Navigating Plateaus and Skill Acquisition

Plateaus are normal. Plateaus in weight gain, plateaus in fat loss, like plateaus in strength, like that's going to happen. Now, those plateaus are going to happen more often, the more experienced you are. So if you think about this, guys who do Olympic weightlifting, you couldn't find anything that requires more precision and technique than doing Olympic weightlifting. There's no sport known to man where you need that type of technique and rhythm and timing and precision, at least when we're talking about strength sports. You can't just start doing the movement. You have to learn how to do the movement in the most efficient, best way possible. As a beginner, you will get decent enough the first year, year and a half, and you'll see your strength go really like it'll go gangbusters once you understand the movements. But once you get reasonably good at that and reasonably strong, your success is going to slow down. It becomes really frustrating. So it's like, let's say, let's say we'll take a guy, we'll take like for myself, like maybe I started doing Olympic weightlifting and I can snatch 50 kilos. You're going to get to 80 really quick. You could probably get to a hundred pretty quick going from a hundred kilos to 120. It's probably going to take three to four times that length of time going from one 20 to one 50 is going to take again, an additional three, four or five times that amount that time Right So it like you it a patient It everything pay You got to have patience for this This is a this is a long thing You not those you going to get beginner gains which are really great but those aren going to last forever So you have to dig in and use that beginner time to learn your technique. Because if you've gone from the couch to the gym, you're going to get really strong or really strong in relation to your sedentary self really quickly. It's good to focus on a handful of key fundamental exercises or fundamental movements. And not have like training ADD where you're constantly switching your stuff just because you're bored of the movement. And I'm not saying that it's not beneficial to change exercises because it can be. But in those early stages, if you're going to make a decision to change an exercise, make it an exercise that's just different enough. Right. So it's like if I'm learning how to high bar back squat. Great. I can do a high bar back squat with a high heel elevation. That's going to make it really easy for me to learn a squatting pattern. And then if I'm getting bored, use a lower elevation because it's the same movement, but we've now made it slightly different. And because you've lowered the hill, you're going to be able to use more weight. And then when you get bored of that, go to feet flat. Then when you get bored of that, go to a lower bar. So you're still doing a squat pattern. It's just slightly different and improving your mechanical leverages as you move through these. So you could do a year and a half of just squats and just going from high heel to foot flat to, to low bar to box squat. At least it's all still related to a squat pattern. And then you would have learned like eight different variation of squats and you'd be really fucking good at squatting. But what you don't want to do is, well, I'm going to do squat for four weeks. I'm bored of this. I'm going to go do leg press. And now you do leg press for four weeks and you go, okay, I'm going to go do something else. So you go, you go do a hack squat and you get bored of that and you go do a different squat you've now done four five six different squats over the course of six months and you're not good at any of them yeah this kind of reminds me of when i had a complete rant to you on our last call where i was getting so good at my squats i got 125 for three reps and then i went with someone who put me onto a program that even though spots on my goal completely did not give me my spots and then i went back to do spots again when i decided not enough of that and went back to like that's when I went back to my proper coaching style and I was struggling to even get 90 back on that squat and this is the thing like you practice the skill and get good at it but I wanted to quickly go back into what you mentioned with this the plateaus the things like you will see really fast changes at first and I think this is why people go back to CrossFit or not CrossFit go back to F45 in group classes because you are going to see results when that's your first point pull and you're doing it for the first time because anything new is going to get you results. So then you're like, if you stay married to it because you think it's working, it feels like hard work. You're burning calories, which isn't a meaning of you actually getting results, but it feels like you're getting results because you've got them before and you see it physically. So you keep doing it, but that is where you start missing out on all that could be gained from you actually having smart training, smart programming. And this can be the same with like group programs as well, which I will bring that on at the end, but the deadlifts. I finally am starting to deadlift again. I went from 100 to 125, 130 in a space of a month. To me, that is really freaking fast. To a lot of people that can seem really slow. Oh, I only put on this much, but that's only because I'm really good at hinging. I'm really good at deadlifting because I've done it before but most people have to kind of learn these little things that come before the adding of the weights and then you're going to progress really fast and then it's going to slow down and then you're going to get bored you're going to hate the exercise because it feels like you're not progressing you're failing no you're not this is the reality of progress and this is why you need to be patient with yourself which brings me to why coaching is so important for like let me explained one thing though like that 100 to 125 and that that's really fast like i would say it's really fast too like people don't understand that's fucking fast especially a woman your size doing 100 125 now why would that happen well at one point you were close to a 200 kilo deadlift so what people need to understand is a lot of this is teaching the brain how to turn muscles on and off at the right times to move your skeleton. So the reason you can make a jump like that is because you've been there before. So it's still in there. You just have to get the brain to recognize the movement again. And then it goes, oh, I remember this. And now you're putting on like seven and a half kilos per session. It's not necessarily that you got stronger. That strength was already there.