Tag Archives: fitness goals

Annihilate Physical and Mental Plateaus in Your Training

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Success is the enemy of progress.

From the time we decide to pursue a goal until the time we achieve it we experience tremendous growth. In the world of bodybuilding and fitness we have the added benefit of that growth not only being mental and emotional, but physical as well.

The trouble is…

Achieving our desired outcome can put the proverbial breaks on further gains.

The great business coach Dan Sullivan referred to this phenomenon in his book, How the Best Get Better, as, “The ceiling of complexity”.

But since we’re not talking business let’s look at an example from the standpoint of exercise.

We decide one day that we need to dial our training up a notch.  We look to a challenging exercise like squats and we say to ourselves, “I’m going add thirty pounds to my personal best on this exercise no matter what it takes”.

squats 3

Over the next 7, 8, 9 weeks you make steady progress toward your goal.  You’re in the gym grinding, you’re constantly analyzing your form and looking for ways to overcome your weak points, you’re slugging back your protein shakes and carbing up before your workouts, and making sure to get plenty of beauty sleep.

Then, on week 10, you do it.  You smash your previous bests as you hoist thirty more pounds on your squat.  You’re glaring back at the old you and laugh at what a wimp he was.

The accomplishment was great, but here comes the ceiling of complexity.

Over the next couple of weeks things are great as you post videos of your new found strength all over Facebook and collect a ton of “Likes”.  Your motivation is still very high.

But gradually things start to get stale.  Motivation is waning and you are no longer doing all the little things that helped propel you to the top of the mountain.  Instead of standing at the peak you settle on a plateau.

Plateau Point sign

As frustrated as plateaus make us there is solution for overcoming them, and the ceiling of complexity.

Set your sights on a greater goal BEFORE achieving the original one.

A friend recently asked, “How do I mentally and physically work through plateaus in training and progress. Specifically when trying to maintain muscle mass and strength while also cutting body-fat.”

Losing body-fat while maintaining muscle and strength is hard and there are a lot of moving parts and details to be addressed.  But it is something many bodybuilders routinely accomplish.

The answer to working mentally and physically through plateaus is to avoid them altogether (unless you’ve planned for down period.).  In order to evade plateaus you need to keep growing as Dan Sullivan would say.

You only grow when you are intensely focused on an objective.  The goal is what keeps you mentally in the game, and that translates to keeping you physically in it as well.

Some may view this as Goal Setting 101 but it goes well beyond that.

It’s about anticipating success and guarding against its ugly side-effect…complacency.  Complacency is what results in plateaus, and plateaus result in relapses.

Bruce Lee put it best when he said,

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life.  There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and yo must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”

[Poof!] My Shape…Gone in an Instant

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You create your fitness plan, you stick to it for 3 months, and then you piss it all away in two weeks. That’s my story and I’m not ashamed of it.  It’s a story that will deliver a massive dose of reality and teach you a lesson if you’re willing to sit here and read it for the next 4 minutes.  As I sit here typing away on my laptop I have to laugh at how quickly I was able to reverse three months of hard work.  Seriously, three months of tracking my food intake and gradually getting my body near competition form, GONE after just 2 weeks of indulgence.

poofThe two weeks were comprised of my wedding and honeymoon so by no means do I kick myself over all the eating and drinking I did.  Heck, Corrie-Beth and I spent 7 of our 10 day honeymoon in Napa Valley and Sonoma so you better believe we were drank a lot of wine!  And the meals were pretty damn good too.

So what was the damage?  A nine pound increase in body weight and all the definition in my abs and arms had disappeared.  Granted at least 3 of the 9 lbs. is retained water which can be eliminated within a week by pushing my water intake up to around a gallon per day but unfortunately the rest of the weight (fat) will take a lot longer to get back off.

Water

I can already hear some of you saying, “But you’re already in good shape it’s not that big of a deal”.  To which I say, “It’s all relative”.  I have certain expectations and standards which if not met or maintained have the same emotional impact as anyone else who looks at them self and is disgusted with how out of shape they’ve become.

I knew it would happen, I’ve been here before.  In the early years of my bodybuilding career I would spend six months prepping for a show only to binge my way out of competition shape in less than a week.  Over more recent years I’ve learned that if I (as well as most people) can keep from letting one day of binging or cheat meals turn into 2, 3, 4, 5 days or more then maintaining that ideal condition that I worked long and hard to achieve is easy and doesn’t require being on point all the time.  But once you start rolling downhill it’s very difficult to stop and the unfortunate consequence is having to start all over.

Fitness PlanThe idea of starting over can be a little demoralizing if you don’t have the proper mindset.  As I said, I would never give up all the great breakfast, lunch, dinners, wine, beer, and spirits I indulged in over the two week wedding/honeymoon period.  In fact I had planned for it.  All the dieting I had done over those three prior months was in anticipation of all I would do and was a way of mitigating the damage.  I knew from the very beginning that at some point I was going to have to “start over”.  Since it is exactly what I expected it eliminates the pain of feeling like “I blew it”.

The situation—and the emotions that accompany it—is similar to saving thousands of dollars over the course of several months or a year for a vacation you’ve always wanted to go on.  When the time comes to actually pay for the vacation the money suddenly disappears from your account, or the envelope of cash you’ve been saving it in.  You knew it was going to happen, and you would never give up the vacation just to hang onto the cash, but you’re still left with that slight bit of sadness that all you saved is gone in an instant.  It doesn’t make the vacation any less enjoyable it’s just an unavoidable feeling…just like putting weight back on that you worked hard to lose. But the great thing is, if you’ve done it once you can do it again and if you’re committed, the next time should be much easier since you already know what to expect.