Why Has Your Progress Stalled

So you started hitting the gym. You start going consistently. You start making progress and begin to see some changes. And then all of a sudden… They Stop!

As frustrating as they are unfortunately plateaus in performance and rate of visual change are completely normal and happen to everyone at some point in time. Some people manage to break through the plateau however for others it becomes an unbreakable wall, which they ultimately succumb to.

It would be easy for me to sit here and analyse why many people succumb when a plateau in performance hits but instead I am going to highlight the factors which helped me when I hit a performance plateau earlier this year.

It was Mid-June, I was 11 months into my ‘bulking’ phase, which after a mini-cut (for 2 weeks) prior to a holiday in May I was quite happy with the way things had gone. I was clearly more muscular in appearance and stronger in terms of performance than when I had started the mass-bulking phase in the previous July. That however, was only half the story.

Although, aesthetically I looked the best I ever had my performance had plateaued in terms of my lifts. For 3 months consecutively I’d failed to make any progress in terms of the weight lifted during sessions and relied on a steady reduction in body fat due to slowly increasing cardio to produce any kind of progressive overload.

Some of you will have spotted a fundamental mistake here already which I’ve been super guilty of for pretty much my whole training career; trying to do too many things at once. Why increase cardio when trying to add mass I hear you ask? Purely and simply due to vanity reasons!

I was terrified of not being able to see my abs and this is a massive problem that men and women the world over make when trying to increase mass, they see their abs disappear or a little bit of a belly start to appear and they freak out because not having abs means your not fit, right? Wrong. Its natural that when you are trying to add mass that you are going to amass some bodyfat as you are eating in a calorie surplus (more calories than your body burns).

As you may of noticed from my previous blog posts I’m a massive believer in planning your workouts at the start of the phase, write them down at the beginning of the week, and then taking your gym log with you to the gym writing down your lifts as you go. This way you can cycle your workouts so your body gets adequate rest and recovery and it means you don’t have a temptation to make it up as you go along or to give yourself unnecessarily easy or difficult sessions. However, my second problem was that I knew my workouts too well!

I’d been doing the same 5-day single body-part 3-week cycle for the whole 11 months. I wasn’t nervous or excited before sessions anymore because I knew them off by heart. I knew which exercises burned and which didn’t really ‘hit the spot’. No wonder my lifts had stopped increasing, even my muscles were bored (physically impossible but you get the gist).

I took the radical step of adopting a less is more strategy by which I’d train the muscles less in a single session but more frequently. I achieved this by training multiple muscle groups together, which meant I could hit every muscle-group twice per week instead of the once I was previously hitting them.

In addition to this I ensured that my new training programme focused on the big compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench press, shoulder press and pull ups. The reason for this is because compounds are effectively the kings of weight training as they recruit multiple muscle groups to complete an exercise unless isolation exercises which simply isolate a particular muscle.

Prior to changing my programme up I also became overly obsessed about the weight being lifted and forgot about my technique. This is so prevalent in just about every gym I’ve ever been in and is purely egotistical. Everyone thinks that they’re not a culprit of this however the vast majority are. I certainly was and only realized when in a podcast a top online coach said ‘if you’re incline curling more than 7.5kg dumbbells then you’re doing it wrong’.

That comment really hit home with me about my technique as that morning I’d been training arms and had been incline curling 12.5kg dumbbells thinking I was doing them properly but upon reflection I was swinging them like crazy in order to get them up. This mistake was easily remedied, I simply put a reminder in my phone for 6am every morning (which is the time I arrive at the gym) saying “Leave your ego in the car!” and focused on controlling the weight especially in the eccentric part of the lifts.

Then there was my food situation. I’d been eating out a lot. That for most people means a massive calorie surplus however not for me. I am religious about tracking my calories (via MyFitnessPal) but unfortunately not many restaurants have a full calorie breakdown available so I was having to guestimate.

Guestimating is absolutely fine as long as you are sensible and realistic with your guesses, I wasn’t. I would massively over estimate the amount of calories in a meal and would therefore create a calorie deficit for the day, which is not ideal when looking to add mass.

I was also getting my calories in at the wrong time. I like training in the morning, it gets me revved up for the day and typically I’d train fasted (without eating anything beforehand). Training fasted is absolutely fine and I started doing it because having a big meal before training I found made me sluggish. Training fasted however gave me a different issue, come the second half of a session I was a spent force and my strength would reduce rapidly as a result.

In the evening after dinner I will always use up my remaining calories, which is usually about 400 on ‘junk’ such as ice cream, cereal and chocolate because that’s my treat for the day. All of these indulgences are about 250 calories each and it got me thinking ‘wouldn’t I be better placed having a water-based protein shake first thing in the morning pre-training at about 150 calories as it would help me power through my sessions and I would still have enough calories left at the end of the day to have my chocolate or ice cream?’, so that’s what I started doing and I’ve found it helps massively later in sessions and it doesn’t sit too heavily either.

Takeaway Points:

-       Keep it simple, bulk or cut, both simply doesn’t work

-       Don’t be afraid to get a little bit fat

-       Plan/log your workouts but change them up so soon as a plateau hits

-       Focus on your compounds

-       Form is the king when it comes to progress

-       Be realistic when ‘guestimating’ calories

-       Eat at times when you enjoy and allows your to maximize the calories