#149: What to Do When You’re Stuck at the Same Weight

If you’ve been lifting consistently and suddenly can’t increase your weights anymore, this episode will help you understand why and what to do next.

I explain why stalling is a normal part of the strength-building process and share four practical adjustments you can make to keep progressing.

P.S. If you missed the last two episodes in this series, I covered what progressive strength training is and the three ways to apply progressive overload, so check those out next: 

• Episode 147: What Progressive Strength Training Is and Why It’s So Effective After 40

• Episode 148: 3 Kinds of Progressive Overload and Practical Tips to Use Them

Enjoy the show!

If you’re enjoying the podcast, and would like to support my work please consider buying me a cup of coffee – link’s in the show notes! 

Transcript

#149: What to Do When You’re Stuck at the Same Weight

[00:00:00] So you've been lifting weights for a while and doing the same exercise over and over again, applying progressive overload, and suddenly you've gotten to this point where you can't really increase reps or weights anymore, your progress has stalled. This is totally normal. And in this episode, we are gonna talk about what to do in this situation. And if we haven't met before, my name is Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, and I am a menopause fitness coach helping women to build strong, lean, functional bodies that look and feel great today and carry us through the decades ahead. Let's get into it.

Now this is a completely normal thing to have happen because if you think about it, if we could just keep applying progressive overload indefinitely, you know, increasing reps. Increasing weights, increasing reps increasing weights, we would be lifting houses, right? Eventually, [00:01:00] and none of us. Is lifting houses, not even those who are on, uh, assisted substances.

So this is a normal thing, and in fact, we all have some kind of a genetic ceiling as far as how strong we are able to get. But let's not assume that we've gotten there yet. You've been working with this one exercise, you've been doing the progressive overload. You've hit the end of it. And a good example is what happened to me.

With my shoulder press. Okay. So I was working on a dumbbell shoulder press. I've gotten up to the top of my rep range and not really moving anywhere from there. And the crazy thing is, of course, when you're working with dumbbells and the dumbbells get heavier, is that. The jumps get bigger, and so there was no way in heck I was going to be able to pick up a 20 kilo (44 lbs) dumbbell when I've been working on 15 kilo (33lb) dumbbells. [00:02:00] That is a huge leap for your shoulders. 

So that leads me to solution number one, switch to another variant of that exercise. So if you think about it in the upper body, you have got four main directions that you're working in. You're doing overhead press or pull. You're doing a horizontal press or pull. Lots of variety. You can do them with dumbbells, cables, machines. So if you've been working on one variant of that switch to another, it may be just different enough that it allows you to get going again and if you're stuck because of a issue like I had where the dumbbell selection just wasn't enough to help me to get to the next level, it may be that the other machine allows you to. So in my case, for example. I moved to the Smith machine, which is still, you know, an overhead press that I'm able to do. But I [00:03:00] can go up in smaller increments. And so I started working on that. So I was able to keep strengthening my shoulder muscles.

And you don't even need to be making switches in equipment. You don't need to go from machine to dumbbells or to cables. You could just switch machines because a lot of times there are options in especially bigger gyms. There might be three different machines for a chest press or for rows.

So just swapping out the machines may be enough of a different stimulus, allowing little bit different parts of your back muscles, your chest muscles to start working so that you can start making progress again.

The second thing you can do is switch to a more stable variant of that exercise. So when you are doing things that are standing or less stable then your body is having to focus on [00:04:00] muscle recruitment and balance at the same time. So shifting to something which is more stable can allow you to start making progress again.

So if you are doing squats, for example, then switching to a leg press machine for your squat pattern exercise, can make a big difference. 

A third thing you can do is switch from doing a bilateral exercise to doing a unilateral exercise. Because when you're using both sides, both limbs, both arms, both legs, then your body has to be like programming the use of the muscle in both, both sides, both limbs, and when you do unilateral work. You're allowing it to focus just on the one limb, and it's kind of a funny thing, but actually a lot of people have found that when you switch to a unilateral exercise, you can actually lift more than [00:05:00] half of what you are doing with the bilateral exercise. So for example, if I am doing leg press with both feet and I switch to doing a unilateral leg press, I'm pretty quickly actually pressing more with the one leg than half of what I was doing with the both legs. If you could keep up with that math, so doing unilateral work for a change can be a great way to move forward as well.

Another thing you can do, which doesn't require any change of equipment, is just change the order of your exercises. You are fresher earlier on in your session, and therefore the exercises that you do then are going to go a little bit more smoothly. I don't know if you've ever noticed that actually, if you have had to swap the order of your sessions, that it may feel a little bit harder to do those exercises that. Suddenly got shifted to [00:06:00] later in your workout. So you can use this to your advantage if you are a little bit stuck on a particular exercise. If you're like, oh, I could almost increase the weight, or I just need a little bit more on this, then bump it up earlier in your session and see if that does the trick.

Another thing you could do is take longer breaks between your sets. You know, the research has actually shown that taking longer breaks is beneficial, but it is kind of boring, right, to hang out during that time. But it can make a real difference. So if you've been doing minimal breaks or maybe even skipping the breaks, which I know a lot of people around me in the weight room do, they're like 20 seconds and they're off to do their next set. That's really not enough. Make sure you're taking at least a minute break and maybe bump that up to two minutes [00:07:00] or even three minutes. So for example, on exercises that I know are really hard for me, like pull-ups, they really take a lot of strength to do. I will rest three minutes between sets, whereas a normal upper body exercises, I only rest the two minutes, so give that a try as well.

And I wanna mention though, we need to be thinking about challenging our muscles and progressive overload as a concept is very useful, especially in the first years of your journey when you are not really close to how strong you can be. Naturally, at some point you are just not going to be able to progress so well. And that's why things like intensity are also very important. So working close to failure, because remember, in order to stimulate change, you just need to be [00:08:00] taking your muscles out of their comfort zone, pushing their limits, and progressive overload is a really useful tool for doing that in a structured manner in the beginning of your strength training journey. Like the first years of your strength training journey. But then after that, you need to be bringing other factors into play to keep going. And next week I'll be talking about intensity of your exercises. So remember to hit the subscribe button to make sure you don't miss that episode.