-band, and then change it.

For example, if your workout logs shows that most of your sets are in the 8-10 rep range, it’s time to change it up.  You can do that by either adjusting your resistance up to force you to train in a lower-rep band (4-6 reps) or decreasing your resistance and training in a higher-rep range (15-20 reps.)

In other-words, do the opposite of what you’ve been doing in terms of weight and reps.

If you lower your reps with more weight, you’ll be emphasizing muscular strength. If you increase reps and decrease load, you’ll be training for muscular endurance. Both of these tactics can help jump start your progress.

Many people find it useful to take their current workout and adjust it to emphasize high-rep endurance work for one week, and then switch to low-rep strength work the next week. At week three, return to your mid-range rep workout.

This is actually a tactic that you can employ on a regular basis to encourage better overall development, balance and conditioning, and head-off plateaus before they even happen.

Training Plateau Buster #5: Switch Routines

If you are still struggling with your progress, make a radical switch in your workout routine.

For example, if you’ve been following a 5-day split routine, consider switching to a full-body workout performed three times a week for 4-6 weeks. Likewise, if your already doing a full body routine, switch to a split for a month or two.

Switching routines will typically cause changes in the order of your exercise, reps/weight/sets and even your rest and recovery periods. All of these factors can have a dramatic impact on improving performance and breaking through a training wall.

Training Plateau Buster # 6: Change the Order of Your Exercises

Change up the order of your exercises within an existing routine and you may see an increase in strength, endurance and size.

For example, if you are always performing chest exercises before shoulders, your triceps may be pre-fatigued before your shoulder work. This can cause you to push less weight during shoulder exercises as your triceps become the limiting factor.

When you perform shoulder work first, your triceps are fresh and no longer your weakest-link. You’ll likely find that you can push more weight with your shoulders than in the past, which can help balance things out and jump-start growth.

This is especially important if you are performing a full body routine, since you will always be working all of your major muscle groups in a single workout.

Training Plateau Buster #7: Get Eccentric!

If you’ve gotten to this point, you are probably a fairly well-conditioned, experienced trainee. That means you may need to try some more advanced techniques for breaking a strength or endurance plateau.

One tactic that may be effective is to put more emphasis on eccentric contractions — in other-words, the portion of the exercise when you lower the weight.

The muscle is able to handle more load on the eccentric contraction than it can on the concentric, which allows you to move more weight than you may be used to. You can use this to your advantage to “shock” the muscle into developing more strength.

You may have heard this referred to as “negatives.” If you choose to try this technique, you’ll need to have a good spotter. Here’s how it works (we’ll use the bench press as an example):

1. Load a barbell with 10-15 percent more weight than you are accustomed to using.
2. With an attentive spotter covering you, lower the barbell slowly to your chest (this is the eccentric or negative portion of the contraction) and then have your spotter help you move the weight back up. This is a complete rep.
3. Continue to lower the weight yourself for additional resp, but use the spotter to help you push the weight back up each time.
4. Continue until feel like you are approaching failure on the negative rep and need the spotters assistance to even lower the bar.

If you play around with negative reps, expect to have a serious case of the DOMS the next day, since eccentric exercises tend to produce the most severe cases of delayed onset muscle soreness.

Because this is a shock technique, you also want to limit how often you use it. It’s not something you want to base your ongoing routine on, but performing them every now and then can be very effective at blasting through a strength plateau.

Training Plateau Buster #8: Try Drop Sets

Drop sets are another advanced technique you can use to try to jump-start your progress when you’ve hit a plateau.

Drop sets involve performing a set of repetitions at your normal weight and rep range for a given exercise until fatigue sets in, reducing the weight and continuing to perform the exercise with reduced poundage until fatigued, dropping the weight again and continuing for additional back-to-back sets.

Drop sets are a high intensity form of weight training that encourage increases in muscle size by more deeply fatiguing muscle fibers.

Drop sets can also increase muscle endurance, which may eventually enable you to push out more reps at your normal training weight. Drop sets can be performed on machines or with free weights (you’ll typically want a spotter available to quickly strip off plates on things like squats or bench presses.)

Change Things Up To Discourage Training Plateaus

The one thing that almost all of the tactics above have in common is that they require change. Change in exercises, repetitions, or methods for challenging the muscle.

Remember, training plateaus are your body’s way of adapting to the work you make it perform.  One of the best ways to discourage tough training plateaus from developing in the first place is to change up your workout regularly — typically every 8-10 weeks.  This can simply be minor tweaks to your existing workout like varying rep ranges, or it can be ditching your current workout altogether and trying something new.

Plus, changing your approach to exercise will keep things exciting and can stave off boredom, which is one of the most serious challenges to continual progress.