5 Strategies To Breakthrough A Weight Lifting Plateau
“When we make progress quickly, it feeds our emotions. Then, when there's a period of waiting or we hit a plateau, we find out how committed we really are and whether we're going to see things through to the finish or quit.”
-Joyce Meyer
If you train long enough, you're going to come to a point where you stop seeing progress in your muscle gain (hypertrophy), strength, or overall performance. You might be working harder with each rep and doing more workouts each week but you’re like a truck stuck in the mud. This is called a weight lifting plateau. It doesn’t matter how much you spin those tires, you ain’t goin’ anywhere without changing the strategy.
What is a Weight Lifting Plateau?
A training plateau happens when your body is flat-out used to what you’ve been teaching it to do within the resources you are giving it such as rest and calories. Through the process of hormesis, muscles become stressed under higher-than-usual demands and then the muscles adapt to that stress by becoming stronger. Through a progressive overload we are able to slowly build upon the hormetic response which results in increased strength and muscle However, if the demands imposed (volume, speed, power, etc.) are consistent over time then the biggest benefits will be felt and seen early on and then the adaptation will slowly stall with time. When you’re no longer making progress in your strength training workouts you've hit a weight lifting plateau.
Newbies tend to see results quickly since their set point of no stimuli is quickly altered when they lift up a weight whereas experienced lifters can take months to add the smallest amount of weight to their lifts.
How to Use Weight Lifting Plateau Busters
Most of these plateau-busting strategies require experience and a need for ingrained motor patterns in order to maintain technique as the muscle burn creeps up. In other words, these are not for beginners. The one exception is the recovery strategy which should be incorporated in every lifter’s programming. It's also important to note that these strategies should be used sparingly and not in all of even most of your sessions. There’s a reason they’re used to get you over that wall you keep banging into.
Once you’ve incorporated these into your sessions you'll notice grains after two or three weeks. But you don’t need to wait to hit a plateau in order to use them. Integrating them into your sessions more frequently allows you to reap the rewards of your workouts without stagnation.
Drop Sets
A drop set is when you do a set of an exercise, reduce the weight by about 10-30%, immediately lift the weight again, then repeat. Drop sets are typically done to failure but they don’t have to be. Drop sets maximize the volume in an exercise which leads to hypertrophy. They’re also a great way to train if you’re strapped for time.
A 2018 study compared a single drop set to the traditional 3 sets over 6 weeks. They determined that “superior muscle gains might be achieved with a single set of [drop sets].” While other studies found mixed results, a 2023 meta-analysis and systematic review found there were “no significant difference in hypertrophy measurements between the drop set and traditional training groups, but some of the drop set modalities took half to one-third of the time compared with traditional training.”
This is a great technique to squeeze everything you can from those muscles to push yourself beyond that plateau. It’s also a great way to get a lot out of a workout in a short time. It shouldn’t be used often, especially if you’re picking up weights for the first time.
2. Partial Ranges
Partial ranges of motion (ROM) is another one of those strategies that have a time and a place. With partial ROM you intentionally shorten the range of your movement for each repetition. Lying on a bench or the floor and performing dumbbell flys are a great use of these partial ranges. Since the end range or position of these flys provides the least amount of resistance of the targeted muscle (the pec major), then stopping short at bringing the dumbbells to touch one another at the top of the movement is a great way to increase the demand. Nordic hamstring curls and chest press (or pushups) are some other good exercises to use this approach.
Another application of partial ROM is during the final few reps of a set. When you hammer out a few final reps of these partial ranges you put the muscle under sustained tension for a longer period of time which is a variation of the mechanism a drop set uses.
A third way to incorporate partial ranges to build strength and hypertrophy is by targeting the weakest part of the lift. For example, if your serratus anterior is limiting full lockout of the chest press then do partial ranges in the final 25% of the lockout (with scapular protraction) to strengthen the serratus anterior muscle.
3. Eccentric Training
Eccentric training is a straight-up lesson in pain tolerance. When we think of lighting a weight we think of the concentric movement, the shortening (think of a bicep curling up a dumbbell). Eccentric movements, the lengthening of a muscle (think bicep lowering the dumbbell) are the afterthought that just slows down the muscle-building movements, or so we thought. With eccentric training, you would favor the lengthening over the shortening of the movement. For example, with a pushup, you would start with your elbows bent, push yourself up normally to straight elbows and then take 3-5 seconds or more to lower yourself back down to the parting position then repeat. Sounds easy but it feels like a set is an eternity, especially with that final muscle-trembling rep.
Eccentric training has plenty of benefits beyond breaking through a strength stall. Compared to traditional training, eccentric training shows improved strength, improves flexibility, and improve power and speed. It’s used a lot in rehab because it tends to improve motor coordination, it’s safer on the tendons, and it demands control versus the compensation of moving the joints quickly through movements. The biggest con is that it causes more delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) compared to traditional training.
4. Deload Week
About every 8 weeks or so I drop a day of lifting, decrease each exercise by a set or 2, and cut the reps down by at least 50%. When I plateaued in the gym and injured my shoulder shortly thereafter I realized my body was just screaming at me and I need a rest. When I first incorporated a deload week it was a total mind screw. I felt I was wasting my time even doing it but not only did I become a believer, I've come to embrace it because of the positive reinforcement of the following week where I tend to set multiple personal bests.
5. Recover Better
The athletes that recover the best are the ones that tend to climb the ranks. With better recovery comes a better next workout which means better gains. Yes, it takes skill and dedication but the ability for the body to recover neuromuscularly is what separates the best. Skimping on recovery in the short term may not have a significant impact but it will eventually catch up to you in the long term.
The best recovery tool is sleep, yet 35% of Americans get less than 7 hours of sleep a night (see tips here). Prioritize this over all else for better recovery. More low-hanging fruit on the recovery tree is getting adequate protein (46% of older adults deficient), eating more calories, learning to activate the parasympathetic system (rest, digest, repair), and breathwork.
Takeaway
A weight lifting plateau is frustrating but it’s there for a reason. It tells us that the body is bored and needs a change in the routine to progress. This change could come in many different forms. It could be as simple as taking more rest and adding in some protein to something more physically demanding like drop sets, partial ranges, and eccentric training. Use the former strategies of rest, deloads, and nutritional modifications on a frequent basis regardless of your level of training. For experienced lifters, use the latter strategies in the gym before you hit that plateau.
What’s the best strategy you’ve found to bust through a plateau?
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