Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1630: Ten Ways to Break Through a Plateau

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin provide ten different ways to kick-start progress after hitting a plateau. Nothing is more frustrating than a plateau. (1:47) Ten Ways to Break Through a Plateau. #1 – Changing the tempo of your reps. (2:53) #2 – Switching up your rep ranges. (6:16) #3 – Mixing up your rest periods. (10:33) #4 – Changing the volume in your workouts. (17:24) #5 – Messing with the frequency you train each body part for the week. (21:50) #6 – Going easier on the intensity of your workouts. (25:23) #7 – Picking the exercises you suck at. (31:45) #8 – Focusing on the mobility piece. (36:17) #9 – Adding more calories to your diet. (40:50) #10 – Trying a more radical workout. (44:11) Related Links/Products Mentioned August Promotion: MAPS Strong and MAPS Powerlift 50% off!  **Promo code “AUGUSTSPECIAL” at checkout** Visit Super Coffee for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code “MINDPUMP” at checkout** Why Your Tempo Matters When You Workout! – Mind Pump TV How Phasing Your Workouts Leads to Consistent Plateau Free Workouts - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1612: Everything You Need To Know About Sets, Reps & Rest Periods Why You Need to Mix Rep Ranges After Periods of Training – Mind Pump Blog The Breakdown Recovery Trap, Why You Aren’t Progressing – Mind Pump Blog The “No Pain, No Gain” Fallacy Exercises That You Probably Aren’t Doing That You Should Be Doing For Maximum Muscle Gain – Mind Pump Blog Is Mobility Important For Working Out? - Mind Pump Blog How to Undulate Your Calories for Faster Weight Loss & an Improved Metabolism Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, ob-mite, up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we talk about 10 of the best ways to bust through a plateau. So if your body has stopped responding, you don't know why, you're working hard, can't figure out why you're just not progressing anymore, you're going to love this episode.

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mapsfitinistproducts.com. Just use the code August Special with no space for that discount. Nothing is more frustrating than a plateau. How many times you gotta get questions about that? My body stopped responding. It's not building muscle. I can't burn more body fat. What the hell's going on? I'm doing all this stuff and my body is frozen

and I'm working harder than ever before. But you're not folio maps program. That's the end of the episode. That's your first mistake. No, you know what? Let's talk about all the different things that you could do one by one. Each of them by themselves oftentimes gets the person's body to respond. Sometimes it requires changing multiple things. So we're going to go down a list of all the factors that you could change in your workouts that can get your body to start

moving forward again. So before we wanted this, okay, so we're going to go over 10 different ways to potentially break through a plateau. But before we, because we listen and we know this, so before we go into this, do you guys prefer to do one of these things at a time, or will you pair them? And if you do pair them, let's save that for afterwards on your favorite ones to pair together. Yeah, and that's a great question and it depends how hard and how long of plateaued. Great question. Absolutely. All right, so what's the first one?

First one is depends. This one is, by the way, these are no real particular order, but this first one is often one that nobody even considers. They don't even think about changing the tempo of the repetitions. What's my favorite to teach? This is one of my favorites to change, because it's easy.

It's like, I don't have to do anything else, except slow my reps down or speed them up. Like just change the tempo and be consistent with that change in your workout. And it usually is enough to get me moving forward again. Well, you can really really change the entire adaptation process by just this one factor. I mean, to be able to stimulate fast twitch muscle fibers

to have that kind of response, it's a completely different response and different signal you're sending your body just by increasing the speed of which you lift or the way that you're the intention of what you're doing with the exercise will tell the body something completely different. So, tempo or to slow it down, obviously,

is gonna tell the body a completely different thing. I love this one and I've talked about on the show many times before because one of the most common goals, even if your goal is fat loss, you normally want to tone or build muscle. Or at least keep muscle. Or keep muscle. More often than not, though, building muscle

is in somebody's goal one way or another. And the protocol for hypertrophy, what the tempo looks like is a 4-2-2 protocol, which is a four second negative, right? So four seconds on the eccentric portion of the exercise, which by the way, for building muscle is one of the most valuable portions of the exercise. And almost nobody actually does a rep that slow.

And I used to, I used to love teaching clients that especially my muscle building clients, that okay, I want you to look at everybody on the gym floor right now and find me one person and count their negative. Just, you know, count in your head and find. How long does it take him to get the bottle? Yeah, find one person that actually does a four second

or more negative and it's just unbelievably rare. And it also is a great way to teach form and technique, right? When you slow down the, where it gets sloppy is people let gravity do the work on the eccentric portion of the exercise. And a lot of times you're losing that tension on the muscle. And so teaching a client how to slow down the negative keeps I think better tension on the muscle,

slows it down so you have better control and form, and then also maximizes the benefits for building muscles. So messing with tempo is one of my favorite things to do. Yeah, now on the other side of that is, and this is definitely for those of you that already have good control and good stability. Is lifting faster? Yeah, explosively.

And explosive push press, or you're doing a push press, and you have bumper plates, and you drop the weight, so you're not even doing a negative, but it's all about this explosive positive. That change can oftentimes be just enough to get your body to respond. And also to be clear, a plateau typically happens not because you've reached your genetic limit.

Like, oh no, my body cannot possibly build more muscle or improve its performance or whatever. Oftentimes it is what you're doing or what you're not doing. So for most of you listening right now, if you plateaued, it's because of something you're doing or something that you're not doing. The next one is another one that a lot of people tend to get stuck in. And that's the rep range. Most people, even those you watching this show right now,

think about how many reps you tend to hit in your bench press or in your row or in your squat. And I would bet money, it's probably within the same four rep range. In other words, oh yeah, I tend to do 10 to 12. Or I like to do them around five or six, right? Most of us tend to get stuck in a particular rep range because we like the way it feels.

Either we like to pump in the berm from the higher reps or we like to feel a heavy weight of the low reps. Nonetheless, getting stuck in a rep range is a guaranteed way to get your body to stop responding. I find there's two most common people when talking about rep ranges. There's always exceptions in the rule, but the two most common people are talking about rep range. There's always exceptions in the rule, but the two most common people

are somebody who sticks to a rep range all the time or the person who claims to change it up all the time, but then they have no structure around it. So they're like, oh yeah, you know, I do 10 reps all the time, and the next day I'll do 15, or one exercise I do this, but they have no way to measure it because they never go oh I stick to this exercise for this long and fall this

rep range and then I transition to they don't have any sort of structure around it and they they do understand the benefits of changing rep range so they're always changing it randomly and don't realize that their body is probably very adapted to training that way and that there's no structure around to be able to say, okay, when I do this rep range, these are the benefits and adaptations that I get. So to me are the two most common is either somebody who is stuck in the exact same rep range all the time and they never move out of it or they are randomly moving in. Well, there's also there's a lot of tribalism around this in terms of like separating people

in camps and where you identify the most is why more of a power lifter, I'm more, you know, an athlete, I'm more of a bodybuilder, I'm more of this, I'm more of that. And usually rep range is very much like set in stone in a lot of programming to where, you know, this is where I get, this is where I'm most comfortable and I've had the best results. So venturing outside of that is not really something I want to consider. Yeah, no, that's 100% true.

In my experience, most people do best, stick into a rep range for about three to four weeks and then moving to another rep range. And when I do this consistently, I just feel the best. If I don't do this consistently, I start to find a plateau real hard, I start to get joint pain

and things start to get totally stay. I just feel like if you don't structure it like that, that you still fall prey to the same habits as the person who gets stuck in the same rep range. You just do it differently, right? If that makes sense, like you are mixing it up, but you're still kind of mixing it up the same way all the time.

I've also noticed that people who mix it up, you know, quote unquote, mix it up, they always do the same rep ranges for certain exercises. Sure. So yeah, I do five reps for bench press, but I do 20 for cable crossover. So I'm doing high in low reps,

but really it's the same rep ranges for the same exercises all the time. Yes. No, with the best approach, just in our experiences, you pick a lower rep range or a moderate or a higher rep range and do that for most of your exercises and do that for about three to four weeks. And Justin's right. I think in both these things, we talked about both tempo and rep range and many of the other things we talk about, we all tend to fall victim to this based on the camp. Like you brought that up for rep range. Why I think the same thing for tempo, if you were an athletic guy, how do you move?

Yeah, explosive. Yeah, explosive. Everything's fast, right? If you're a bodybuilder guy, you're probably the group that does slow. I never did any eccentric. You know, I had to really be intentional to do that because it was just like,

picked the way up and then get rid of it. Exactly. And so I think that having some self-awareness around who you are, because we all kind of do gravitate to a style or identify as a type of a lifter, you know, is so the key to this is to be self-aware and who do I typically gravitate towards

or the style I gravitate towards and then trying to move in the opposite direction for a while and you'll see extreme all kinds of benefits in both the tempo and rep range. Now the next one is one that I was probably one of the last things that I ever started to manipulate in my workouts and really came to me on accident. For most of my personal workout career and my clients, there was always the same amount of time that we'd work out. So when I had a client, they come in, it's always an hour, right? If I worked out, I always had myself scheduled for two hours, which would give me time to warm up, workout, cool down, eat, whatever. And so my rest periods were

always roughly the same. I didn't time myself, but they were always roughly the same because what I would do is I would do a set, I'd walk to the water fountain, get some water, walk back. By the time I got back, I would do my set. So it was probably around one and a half minutes to two minutes between sets, and I never really changed that. Now, the accident happened when I started to get pressed for time.

This happened after I had kids. When you have kids, sometimes shit happens in the morning. Oh my gosh, my two hour window. Now I have 40 minutes. How am I going to fit all these exercises that I normally do? And so I started super setting or I started doing short rest periods and I noticed phenomenal results.

I happened again this morning. This morning I came in. I had 45 minutes to do an hour workout. So I did much shorter rest periods, and I noticed something completely different. Then I started to play with them in my programming, and I got great results. I love mixing up the rest periods,

where I'll go 30 seconds in between sets, and of course I have to go much lighter, I can't lift as heavy, or I go longer and I have much more time, and I can lift up much heavier, really changes the feel of the workout, the pump that I get, the control that I have. It's an easy thing to change.

You have to change anything else you could simply cut your rest in half or double your rest and then watch what happens. Again, here's the groups, right? You have the power lifter who loves to do a set, go do his knee wrap, sweat three, five minutes, get some water. You see those memes where they do a wrap

and then they have a couch over there and get a blanket on them. Right, that is sleeping. I mean, that is totally the powerlifter, right? Three plus minutes, I want maximum rest between every single lift and so you tend to do everything like that. And just because even if you are a powerlifter,

it still would benefit you to move this to break some plateau. Throw it in everyone's life. Yeah, so even if you are someone that is, that not only identifies, but you are that person, you still will benefit from messing with this. The opposite is,

then you have the other client who is, loves the fast tempo classes, that just can't stay, everyone, we've all trained this client who you know you're telling them the rest That's more often what else what else what else whether dancing they're like well I can do something else or I'm ready I'm ready and they want to go right back in their size and you're like that's been 20 seconds hold on like I want you to rest for a whole Minute right so again having self awareness around who you are like and then trying to move away from that and You know, I kind of was the body builder guy, right?

So I fell in that like 90 second protocol is what I just kind of gravitated. So this is something that I was guilty of for a long time and I still to this day have to like focus on or otherwise, no matter what rep range I'm moving in, no matter what tempo, I always kind of rest about that 90 seconds. It's just, it's kind of my cadence, right right it gets the workout done in about an hour or so I can get

everything done I feel good and ready to go. So again I have to really challenge myself to either speed it up or get myself in the powerlifting mindset where I rest for you. Have some fun with this. So here's what I would do is I would do my normal workout and I would look at my my time and I'd say okay look I'm averaging about 90 seconds. Next workout, I would take a stopwatch because you will gravitate to what you did before. Even if you think you're going faster, you might only be shaving off 10 seconds. Get your stopwatch as soon as you finish your set, hit it and be like, I'm doing the next set in 30 seconds. Oh, boy, it changes the entire dynamic of the workout.

And the same thing in the opposite, like you're a fast, you know, in between sets, take your stopwatch, you're like, I'm waiting a full three minutes. And you'll be like, I'm ready to go. Look at the stopwatch. Oh my God, I have another 60 seconds. Like totally changes the dynamic of the workout

and it changes the steam list for your body. Yeah, the whole concept of the pump was just the foreign idea for me. Until like, I even even I think it was back when I worked for Adam where he brought me out on the floor and was like here's we're gonna super set today I'm like what does that mean? I'm gonna work. What are you doing? Oh my god, like everything just was just filled up and pumped and it was a completely different experience So it's the only way I could do as much weight or more Quickly figured that strategy. Oh yeah.

I deal with this guy, this guy, Lys, right here. But I mean, it took that new stimulus to realize, wow, there's a whole different methodology that you can apply to your training. You know, I'd say that jokingly, but there's some truth to that. And again, having self awareness around this, that what makes this difficult is you're inevitably going

to suck. Well, if you would use something new. When you move out of whatever you're doing consistently, and that is the hard part, I think that's that you have, you're gonna have to lighten the weight up dramatically, because you just, to the go to your body. Yeah, and it, or you're not gonna sweat as much because you just to the bottom. Yeah. Or you're not going to sweat as much

because you're resting longer. Yeah, that's right. So you gotta, there's definitely a mental game here where you have to be aware that you're going to be challenged. But the way you have to shift your mindset is that's good. That means if you, if this is new, it's difficult. There's a lot of room to adapt and change and improve. And that's what we're looking for when we're seeking to break through a plateau.

Now when you talk about rest periods, do you guys have like three ranges I like to move in and out of? I have the 30 to second, 30 to 60 second range. I have the 90 second range, and then I have the like, which is 90 to two minutes and then I have the three minute plus. Yes, those are the three here. Three kind of section. I never go below 30 seconds. I feel like when you go below 30,

you do cardio. Yeah, yeah. So I'll go, I'll say the thing, I'll go 36, I'll go 30, 60 to 90 and then you're three minutes plus. Yeah, I do the same thing. I do the same thing. I use my happy place, but everything out of that is like rough. And I have to do it though.

Oh, the 30nd ones are fun. I mean, as long as you make peace with the fact that you're not gonna lift as much, man, the pump you get is just, it's intense. And I can get a dicking too. I hate doing that. I've learned to love, and I actually didn't really learn to love this until really hanging out with you guys,

because I was never a single, double, triple time of lifter, you know, doing heavy, heavy lifts, right? The three minute rest period in between. And since we built a business around, we just work in between. Social media, I'll go answer an email, and then I'll go back to a set, like, and because we have our own place, you know, I can stretch the workout to be two hours if I want to. So I've learned to like that pace, even though I to gravitate towards the 90 second.

Now, this next one, people change quite often. It's a common one that people change. Unfortunately, people tend to only change it in one direction. Okay, and that's the change the volume of your workouts. What does the volume mean? That means the total amount of sets and exercises that you're doing in your workout. Now, when people hit a plateau, they do often change the volume to get out of plateau,

but they almost always add volume. Add, yes. It's always like, oh, I must not be doing enough. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten people's clients, excuse me, clients' bodies to respond in big ways by cutting the volume, by taking their total volume and having them do less. You may be in this category.

You, if you're doing a lot of exercises and a lot of work and I've been working out for a long time and you're doing, you know, 15 sets per body part or, you know, per week and you're doing all this stuff, and you think, man, my body stopped responding. I need to do more. Try doing half. Try cutting your volume in half.

And here's what often happens. You get stronger right away. Literally, within that same week. It seems so counterproductive. It does. And it's hard. It's a hard thing to sell. It's hard concept to sell because all we've been fed for so long is like more is better,

more intensity, more volume, keep adding, adding, adding, but you know, there's this speaks to there is the right dose for each person. And that dose changes. And it changes and you have to be able to stay ahead of that and be able to take yourself now into a new area of growth that you need to focus on. So I have a lot of thoughts around this one. Mainly because it was one of the most impactful things

for me when I was competing, as far as what changed my physique like consistently for show over show after show. Now the reason why I think the point you guys are making it holds true and it is probably more true than not is because I think everybody just thinks that more means more results. I think that's just so common. If you're a motivated person, you're in the gym, you're listening to a podcast about fitness, more likely than not, you're the type that

just keeps piling more and more on thinking that you're gonna get more results. And there definitely is a very, there's definitely a sweet spot of rest and calories and how much volume we should be doing. Now, why this is so important or such a big one for me was never in my career until this point did I actually like mathematically track this like I didn't do that until competing.

Never had a reason to it. I didn't care enough to actually sit down and calculate my total volume. And there's a math formula for this right? So it sets times reps times weight and that gives you the total volume for whatever your matter. So if you did 10 sets of 10 reps with a hundred pounds, multiply them times each other, that's your volume. That's your total volume for that exercise, right?

And so to make it easy, I picked like the big bang for your buck type of exercise, the squat, like the big five that I was really paying attention to, even though you can count volume counts on all the isolation exercise too, that's what I was really tracking to see so I'd slowly progress. And the key was when I first started was to follow the rule that I talk about on the show all the time, which is my goal was to do as little as possible

to elicit the most amount of change. So I wanted to start with the bare minimum, very similar to a pre-phase of MAPS antibiotic. Two days of exercising, two sets of most, the exercise you're doing, full body type of routine, measure that volume out, figure out where you're at, and then literally you only need to add five to 10% every couple of weeks to that,

and that will take you a really long time and you will continually progress simply just by tracking your volume and slowly incrementally etching it up like that. Now the problem is there's a lot of people probably listening right now and they're well beyond all that and your guys' rule and truth. They're already doing too much. They're already doing too much. And that's why they're plateauing. Right. Because they're over training too much all the time. So you cut their volume and boom, like magic, their body responds.

So you gotta assess this for yourself. By the way, here's a deal. Changing any one of these variables at worst, you might not progress, okay? So don't worry, it's not like you cut your volume and oh my god, all my gains are gone forever. No, you'll cut your volume, be like, oh yeah, that wasn't it. So maybe it's something else. Let me try you know something else The next one is the frequency and specifically what we're talking about is the frequency of which you train each body part

per week Here's how I love to mess with frequency. I like to keep everything else the same and Change the frequency. How does that work? Well, let's say I work out my back twice a week and I do 10 sets on Monday, 10 sets on Thursday. So that's 20 total sets for my back. I could also take my back and train it four days that week but do five sets on each day.

So five sets on Monday and Tuesday So five sets on Monday and Tuesday, five sets on Thursday and Friday, I'm still doing 20 total sets. We're always a volume, you just spread that out. Yes, I've just increased the frequency, all else, everything else is equal. And this was a game changer for me back in the day. I used to train each body part once a week

with about 15 to 20 sets per body part. When I finally was convinced that maybe it's a frequency problem and I took all those sets and I just divided it up over three workouts. That's all I did. It was like I turned on a light switch and I felt it immediately. Literally within the first week,

I could feel that I was stronger and things were responding. And it was really, really trippy to me. And so, frequencies are very important to look at. A lot of times this can speak to people who have been running a split or a different type of a program. Like that versus a total body type of workout program where you can hit these body parts, like you you said a few more times throughout the week, but continue that similar amount of volume

instead of just trying to pile it all in on one or two days throughout the week. It's a pretty massive shift on your body. Now, the thing that you have to be careful about is the same mistake that I bet we all made. I know I made this mistake, for sure, when the frequency light bulb went off was, oh, I do, and I used to back then, I used to split,

chest, shoulders, thighs, it was like set up with that. I'm like, okay, it sounds like the research says that two to three times a week per muscle group is the most ideal for building muscle. So I literally did everything that I was doing for my chest. The same workout. Yeah, basically the same workout now three times a week.

And so I went from doing 15 sets on Monday to now doing 15 Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And now I'm doing 45 sets for my chest. Which now you fall into the problem and the trap that you talked about with volume. Way too much volume. I mean, what's the, the literature is pretty clear on this 12 to 20, I believe this was,

yeah, it's like nine to 15. Oh, so what is that that was 12 to 12? Okay, so, so 20 is the peak, you know, and I made the mistake of going 15 sets, 15, 15. It's just way too much volume. Keep everything the same. Right. Just divide it up.

That is the key to this is to figure out where you're currently at. If you're only training, you know, if you're doing a body part split and you wanna try and mess with the frequency then go to like more of a full body type of routine two or three times a week, then you need to measure what you're doing sets wise

and then keep in mind that this total sets in a week, the sweet spot is somewhere in mind that this total sets in a week, the sweet spot is somewhere in that 10 to 20 sets, not much above it, not much below it and to stay somewhere in that range and not to make the Joe Donnelly mistake and do 50 to 60 sets on a muscle group, unless you're completely enhanced,

you're gonna end up getting stuck on a plateau. Now let's talk about intensity, okay? This is another one, like volume, that people tend to only go in one direction. Their body stops responding, and so they say to themselves, I must have to work out harder. That must be the issue.

I'm just not working out hard enough. So people do change the intensity, but it's almost always in the direction of harder. I'm gonna talk to you about doing the opposite. And I know the reason why I'm doing this is I know a lot of fitness fanatics watch this show and a lot of fitness fanatics. That's our tendency. Our tendency is to go harder every time something stops working. Well, I'm going to convince you that sometimes you need to go easier. In fact, studies show that when people take a week, what do they call that week where people do a back-off week?

D-load? D-load week. That when they do a D-load week, the gains tend to happen right after the D-load week or even during the D-load week. So this is what happened to me. I used to go to failure in every single set because I was convinced from reading all the bodybuilding magazines at the time that if you went to failure, you know you triggered muscle growth

because failure was the very end. So go to failure, no matter what, that'll get things moving. And so that's what I did all the time. And then I went back and started reading old muscle building books and publication. I'm talking old, like these were written in the early 1900s by people like Eugene Sandow, right?

And all of these guys, back in those days, before protein powders, definitely before steroids, and these guys were impressive. And I mean, I think Eugene Sandow would do a one-arm bent press with like 300 pounds, which that's impressive now, even. It's insane.

And all of them said, train hard, but make sure you have enough energy left over for the next workout. And so the way I interpreted this was, these guys are training hard, but none of them are beaten the crap out of themselves working out. And they only all worked out about three or four days a week. So I said, what happens if I stop going to failure and I just stop about two reps short of this? Now, here's the irony of this.

The irony was, as a trainer, I almost never trained clients to failure, never. Because every time I ever experimented with a client going to failure, they would go backwards. Now for some reason I thought my body was different, so I should go to failure all the time. But when I applied the same thing to myself, and I stopped every rep short of failure

or every set short of failure, about two reps, my body started responding again. So, intensity you can manipulate and sometimes it's going lower intensity. It gets your body to move forward. Well, this is part of why before we started the conversation, I asked you guys, you know, kind of prefaced it with, you know, the things that you like to pair together and the reason why I was alluding to that because I think that it's necessary for certain things that you manipulate. For example, we just talked about increasing the frequency.

So if you were training chest intensely one day a week and you now disperse it over two or three times in the week, you have to manipulate the intensity also. You can't keep the same intensity that you were training that one chest on one day and now do it two and three times a week or else you're going to run into this problem where you're over-training and you're going to get stuck in another plateau.

So you have to know that you've got to modify your intensity based off of other factors that you're manipulating at the same time too. And I think again, talking to this audience who is probably into working out more often than not, and like, Sal, you talking about the failure, that was one of the biggest game changers for me during my fitness career was starting to leave what we call two in the tank. I used to train every set to failure.

Every single set I was shaking, or I had a spotter to help me finish the last three reps, and simply backing off and actually Leaving two reps in the tank for my entire workout actually Plusted me through a massive plateau. There was two completely different conversations. I would have between you know my athlete clients versus my everyday average person client And and typically every day average person client to you know That mentality of going 100% every time, and it didn't really exist.

So that was something that I was sort of building my way up towards, because yes, there's value in that, but also it can exceed the amount that's good for your body. So yeah, me coming from that athletic background, I totally get it because every single workout in my mind was just like if I was practicing, which was I want to drill at 100%.

So that way, it applies best on the field, but it unfortunately doesn't work that way when you're trying to build muscle, it is dose-dependent. I need to be able to apply what's most appropriate for my body to grow. So it's such a great point, just because this is another one of those,

you need the self-awareness here to know who you are. Because I did, I trained probably a split right here too. Like, I definitely had clients that, you know, oh, it hurts, you know, because it starts burning. And they want to back off the intensity all the time. That was too much. Yeah, I mean, so you definitely had clients, or their heart rate starts pounding a little faster

with that, I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack. I need to stop, slow it. I had a woman literally throw her dumbbells on the ground because she's literally, I handed them to her. She was doing a rap. She did like three reps. She was, how much do these weigh? And I said, oh, there's just seven pound dumbbells.

Oh my god, she threw them on the floor. I'm like, what are you doing? She's like, I've never done more than five. You were doing them. Why did you throw them on the floor? This is for sure. So you gotta know who you are. Are you the person that is looking for every reason

to not push and not stretch your capacity or are you the fitness enthusiast who wants to keep pushing themselves and more and more and more. And that's who's, who you gotta know who you are and where this supplies, because there is definitely some value to increasing intensity with the right person. If you've never stretched your capacity for it,

if you've never trained a failure before, you're gonna see tremendous benefit by actually intermittently doing that in your routine. But if you're the fitness fanatic where or like any of us who trained that was looking for every ounce you could get out of your workout, you probably could use a lot or get a lot of value from backing off. Yeah, it's just it's obvious that going harder is the next step, right? Making it harder. It's not so obvious. That's why it's going easier and that'll get your body to move forward. All right, this next one is, it sounds obvious,

but we're gonna explain to you how to maximize this, okay? So change your exercises. Now it sounds obvious, right? Oh, do different exercises. My body's gonna develop differently. Okay, let's get a little deeper into this. Here's what you need to do with this. Change the exercises and the best results you're gonna get

are if you change to an exercise you suck at, okay? So pick the exercise, do the worst at. So, if you always do barbell squats with a barbell on your back and you're really good at it but you've been doing them forever, you know, like, you know, I want to try a different leg exercise. And I know I can leg press and I know I can do, you know, a Bulgarian split stand squat. Oh, front squats. Man, I suck at those. I don't know how I'm gonna do those. I bet you the one you'll get the best results out of

is the one that you suck at the most. And the reason is because there's so much room to grow. There's so much improvement you can make. I mean, every time I've done this, where I pick an exercise I suck at, I'll gain 10 or 15 pounds on that exercise every single week because I went from sucking to not sucking so bad to, ooh, I'm getting kind of good at it versus picking the exercise at, yeah, it's different, but I'm kind of good

at it anyway. How much am I going to possibly add to that? Oh, yeah, a lot of times. Why you suck at it is, you know, what you're not addressing in your program right now. Totally. That's causing you to plateau. That was, you know, the case a lot of times. And that's why for me, and I know I can get into

a lot of barbell training and a lot of bilateral type of training because it feels good. Like I can really stack plates and I can add load and it's fun. And then when I go to Bulgarian split squad or like lunges or things like, oh my God, I'm so shaking and unstable and you know, this sucks. I'm going to go right back to squatting, but you know, to highlight that now and focus

on that, bring it, you know, a little bit more frequency in terms of like rotating that into my workouts, makes a massive difference. And then also adds, you know, that stability that will bring my strength up even more in my work at all. I think this is of all the plateau breakers, one of the greatest hacks for experienced lifters is this one. The reason why I think that over the other ones

is not that they don't work also, but when you're a new lifter, you could basically throw every exercise, any and every exercise. You suck them all. Yeah, you suck at everything and everything is you're a new lifter, you could basically throw every exercise, any and every exercise. You suck them all. Yeah, you suck at everything, and everything is you're adapting and getting better, but if you've been lifting for a really long time,

you've definitely identified what you do well, you've definitely gone through phases of gravitating towards what you like to do, and there is definitely, you've figured out what modalities of training you do not like. I don't like fucking around with that explosive stuff for that high intensity type of interval training. Like I don't like messing with that,

or I can't stand that really grinding, heavy lifting type of training, or I don't like Turkish get ups, I don't have the mobility and the flexibility to do. Like you definitely have shit you know, when even if you're great at lifting, you've been lifting for a decade plus, there are things that you know

that you're not very good at, and the trick is just to be able to mentally focus in that direction, and you just gotta realize that, that you've gotten really good at a lot of things, and the thing that's probably gonna show you the greatest change or help you break through a plateau is focusing on the shit you're not good at. Oh, try this, do this, You've been working out for a while.

Say, okay, I'm going to plateau. I'm going to do a new workout for the next four weeks. Do this. Go down body part by body part and pick a lift that you suck at for each body part. And then for the next four weeks, your goal is to get good at all those exercises you suck at. And watch what happens over the next four weeks. The progress will blow you away.

You'll notice, okay, those that have been listening to the show for a long time and listening to our quads where we answer live questions and stuff. One of the things that you'll see that we almost always recommend the same program. And I know what makes all of us choose that is, we listen to what the person's saying quickly, we can start to figure out what type of person they avoid this.

Yeah, we know how they train. We know what programs we've written that are similar to that. And then we know what are like polar opposite of that. And we'll always recommend the polar opposite because we know it's going to show them the greatest change. We know that, okay, I can, by what she's telling me or he's telling me right now, I can tell they like this way of training. So that's kind of like our anabolic program. Or oh, that's like our performance program. So it's like, okay,

I'm going to shift this person to strong or power lift because I know that that's going to be such unfamiliar territory for them that their body is going to see the greatest change. Totally. All right. So this next one, a lot of people don't connect this one to platos. And that is mobility. Oftentimes people don't realize that the reason why their body is not progressing is because their body is preventing them from progressing because it has its own safety governing in place. It's got its own governing and safety mechanisms to prevent injury. So you've been squatting in your stuck at 200 pounds and you think, okay, is it my diet, is it the wraps, is it the sats, and you're stuck at 200 pounds, and you think, okay, is it my diet, is it the reps,

is it the sets, and you're trying all these different things, and nothing seems to be working, not realizing that the reason why your body is not letting you lift more than 200 pounds is because there is a mobility issue in your hips that your body's identified and said, if we go any heavier, we're probably gonna hurt ourselves. And your body is very effective at doing this. I remember when I had my bench press,

I don't remember what the weight was, but it was stuck forever. And all I literally, all I did was like two days of rotator cuff exercises. And I added 10 pounds to my bench press. And it was why? Because my body obviously identified that my shoulders weren't stable enough to go any heavier.

So I strengthened the muscle that is not even directly connected to the... I mean a rotator cuff stabilizing muscle doesn't lift the bar when I'm bench press. All it does is stabilize the upper arm, right? But because I had that increased stability, my central nervous system allowed me to generate more force so I could lift more weight. So this is... Now this is obviously true for beginners. Like if I take a new person and I'm training them,

I'm focusing a lot on stability and mobility. But advanced lifters, people I'm working out for a while, this almost never dawns on them, that the reason why they can't add more weight to the bar or the reason why they're not progressing, it's not because of any of the reason than the fact that their body is sensing instability or mobility,

and if they just took a few weeks to focus on that, they break through the plateau. Well, not only that, they're not sensitive to their body signals, which as they're going through this, like your body's telling you, certain aches and stiffness and pains in certain joints, are areas of instability, or lack of range of motion that need to be addressed.

And so the common thought because of the way stability or you know lack of range of motion that need to be addressed. And so the common thought because of the way the industry is kind of set it up is well, maybe I need you know wristraft, maybe I need to belt it up, maybe I need sleeves, maybe I need whatever fucking device they can sell and push on you to provide that externally when there are methods like mobility and drilling, these exercises to really build that back internally. Well, here's what's cool too. I found really fascinating about this process for me because this is something that I really experienced later in my career was putting a lot of emphasis on mobility is that when you do a lot of work in this direction

and you gain this new range of motion, the amount of work you have to do to maintain or build the same amount of muscle is so much less than what you had to do before to do the same thing. And I use this in my squatting. It's like, it trips me out, how little and how infrequent an amount of volume

I have to train my legs to keep the same size on them when I was hammering them in that short. I never used to break 90 degrees. Me going from now from someone who never broke 90 degrees all the way to Asagras is a dramatic change of range of motion. And that new found range of motion is allowed me to do way less work and still maintain the size of my legs with way more volume on it. That blows my mind. So if you find a way to increase your range of motion, and this is, I'm using legs, exactly on any muscle, and you gain a newfound range of motion, you're getting more,

you're getting, you are getting more work on that muscle for less effort, and you will build more muscle. Yeah, so do this, right? So you're in a plateau, nothing's, oh my gosh, my body's not moving forward. The next three weeks focus primarily on mobility. Not only will you improve mobility and connection and stability, but oftentimes that means for three weeks, you're not training with as much intensity and volume and you're giving your body a little bit of a break. Then you go back to your old workouts, you're now rested, fully recovered.

You know, you're not, you haven't lost any muscle or strength because it takes longer to make that go away, but you got this new stability and mobility, and you go back and work out. All of a sudden, you feel more stable, everything feels better, oh, aches and pains are gone, and then you watch the weight to start move back up.

And again, I found that this to be more true for people who have been working out a long time than almost anything else. All right, the next one is diet related. And this one is an interesting one because off it's funny, either people think this is always the issue or people think this is never the issue. So people fall into one of two camps like, oh my god, I'm not progressing. I got to double my calories. There's that crowd of people. You know, into one of two camps like, oh my God, I'm not progressing. I got to double my calories. There's that crowd of people. What do they say? There's no such thing as over training, just under reading. Under fed, which is totally not true.

And then there's the other camp where, oh, my body's not responding and I look at the workouts and whatever and I say, well, how's your diet? And then you see the face like, why are you asking me about my diet? What does that have to do with anything? Well, it has a lot to do with your progress. Usually if it's not a, it's usually a macro issue,

not eating enough protein or my carbohydrates are too low or something like that, or more commonly, I'm not eating enough or I'm eating a little enough. In other words, I'm not getting losing body fat anymore. My calories are too high or I'm not getting losing body fat anymore. My calories are too high, or I'm not getting enough muscle, your calories are too low. I've found this most common and the biggest game changer for these people would be really common that I get somebody who hires me who is trying to reduce body fat. They're trying to lose 20 to 30 pounds, and they're training

three to five, maybe seven days a week, anywhere in that range, right? They're training frequently, and they're at really low calories, and they're stuck in this plateau, and actually getting them to increase calories, and maybe even reduce frequency if they're up at the seven range. So less work, more food,

for the person who's trying to lose weight, which is really hard to get that mental shift, is one of the best ways to bust them through a plateau. So long as I can get them to shift that mentality, and they can be okay with the scale potentially going the opposite direction of their goal temporarily, they benefit the most from it. They've been in such a low calorie phase and high amount of volume and frequency of training that their body It's just become so efficient. I ain't building anymore muscle. It's just surviving It's like you're feeding me 1500 or 1800 calories you're training me five days a week all these sets and exercises

I'm just trying to live. I'm not gonna build muscle for you right now or burn more body fat You're not giving me enough. And it's hanging on. Right, it's just, your body's just hanging on. And so getting that, but that's hard, right? Because they're hiring me and they're stuck in a plateau and they're trying to lose 20 more pounds. And I'm going to tell them, hey, train less and add some more calories.

And we're probably going to see the scale go up. It's really hard to sell yourself as a trainer that you know what you're doing, and when they approach you with that goal, but the truth is, this is the person who probably benefits the most from this plateau right here, is they've just been under-eating for a long period of time

and pushing the body so hard and they're trying to lose more. Yeah, or you have the opposite, right? The person who's just always on this continual bulk. And they're, you know, I want my definition and I want more, but they're afraid of the scale moving in the wrong, this was me, right? It was funny because I was just eating, I mean, sounds obvious when I say it, but at the time, it wasn't obvious to me. I was just eating too much. I cut my calories, I got leaner, and all of a sudden, I looked bigger, muscularly-wise, right? Because I had more definition. So look at your diet as one of the factors that you could change, you get your body moving.

All right. So this last one is an interesting one. And I'm going to give some specifics. Okay. So the last thing is to try a radical workout known as a plateau buster. Now I'm radical. I want to be very careful with this because people taste radical sounds crazy. Well, people can take things to two extreme.

Like, oh, that's it. My legs aren't responding. I'm gonna do 85 sets today. It was worth it. Or something like that. That would be just, that was something I would have done when I was younger. That's not necessarily what I mean.

What I mean by a radical workout is something totally different than what you're used to. Here's one of my favorites. One of my favorite, and I literally recently discovered this, and it worked so well for me that this is something now I have in my back pocket, is what I'll do, is I'll take a day, this is why it's radical, it's not something I'll do all the time,

but I'll take an entire day, and every other hour or every three hours, I'll go do three exercises, three sets of each exercise. So I'm literally every other hour, I'm working out for 15 minutes. And I'll have a garage gym, so it's very easy for me. But I've done this several times, and it's remarkable at how much my body progresses

when I do this. So to give you an example, I would do, like barbell row, barbell bench press, barbell squat, three exercises, I'll do maybe fivebell row, barbell bench press, barbell squat, three exercises. I'll do maybe five reps of each one, three sets each. I'll start at nine a.m. So I do that nine a.m. And then I do it at 11 a.m.

And then I would do it at one p.m. And so on until about maybe five p.m. And throughout the whole day, it's like a lot of volume doesn't feel like it because I'm taking every other hour I'm off. But man, do I get great results now? Keep in mind, when I did that, my intensity was moderate. I wasn't going to failure. But you can try this. You could try something weird and something totally different out of the ordinary occasionally.

And oftentimes it gets things moving. Yeah, and it's just one of those kind of a shell shock, kind of a feeling that you're placing on your body. This is where I like some of those other kind of more, I guess, advanced techniques and things like we mentioned with strip sets. Yes. You know, you can do certain techniques where it's a lot of demand. Either you're really ramping the intensity up in the workout or you're adding like quite a bit of volume that you normally wouldn't or you're doing like an insane know, quite a bit of volume that you normally wouldn't, or you're doing, like an insane amount of reps, like 100 reps, or something like of an exercise.

I mean, it's just kind of one of those, I'm gonna get super stimulated in this workout, which then is gonna carry me into, you know, my next workout with a completely different feel. When I think of radical too, I think that includes just radically different from what you're doing. Sure.

You give an example of something like radical that is extreme, all day long event that probably a good portion of people may not be able to do or definitely not consistently do. But I think radical also means radically different than what you would grab things. So instead of like kind of changing one of these things, like, oh, I'm resting 90 seconds. So now I'm gonna rest 60 seconds. It's just something kind of different. It's like going the kind of complete opposite. Doing all of them.

This is actually something that right before we got an error. So I'm coming up on almost a month of not training right now. So I haven't got back to lifting. And something that would be radically different from my train is body weight or all suspension training. I just don't, I intermittently do that very rarely here and there, but I love barbell lifting.

I love heavy barbell lifting. I like building like a body builder type of building, but I just body weight suspension trainer stuff is the complete opposite of what I like to do, which I think, okay, I've been off for almost a month. I know I'm gonna be weak as shit. I know my body's gonna respond and build muscle

to almost anything I do. This would be a good time for me to do in all body weights, suspension trainer type of training for a while. And so that is something that I would consider radically different that falls in that category. What a great point. If you train always like an athlete,

go train like a powerlifter. If you always train like a powerlifter, go train like a body builder, or maybe do body weight stuff, or train with rings or kettlebells only, like radically different from what you used to. And to break through plateau, it doesn't mean you just switch to this new workout style

That's the new workout style for the rest of your life do it for four weeks literally just do 30 days of Something completely different then go back to what you were doing before and oftentimes That's enough to get the ball rolling again And then you'll move past that plateau and then eventually hit another plateau and then you can incorporate a lot of stuff that we talked about In this episode so look if you found value in this episode, if it helped you out and you want more good, great information, head over to mindpumpfree.com. We have a lot of guides that can help you

with almost any fitness goal. Again, they cost nothing, mindpumpfree.com. You can also find all of us on Instagram, so you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPump

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