Recent Sub-optimal gains

[gunit]

It's definitely not in my diet, I'm eating shit loads of food. My lifts don't seem to go up anymore. I've been doing 5x5 single factor since the beginning of July, so that's around 4 months of non stop training. I have never took even a week off to rest my muscles. These past weeks my lifts have not been going up at all, so I think I'm overtraining even though i'm not exactly sure about it. I decided to take a week off from lifting. But I don't want to start the dual factor program yet because I want to squeeze the most out of single factor before taking the next step. It's really damn annoying also, I only bench 200 pounds and I'm already at a friggin plateau. What do you guys think I should do.

 

[Anthrax Invasion]

Are you gaining weight? If not, you're not eating enough food.

If you're gaining weight, drop the weights back 20 lbs. or so, then try ramping back up again. By the time you hit where you stalled before, you should be able to break through it.

 

[Morrigu667]

your going to haveto stop playing with the weightsdont think of the weight as being to heavy or 'i can't do it' just look at the weight and laugh even if you manage one clean rep your already there.

 

[anotherbutters]

First off, congrats on sticking with it and for all the gains you've made since July! I started at the end of July and I've also just reached my first plateau and also decided to take a week off. Freaky, huh? Whether I'm overreaching or not, the break will do me good and rule it out of the equation, so I can start fresh in a week's time.

Plateaus are bound to happen as your body gets used to the training stimulus, hence the need to introduce more complexity into your training as you go on. I agree that the dual factor is a lot more complex than we need for now and there's a lot to explore in between.

There are a number of things we can try next, but no solid information on what's best. This was discussed in my journal a couple of weeks ago, post 265 onwards:


http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/showthread.php?t=413888&page=14&pp=20

To be honest, what's 'best' is going to be individual, so now might be the time to start experimenting to see how we respond to different strategies. I would still rather have a cookie cutter program to follow, but that's just me. The easiest thing would be to step back to the weights we used three or four weeks ago and ramp up again.

I haven't decided exactly what I'll do after the week off, but I tried doing triples on deadlifts this week and quite liked it, so I think I'll stick with them. Whether that's a good strategy for making gains remains to be seen.

Let us know what you try and how it works for you. This is very interesting for me and I'm sure for a lot of people following the single factor.

 

[AEKDB]

your going to haveto stop playing with the weightsdont think of the weight as being to heavy or 'i can't do it' just look at the weight and laugh even if you manage one clean rep your already there.

I have found that this is always my problem when I plateau.

 

[landser]

Changing exercises is good to. Then when you plateau on the new ones, move back to your older ones, and so on.

 

[Micker]

Maybe switch to dual factor 5x5?? Probably get you going again. Start kinda lite the first week or two and start gaining again!!