You signed up, put on your pants, and boldly went outside to do your best work on improving your fitness and health. It was awkward and uncomfortable at first, you were sore all the time, there were lots of new, weird movements and words to learn, but over time it started to make sense. Progress came in fits and spurts, but for several months it was there. And then, like someone turned off the faucet, it was gone…
Where did your gains go?
Now, I’m outlining a common trajectory of someone in a relatively “good” functional training program: one that involves power lifts, basic gymnastics, some metabolic work, and perhaps some properly scaled olympic lifts. One where the type and amount of training you are doing is sufficient for progress, but some other factors are blunting your body’s response.
The reasons you might start to hit plateaus and roadblocks are many, and unique to your background and situation for sure. But there are some common ones that are quite solvable, and your awareness of them might be the missing link to help get the needle moving again.
The basic premise is this:
Not Enough Stress < Sufficient Stress < Too Much Stress
If you aren’t doing some sort of structured functional fitness, well, if you care about your progress you probably should, because there is such a thing as “not enough stress,” and though we can generalize it to “couch potato,” often it can manifest in more subtle ways. Like going to the gym but spending most of your time chatting with friends and running out of time, or doing the same machines + treadmill routine and wondering why you’re not getting the results you want.
But assuming you have resolved to do some training with intention, the TL;DR is this: you gotta do meaningful work, but not too much. And what constitutes “enough” or sufficient stress is a moving target that changes primarily with how close you are to reaching your maximum potential, and with age.
The graph above (from Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe) outlines these general principles. As you can see, there is a ceiling for what you are capable of long-term, your “individual genetic potential.” Honestly, this is a helpful concept, but of limited utility because it cannot be pinned down, only guessed at for a given exercise as you progress further and further along in performance and years. It will of course go down over time as you age up significantly (every 5 years or so).
We could spend all day talking about what this graph means, but the two points I want to emphasize are:
1) Progress (rate of adaptation) will slow down, but not remarkably until you have been training with purpose for 2+ years in a single modality (e.g. all I do is squats), which almost no one does.
2) If you want to get closer to your potential, or if you are already in a cohort that has a lower ceiling (e.g. due to age or health/medical complexity) you must get your lifestyle factors that push the performance curve down under control.
What happens in reality is that these lifestyle factors that are at least somewhat under your control: your sleep, physical and emotional stress, fatigue, nutrition, progressive overload, weak links in your mobility or kinetic chain — get neglected, and you reach an artificial plateau sooner than necessary.
And because those lifestyle factors are often habits and therefore seemingly hard to change, we often look for the comforting distraction of increasing training complexity. This often manifests as layering on extra metabolic work (just do more!), but can also get into the weeds of “secret squirrel programs,” which are basically mash-ups of multiple different training programs, arising from the same “more is better” thought process.
These are the tactics of avoidance that come from feeling unable to make the necessary changes in your lifestyle factors here and now.
It’s an understandable feeling honestly. The pandemic has put us all at a higher base stress than we’re used to, and that affects all of the other lifestyle factors for sure. Understanding how your lifestyle choices and pressures intersect your health and fitness is a messy, tangled web. Nevertheless, the answers you seek are there in unpacking your behaviors and root causes for them, and in learning to work smarter, not harder.
The simplest (but not easiest) things you can do right now are:
- Get your sleep quality and quantity in a healthy range. It will help you think more clearly about the rest of the process
- Work your protein intake up to 1 gram per pound of bodyweight per day. You will win at this via planning and preparation that the clear thinking from sufficient sleep will enable
- If you have chronic emotional stress that you cannot simply remove from your life, find a good therapist
- Stretch more, walk more, do fewer intense workouts and do more structured ones that fit your unique goals and circumstances
Each one of those are at least small hills to climb, and could take you several months or more to crack the code on in your unique situation. But they’re worth it, and will get you closer to realizing your unique potential than anything else will.
Coach Mauricio