Approaches to plateaus(?)

@Alessandro Mainente I’d love your thoughts about the following 3 approaches to dealing with plateaus:

1) increasing rest times

2) regressing a movement to finish the prescribed reps in a set

3) Working through the progressions again. 
 

My questions:

Increasing rest time: if I can complete all reps and set for an exercises but I can’t to it at the pace in the follow along videos, would you keep working at that level and just gradually try to reduce rest times?

regressing a moment: have you found this to be an effective way to work toward completing your goal sets/reps? The idea being that I am committing to the volume, and simply aiming to increase the volume I can achieve of the target exercise before having to regress the movement until the entire volume is completed using the target exercise  

working progressions again: I can’t find it again, but I thought I heard a podcast from Coach Sommer where he praised one of his students. He said this student would rework all the progressions leading up to a movement if the student hit a plateau at that movement. Is the proper way to do this simply to check the mastery level of each preceding movement? For example, if I’m stuck on elevated rows, then check incline rows at 5x15, then next workout check ground rows at 5x15, etc?

Thanks,

Manny 

17 hours ago, Manuel Hernandez said:

@Alessandro Mainente I’d love your thoughts about the following 3 approaches to dealing with plateaus:

1) increasing rest times

2) regressing a movement to finish the prescribed reps in a set

3) Working through the progressions again. 
 

My questions:

Increasing rest time: if I can complete all reps and set for an exercises but I can’t to it at the pace in the follow along videos, would you keep working at that level and just gradually try to reduce rest times?

regressing a moment: have you found this to be an effective way to work toward completing your goal sets/reps? The idea being that I am committing to the volume, and simply aiming to increase the volume I can achieve of the target exercise before having to regress the movement until the entire volume is completed using the target exercise  

working progressions again: I can’t find it again, but I thought I heard a podcast from Coach Sommer where he praised one of his students. He said this student would rework all the progressions leading up to a movement if the student hit a plateau at that movement. Is the proper way to do this simply to check the mastery level of each preceding movement? For example, if I’m stuck on elevated rows, then check incline rows at 5x15, then next workout check ground rows at 5x15, etc?

 

Thanks,

Manny 

 

 

Hi Manuel, weel...

option 1: yes its is fine especially when you move from a 5-6 reps in a set up to 10...some people need more time to adapt to metabolic stress

option 2:  there are 2 option. reduce the intensity (not the movement) for example with pullup use a little elastic band. another option is the strenght rest pause, i mean i need to do 10 reps. i do 7, i rest 20'', i do the remaining 3. with the time i reduce the intraset rest. another option is clustering....in the previous case i split th 3 remaining reps into cluster so 1 reps, rst 5'', 1 rep, rest 5'', 1 rep. the next time i begin to take off the rest from the last rep nor from the first of the cluster. it is counter intuitive but it works better... a lot

option 3: never used

option 4: regress the schema and rebuild it i mean... i do 4x4, 5x4, 6x4... and i stuck on 6x4....i do a step back and the move forward again.

option 5: "  increase the gap"...sometime to "convert" a schema to another for example 5x4 to 5x5 you need more work on the "reps" range so build to 6x4 and 7x4 it is better...my suggestion is to reach a 20% more of the volume you want to convert. i mean 5x5 is 25 rep, if you do 7x4r is 28....something similat to a 205 more compared to 25 rep...

Very helpful, thank you Alessandro.