สุขสันต์วันจันทร์! 🇹🇭 ( Happy Monday! ) 

Hello From Thailand! 

I have something to level up your fitness game today! 

Hitting a plateau is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the fitness world. Many people see it as an invisible wall that halts their progress, requiring dramatic intervention. For example, when we can no longer add 5 pounds to the bar during a bench press, we panic and start searching online for solutions.

I'm here to tell you that many who think they have "hit a plateau" actually haven't. It takes much more thorough analysis than you might expect to classify yourself as truly hitting a plateau.

Google may define a plateau as when a lifter "feels" they are not making progress, but as an evidence-based coach, I'm not interested in "feelings" when quantifying progress. We should look for objective measurements of progress stalling by analyzing multiple dimensions of our lifestyle and fitness routine.

Let's clarify what a fitness plateau really is. A fitness plateau occurs when, despite analyzing and consistently optimizing all fundamental contributors to progress, you experience at least 4 WEEKS of being completely unable to set any personal records (PRs) in terms of weight, sets, or reps. This is the most objective sign of a true plateau recognized in exercise science.

So with this clear in our minds, 

Here Are 3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Go Defcon 1 On Your Training Program 

How Is My Recovery? 

This is the most important question to ask yourself, so I put it first. When I say recovery, I mean your sleep, nutrition, active rest, and stress management outside of the gym. If these things are not managed properly, it can lead to sometimes concerning levels of performance decline or stagnation. But the good news is that most of these things are measurable and simple to fix if they are out of whack.

Sleep messed up? Sleep more. Not eating right? Tighten it up, and make sure your macros, micros, and calories are consistent each week. Not getting enough active rest on off days? Walk more. Stressed out? Assess your priorities and act accordingly. All of these things are like the tightrope you balance yourself on each day to get to “Gainstown.” Before you analyze further, make sure all of these boxes are checked first.

Is My Training Program Affecting My Ability To Progress?

The first thing I'll briefly mention is that if you aren’t tracking your progress and think you’ve plateaued, you have no way to prove it. That's a subjective conclusion. Do you “think” or “feel” like you’ve plateaued? That doesn’t really mean anything or give you anything to work with. What gets measured gets managed. Spend 8-12 weeks following a linear progression strength program consistently after optimizing your recovery routine, and track your progress before you even think about anything else training-related.

Assuming everything’s been tracked up to this point, consider your training frequency and intensity. Training too much or too little can impact your ability to consistently progress. Train too frequently and too hard, and you risk not allowing your body adequate time to let muscles heal and let the nervous system recharge. Train too little and too soft, and you might not be stressing your body enough to force it to adapt to a higher level of performance.

A simple way to gauge this is if you’re feeling sore and tired from the previous workout during every workout or many workouts each week, you’re probably training too much for your current fitness level. On the other hand, if you look at yourself in the mirror, look into the windows of your soul, and ask, “Am I training hard enough?” “Have I been skipping workouts?” or “Could I be lifting more than I am now?” If your answer is an honest “yes,” then you probably could turn up the frequency and intensity of your workouts.

Finally, consider your exercise selection. If you’re trying to progress the Big 3 for example (squat, bench, deadlift), anything that is not supporting those lifts shouldn’t be in your program. I’m not saying don’t do anything else outside of the gym, but when you are in the gym lifting weights, your lifts should support your goals.

Your body does not have infinite resources, so spending them productively on appropriate lifts is the definition of working smarter, not harder. As Jim Wendler puts it, “Try to have a great workout on your first couple of exercises and a good workout on your accessory work.” Most of your energy for the workout, if you’re training hard enough, will be spent on the first two exercises, so choose them wisely. Doing tons of exercises for exercise's sake is how people get gassed out, beat up, and think they’ve “plateaued.”

Am I Just Being Anxious & Impatient? 

It’s really easy to assume your workout program is trash and that you need to switch up everything because you had a bad day or week in the gym. I am no exception to this. Having bad weeks plus ADHD in the gym has caused me to take sharp left turns in my program many times, switch up everything, and then face the same problem again later when things don’t go as planned. The truth is that the human body is not a machine. Its ability to perform is affected by many different elements, most of them being in our control like nutrition and sleep, but some not so much. 

Sometimes you can have everything dialed in and still have a crappy day, week, or even month in the gym. It just happens sometimes, and you have to take these moments as opportunities to look at the big picture, understanding that fitness is a process, not just a recurring event we engage in with complete predictability. One of the most challenging but fun things for me as a coach is managing the sheer unpredictability of my clients' bodies and mental health.

It’s important to remain flexible and roll with the punches. Often, we forget about the progress we’re making overall because we don’t receive the instant gratification of a PR when we expected it. At a certain point in your fitness journey, progress will slow down no matter what you do. But that doesn’t mean you’ve plateaued. It just means that progress is coming slower now. That’s normal, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Being patient and playing the long game with fitness is a big character builder. Sometimes it’s not about winning; it’s about continuing to play the game.

Conclusion

The next time you think you’ve plateaued, take the time to fully analyze yourself and your training before jumping to any conclusions. Don’t let your training be led by emotion more than logic. Being neurotic about your training only makes things worse. Give yourself grace when you need it and keep showing up. Remember that fitness is a part of your life; you are not fitness.

Use this perspective to detach and think clearly about your routine when you feel like you’re plateauing. 99% of the time when you can optimize these aforementioned objective factors of your training and lifestyle, you’ll realize that the “ plateau “ you thought you were facing was just a bad day and not anything to be worried about. 

If you feel like you’ve got all of these things in check and you still haven’t seen progress after 4 weeks of training, then you may be facing an actual plateau. I will address this in another newsletter in the future, so stay tuned.

Weekly Wisdom - "Thought is the fountain of action, life, and manifestation; make the fountain pure, and all will be pure." (James Allen, As a Man Thinketh)

Physical Fun Fact - You Shed 600,000 Particles of Skin Every Hour: Humans shed around 600,000 particles of skin every hour. By age 70, the average person will have lost about 105 pounds of skin.

Be exceptional this week💪,

Leon

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