The Dreaded Forever Intermediate Plateau

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:53 1. Sleep

01:56 2. Cutting too aggressively

03:05 3. Never bulking

05:34 4. Ego lifting

06:52 5. Lack of systematic progressive overload

Transcript:

You’re lifting weights at least three times per week, you’re getting your protein in, but if you look at your photos from last year, you kind of just look the same. What gives? You might be in the dreaded intermediate plateau.

During the newbie gains phase, if you just start lifting weights and you start consuming a high protein diet, most people just make reliably good gains. But these wear off. As you get more advanced your gains start plateauing. There are diminishing returns to further training experience. Welcome to the intermediate stage.

In this video, I’m going to share with you the top six reasons why people get stuck in the intermediate stage and they fail to take their physique to the next level. My experience is based on over 15 years of coaching experience, over 10 years of teaching others coaches how to become better coaches in my PT certification, and have personally competed in physique sports and done fitness modeling.

One of the most underrated reasons is your lifestyle. Specifically, your sleep. Stress is also highly important, but sleep is more under your control and we have more direct research showing that sleep quality and sleep duration have a huge effect on your gains. For example, in one study, sleeping 5 instead of 7.5 hours per day decreased fat loss from 1.4 to 0.6 kg, and it increased fat free mass loss from 1.6 to 2.4 kg. That is an over 50% decrease in fat loss and over 50% increase in muscle loss, or at least fat free mass loss.

Multiple other studies have found similar results, although the exact magnitudes are contested, it is very clear that sleep has a huge effect on your gains. Most people think of sleep as something kind of down the line with supplements, where you have your training and your nutrition, and these are the really important things, and sleep is kind of important, but not really. But in reality, sleep should be up there with training and nutrition as the pillars of your long term results.

The second major pitfall is cutting to aggressively. Many lifters want to just get the cut over with as soon as possible, and end up being in a very significant energy deficit. Research is very clear that there is an optimum energy deficit, beyond which the risk of muscle loss is too large, and fat loss actually doesn’t even increase that much because of the additional muscle loss.

For example, one study on elite athletes found that with a 0.7% weight loss rate per week, they actually managed to achieve a little bit of positive body recomposition, and they had better strength gains than with a 1% weight loss rate, when they actually lost a little bit of muscle mass along with the fat, resulting in a very similar body fat percentage change in the two groups, despite significantly more work, less muscle growth, and less strength gains in the group with the higher energy deficit.

Multiple other studies agree that especially as you get leaner and more advanced, you need to be conservative with the energy deficit. The more body fat you have, the more aggressive you can be with your energy deficit. But if you have a lot of muscle and very little fat, the risk of muscle loss when you’re in energy deficit is very large. So you need to be very careful. However, you also don’t want to spend your whole life close to a maintenance energy intake.

Reason number three is not bulking. I commonly see people that finally managed to get lean with a decent amount of muscle mass without looking anorexic, and then they kind of go into perma-cutting mode because they are too afraid to gain any body fat, and therefore they never really end up bulking anymore. This is also a mistake I personally made, and it really costs you long term gains.

When you get to a certain level of advancement, you’re not going to gain an appreciable amount of muscle mass anymore without being in energy deficit. Research is very clear that energy deficiency impairs gains in muscle mass. You might argue that, since research is clear that you should be doing a lean bulk with a very modest energy surplus, and research is also very clear that you don’t want an excessive energy deficit while you’re cutting, it’s therefore best to spend basically all of your time at energy maintenance.

However, a recent study actually looked at the idea of “gaintaining” or “maingaining”, and it concluded that it’s more efficient to spend your time actually cutting and probably bulking in this time that you save with the faster cut. Specifically, the had one group attempt to be at energy maintenance, and the other group attempted to be in a 10% energy deficit. After ten weeks, the “maingaining” group did actually successfully recomp with one kilo of additional lean body mass and 1.4 kg of fat loss. However, the 10% cutting group lost about twice as much fat: 2.9 kg, while gaining basically the same amount of lean body mass: one kg.

There were also no significant differences between the groups in their gains in bench press and squat 1 rep max strength, and this was in lifters that had an average body fat percentage around 25%. Well, the sample included some women, this is still relatively high, and if you get more advanced, you’re not going to lose an appreciable amount of body fat anymore when you’re at energy maintenance. You stop recomping. Positive body recomposition, gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time is possible, but it’s mostly restricted to novices and intermediates who know what they are doing. In advanced lifters, it gets increasingly difficult and you cannot count on it.

Overall, it’s very clear that your exact energy balance is very important to optimize. Energy balance and training volume, measured as sets per week per muscle group, are probably the two variables that are the most important to optimize. These are such important variables that it’s not just a matter of progressing a little bit faster when you do the optimization, it can actually make or break the program. If you’re interested in having these variables optimized for you based on your stats, check out my MH Physique App. The link is in the description to get a 2 week free trial.

Pitfall number four is ego lifting. It’s very tempting to just force yourself to lift a little bit more weight or do an extra rep, and in doing so, reduce your range of motion just a little bit, or involve some extra momentum from other body parts. What started off being a very strict biceps curl has become kind of a hip swing, shoulder extension, biceps exercise with shortened range of motion. Worse technique plus shortened range of motion is very, very, very bad for your gains.

Research is very clear that shortened range of motion, especially when you are not doing the fully lengthened part of the movement when the muscle is at longest muscle lengths, is bad for your gains, and the magnitudes of effects can be very, very large. So the combination of bad technique and bad range of motion is really pivotal. This is basically consensus in exercise science right now, so I’m not even going to bother referencing this, but what I do in practice with my clients is adopt a zero tolerance policy for technique. It really helps to always focus on technique and range of motion first and foremost, and see that as a hard limit. If you cannot do more reps with the same technique, then you failed. That was failure, and you don’t count any reps where your range of motion shortened or your technique measurably suffered.

Ego lifting also exacerbates problem number five, which is a lack of systematic progressive overload. It can be very tempting to fake your own progress with ego lifting, but it’s not actual progressive overload. Progressive overload is not the cause of your gains, you can’t just add more sets or do more reps with worse technique, progressive overload is the measure of your gains. The fact that with the same technique and the same volume, you can now do an additional rep or lift a little bit more weight than last time is the proof that your last workouts were effective.

If you don’t have progressive overload in your program, where you are getting stronger, measured as additional repetitions or increases in load, anything else I would not deem reliable enough, then you don’t know if you are progressing or not. If you don’t know if you’re progressing or not, and which exercises and body parts specifically are progressing or not, then you don’t know how to update your training program. Your training program update should always logically follow from your actual results. Results drive everything in a logical, evidence based program.

Another very important practical reason to implement progressive overload and always strive to improve your last performance from the last time you did an exercise is that you have clear performance targets, and most people don’t give it 100% effort if they don’t have these targets. If you know you have to get that 9th rep instead of 8, you’re probably going to get it because you are going to try really hard. But if you don’t have that clear target, most people stay a little bit too much in their comfort zone, and if you do that every single time, it can make or break the program. Getting that one additional rep for intermediate lifters is often really all that you’re going to get in that workout. If you’re never getting that additional rep, you get stuck. And that’s how you get the forever intermediate plateau.

To get from the intermediate to the advanced level, you need a systematic, structured training program that has forms of auto regulation, such as reactive deloads. As you get to the advanced level, you probably also need some form of periodization, like daily undulating periodization. In practice, this simply means that you can alternate between different rep targets for the same exercise.

A very simple way to implement this in practice is just to have different rep targets for the same exercise, rather than trying to keep grinding away at the same rep target, because you’re not going to be able to progress linearly forever. In fact, you could argue that the definition of being advanced is that linear, simple progress no longer works. If you want such a structured training plan based on my methods, you can check out the MH physique app in the link in the description.

Regardless of whether you’re using my app, if you have a successful training program that is working and causing measurable progressive overload over time, then for God’s sake stick to it and milk it. I see so many people switch a program because they have some idea of muscle confusion, which I call muscle confusion-confusion, the idea that you have to avoid adaptation and confuse the muscle to do it. It makes no sense at all, because the whole goal of training is to cause adaptation.

You impose a systematic stress on the muscle, it adapts to that stress, and the adaptation is the gains that we are seeking. It is the muscle growth and the strength gains. So when your program is working, then for God’s sake, don’t change it. Stick to it and ride out that nice progress.

When you switch to a new training plan you lose your progression benchmarks. Your training history is now gone, or at least it’s not perfectly 1 to 1 comparable to your current data, so you no longer know if you are progressing or not. The problem is that, especially with new exercises, most of the gains in strength in the first few weeks of a program are neural. Most of these adaptations are just improved neural coordination, not necessarily evidence of muscle growth. So if you keep switching up the program every four weeks, you never know if all those gains were just neural, just you becoming familiar with the exercises, the exercise order, the structure, etc. or if you’re actually building long term muscle mass.

The strongest evidence in practice, if you don’t have access to a dexa scan every week, which most people don’t, is to have consistent long term strength progress on familiar exercises. You cannot fake 30% increases in your squat, your bench press, and other big compound lifts if those are familiar exercises to you. This is almost certainly going to coincide with muscle growth, especially if your body composition data are also positive.

Big picture: most people get stuck after the newbie gains because during the newbie gains phase, as long as they have a high protein diet and they start strength training, they are going to get some gains. And it doesn’t matter what specifically they do, what their training program is exactly, or how their exact diet is set up. As you get to the intermediate stage and you want to get to the advanced stage to take your physique to the next level, you have to become more structured. You need a structured training plan and good structured diet so that you can have an exact training volume, you can implement progressive overload, and you can monitor your energy deficit and surplus and monitor your body composition change to make sure that your strength and body composition are actually progressing in the right direction.

Your progress should guide how you update the training and the nutrition from that point onward. Again, you can do this in my app, or you can keep watching more of my videos to help you design optimized training programs. I hope this helps you take your physique to the next level and see you next time.