Breaking Out: Plateau Busting Strategies – Part 1

You’ve already been there or if you’re a beginner you’ll get there sooner rather then later.

No matter how much effort you put in to your workout progress seems to hit a wall.

Standard advice at this point is to just change your routine.

New exercises, new reps ranges. Confuse those muscles and things will start moving again.

The only problem with this approach is that most of the new progress is due to learning the new routine. And I mean, learning, in it’s broadest sense including learning new motor coordination patterns and learning how to ‘cheat’ on the new exercises.

Sometimes it would be nice to break through a plateau using your existing program because it’s just a lot easier to see if you’ve made progress or not.

The following is one techniques I’ve used to bust through stalling points in my training.

The Reverse Pyramid!

Although there are a lot of different bodybuilding protocols to choose from pyramid sets are probably still the most popular.

A standard pyramid might go:

Warm Up
Set 1 Xkg 10-12 reps
Set 2 Xkg 10-12 reps
Set 3 Ykg 8-10 reps
Set 4 Ykg 8-10 reps
Set 5 Zkg 6-8 reps
Set 6 Zkg 6-8 reps

You can make nice progress with this scheme but as you increase the weight for each rep range you’ll eventually fail to hit your targets on the later sets.

What now? The answer may be Reverse Pyramids.

Warm Up
Set 1 Zkg 6-8 reps
Set 2 Zkg 6-8 reps
Set 3 Ykg 8-10 reps
Set 4 Ykg 8-10 reps
Set 5 Xkg 10-12 reps
Set 6 Xkg 10-12 reps

For Reverse Pyramids I like to warm up with low reps and short rest intervals then rest for a couple of minutes before starting the work sets.

Here’s a real life example using Bent Over Rows

Plateau Week

Set 1 90kg 12 reps, Set 2 90kg 12 reps
Set 3 100kg 10 reps, Set 4 100kg 10 reps
Set 5 110kg 6 reps, Set 6 110kg 5 reps

Reverse Pyramid Week

Set 1 110kg 8 reps, Set 6 110kg 8 reps
Set 3 100kg 10 reps, Set 4 100kg 8 reps
Set 5 90kg 8 reps, Set 6 90kg 8 reps

Break Out Week (back to standard pyramid)

Set 1 90kg 12 reps, Set 2 90kg 12 reps
Set 3 100kg 10 reps, Set 4 100kg 10 reps
Set 5 110kg 8 reps, Set 6 110kg 6 reps

Plateau busted!