honestly that would help ...lol
How do you get past a plateau in weight lifting?
- Thread starter Taureau
- Start date
I totally agree with what your saying. Using Westside methods, these guys change their main exercise on max effort days at least every 3 weeks as they hit plateaus with the exercise. So for example if you are doing squats for 3 weeks and you have worked up to from 405 to 425 or whatever ... switch to bent leg good mornings for 2 to 3 weeks and try to get a pr on that, I have been able to work up to 465lbs for 3 reps relatively low, bent leg good mornings with no back rounding … that was a very good day for me but might be very easy for someone else. So after another 2 - 3 weeks I would switch to maybe box squats. Eventually I would come back around and do squats again in about 2 or 3 months and I normally noticed my squat weight that I use to handle feels a lot lighter. Doing different exercises, alternating every 2 -3 weeks, should be done on speed days as well when you are trying to increase your speed strength. So I may do pause benches for 2-3 weeks working up to a pr or close to one and then switch to benching with lower bar weight but higher band tension and work the bar weight up over 2 - 3 weeks to see if my bar speed stays the same. If it slows down over 3 reps I know I have hit my max ( if your not familiar with speed training refer to westside articles).
Another way of working through a plateau on a bench is to determine where you are failing ... is it off the chest you stall, half way up or on the lockouts. One of the techniques I have used is to bench in a rack and bench from the level I am failing at and try to increase that weight over time. So if im failing at the bottom I would put the weight support bars on the rack say an inch from my chest and load a weight on that I can do for 3-5 reps. Then I would up the load until I got to say 2 reps then I would stop for that week. The next week I would use the same exercise and try to increase my weight for 3 -5 set and all the way up to the 2 rep set. Do this for about 3 weeks. And then try another exercise that would increase your strength at the bottom of a bench ... like say weighted low dips... If your failing at the lock out put the rack support bars 4 inches from lockout and bench that way increasing you weight over each workout and over each set. Remember if good form fails you are going to heavy
Anyway ... those are some of my thoughts and things that have helped me. Hope that helps. There are so many things that may make you plateau and make your strength decrease ... diet , over training, to much volume, not enuff volume ... on and on. What you have to do is experiment over time and find what works for you and read everything you can on how the real strong lifters train ie... Eddie Hall, Brian Shaw, Ed Coan, Louis Simmons, Thor, Kaz and try some of what they are doing.
A of people hit plateaus, I believe because it is very rare that someone records each workout in a logbook, notepad, whatever. Most people go for having a 'good workout' rather than progressively overloading the muscle. In order to get bigger and therefore stronger you must do more than what you did before. Of course deloading and rest comes into play but, I dont feel that needs to be touched on here. If you just switch up workouts and exercises constantly without recording anything there's a good chance nothing will be accomplished. In fact, sticking with the same excersies, recording your progress then switching excersises and starting the whole process over again when you actually do plateau is far more beneficial than just mixing things up all the time. Theres some truth to this dudes advice but, its vary vague!
totally agree, I had my favorite major exercises for dead/squats ( box squat, regular squat, bent leg good mornings, ghr, conventional deads and wide deads) and bench ( tricep push downs, pause benches, floor benches, JB benches, dips, regular benches) … always worked down to a hard double or triple for each exercise. Used a lot of bands with the a lot of the exercises as well.