“How do you break a plateau?”
It is one of the questions Nita and I are asked all the time. It seems like a straight-forward question, but we usually reply with another question.
“Is it a plateau in strength or gaining muscle?”
That usually causes the questioner to pause for a moment and think.
A person who is working out with weights can get stronger without gaining muscle. But, if you are gaining muscle, you almost cannot help but get stronger.
The ability to move a certain amount of weight in the gym is made up of two components—muscle and myelin. Muscle is straight forward, but myelin is less understood.
Myelin tissue is the fatty sheath around nerves that conducts the electro-chemical signals that cause a muscle to flex. The more myelin tissue, the more powerful the signal. It is often mistakenly referred to as muscle memory. But muscles do not have memory. It is the nerves, that through repeatedly performing the movement, build up more myelin.
The more myelin, the more efficient the firing sequence of the muscles. This is why golfers and tennis players practice their swing and why power lifters and Olympic lifters practice their lifts.
But is your goal in life really to be able to bench press a certain amount of weight or to have a well rounded physique?
If it is to be able to bench press a certain amount of weight, practice bench pressing. If it is to develop a well rounded physique, do not worry about strength plateaus.
What Nita and I have found over the years is that there is not such thing as a plateau. What people think of as a plateau is actually a point of reduced returns. This point of reduced returns occurs when people continue to do the same program, their body adapts and they fail to constantly overload the muscle.
What builds muscle is overload over time. Doing more this week than you did last week, and then doing more next week than you did last week.
When people hit the reduced return point, it is often feels like a plateau in strength—you can’t increase the number of reps on bench press or increase the weight.
If your goal is a well rounded physique, then quit doing bench press, move on to another exercise that works those muscles.
This will give a fresh start on the overload over time, with greater returns on the effort. If you are not a competitive power lifter or obsessed with you much you can bench press, why spend energy and time on exercise that is yielding lower and lower returns?
When a person thinks they are not making progress in gaining muscle, Nita and I ask another question, “how do you know you are not gaining muscle?”
This is an important question. For people who have been training with weights for a year or more, the gains begin to slow down. For an advanced athlete like Nita, the gains in muscle may be as little as a millimeter or two a year. Those incremental gains cannot be detected in the mirror or with progress photos.
How do you track such minor gains? One could use a cloth tape measure to track the size of various body parts, but how does one control for subcutaneous bodyfat? If you are near a large research university, you could do a DXA scan combined with a hydrostatic (water tank) measurement of body fat. Or even combine it with a gas exchange measure.
But, for a simple, in-home measure, use the cloth tape measure and a set of body fat calipers.
The cloth tape will give you circumference of a body part like calves, quads, bicep. The calipers will give you the fat thickness.
You can then use those to measures to determine if any gain or loss in size is due to muscle or fat.
Nita and I use the mathematical constant of Pi (3.14) to determine what we call lean tissue diameter. Because the gains and losses are in millimeters, we measure things in millimeters. This also makes the math easier.
A few weeks ago, my right bicep was 435mm in circumference. The fat thickness on the top of my bicep was 1mm.
I divide the 435mm circumference by Pi 435/3.14= 135.5
I then subtract the millimeters of fat thickness from the gross diameter 135.5 – 1 = 134.5
For tracking purposes my lean tissue diameter is 134.5. If this number increases over the course of months, or a year, I am on the right track. If it is going down…well, I am doing something wrong.
If you are overloading your muscles over time, doing more this week than you did last week, doing more next week than you did this week, you will be making gains.
Those gains may be small, which is why they should be measured in millimeters.
But, when a person thinks they have reached a plateau in muscle gains, they rarely have reached their body’s genetic limit. Usually they have reached the limit that a particular workout plan yields quality returns.
In our experience, this happens most often when people do the exact same workout for months and years, when they do the exact same exercises for biceps and chest and back for months. Often they get to the point where the increase in reps and/or weight (strength) is so slow, it is barely discernable.
The best way to avoid what feels like a plateau is to never get in a rut with the same program.
In our book, Fit for Combat, we tell people that when they get to a point that they cannot increase the reps or weight on a given exercise, to quit doing that exercise.
If a person gets to a point that they cannot increase the weight or reps on flat barbell bench press, quit doing it. Move on to incline dumbbell presses. When you get to the point you “plateau” on that exercise, move on to flat dumbbell bench press. Then move on to smith machine incline, and eventually, a year or more later, you will be back on flat barbell bench press.
This system of changing up exercises after you reach the point of reduced returns produces a well rounded physique because over time, you eventually work every muscle, and every group of muscles, from every conceivable angle and direction.
People often make the mistake of radically changing their workout program, swinging wildly from low reps to high reps, or low volume to high volume when they encounter a point of reduced returns.
Or, they make the ultimate mistake in thinking they just need to do a lot more exercises and pile on a few more exercises.
The key to never reaching a plateau is to use measurements like lean tissue diameter, and tracking your overload over time in a workout log book to dial in workout that allows you make constant progress.
Muscle gains come from overload over time. The overload creates micro-trauma to the muscles. Micro-trauma are the itty-bitty tears that send the signal to the body to build more muscle.
The key to constant muscle gains is to find the workout that creates the amount of micro-trauma you can recover from before your next workout.
Over time, especially for people who are younger, their bodies will adapt and become fairly good at recovering from the micro-trauma, which means they can gradually add more work to inflict a little more micro-trauma.
But, as we age, the body’s ability to recover may also diminish, and the workout programs the yield the best results may inflict less micro trauma.
So, what is a plateau? It is actually the point where the micro-trauma the body can recover from is not enough to yield results, or too much to be recovered from.
When you think in terms of managing micro-trauma, you realize there is not plateau for your body, just a workout that is inflicting an incorrect level of micro-trauma.
There is no plateau for your body, just reduced returns from the workout program.
Rather than make wholesale changes in your workout, when you reach a point of reduced returns from exercise, ditch that exercise. Constantly increase the overload over time using a log book to hold yourself accountable to do more this week than you did last week. Use quantifiable measurements like lean tissue diameter to determine if you making millimeter gains over the course of months and years.
The key to breaking a plateau is to realize what a plateau really is. And then you will see, there is no plateau.
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