For anyone embarking on a long term fitness journey, hitting a plateau at some point is almost unavoidable.
As weightlifting women, chances are more likely than not you’re going to hit a plateau in your journey.
It’s essential to recognize that hitting a plateau is just a part of the process.
The most important thing however is to not get discouraged.
All you have to do is evaluate what changes you may need to make, stay patient, and stay consistent.
In this post I’m going to cover some of the best things you can do when you hit a weightlifting plateau.
Take a look at your current routine
Although not always, sometimes we might be hitting a plateau because of our current routine.
There’s a lot of factors that go into making progress in the gym. Our sleep, nutrition, intensity of training, hydration, etc. etc., all play a significant role in our progress.
If you’ve stopped seeing the results you want, or maybe you haven’t seen them at all, it could be because one of these things you’re doing is off.
Common problems that may cause a plateau
There are a lot of things that could be wrong in your routine causing you to hit a plateau. I’ve summed up the most common weightlifting mistakes people make that cause them to hit a plateau.
Here are some adjustments you might want to make to avoid making the most common mistakes that prevent progress.
Consider adjusting your workouts
Because our muscles are always growing and changing, we need to keep adapting our workouts in order to continue to challenge our developing muscles.
There’s a few different ways you need to do this:
Adjust to keep intensity
As our muscles continue growing, they get much stronger. So, we need to adjust our exercises to continue to challenge our muscles, even when they get stronger.
Once your muscles get comfortable with a weight, you need to adjust it to continue challenging your muscles.
You can do this by either increasing the weight of your lift, or by increasing the number of reps you do.
If you increase the weight, it’s known as increasing the intensity. Whereas if you increase the number of reps, it’s known as increasing the volume of your workout.
Both of these are essential to progressively overload your muscles and keep your muscles challenged.
Vary your workouts
Similarly to the way your muscles can adapt to certain weights, they can also adapt to certain exercises.
Because of this, just like you need to change the weight and the reps you’re doing, you also need to change the exercises you’re doing.
Every so often, it’s good to mix up your weekly gym split and the exercises you do each day.
You don’t need to change everything, but you should look to create some variety in your routine.
Here’s how to add variety to your weightlifting routine
Change up your weekly split
Try mixing up the days that you work certain muscles, how often you work those muscle, or the muscle pairings you do.
For example, maybe for the past 6 weeks I’ve been training glutes and hamstrings every Tuesday and Thursday.
To mix it up, maybe I’ll start training quads and glutes every Monday and Friday, and train hamstrings on Wednesdays.
This would be a great way to mix up my split and require my muscles to work and adapt.
Change up the exercises you do each day
You don’t need to completely wipe out all the exercises you’ve been doing, but creating some variety and something new is always good for your muscles.
You can do this by either replacing some exercises in your routine with some new ones, or by changing up the order you do exercises in your routine.
Doing this will again be a great way to do something new for your muscles, causing them to have to change and adapt.
Consider adjusting your nutrition
Nutrition is a necessity in order to make progress in the gym.
Because of this, it’s important you learn how to eat as a weightlifting women.
However, it’s not only about what you eat, but also how much you eat.
Because food is what gives you energy, you need to make sure you’re eating the right foods but also that you’re eating enough food to give your body sustainable energy.
On top of eating correctly, you also need to make sure you’re drinking enough water.
Hydration is extremely important to support and grow your muscles. Hydrated muscles perform better, look better, and feel better. All of this leads to more muscle growth from working out.
Ask yourself if you’re getting enough rest and recovery
You might also need to dive into the importance of rest to make progress in the gym.
Because rest is when you’re muscles recover, it’s also when you’re muscles grow, making it extremely important for gym progress.
If you’ve hit a plateau recently, it could certainly be because you’re not incorporating enough rest days.
If you’re not allowing your body enough time to rest regularly, then your body could very well become burned out.
With this, you’d see a decrease in progress and performance, causing you to have hit a plateau.
A solution to a plateau caused from working out too much could be to take a deload week.
A deload week gives you an extended amount of time off and allows your body to fully rest and recover.
Alternatively, you might be getting enough rest days, however you might not be getting enough of another crucial element for your body to recover. SLEEP!
Sleep is extremely important for muscle growth but it’s something that not a lot of people prioritize.
I get it, life gets busy and there’s just not enough time in the day. But, if you want to see some serious muscle growth and overcome that plateau, you have to consider getting more sleep.
There isn’t always a reason for hitting a plateau…
Sometimes, we’re doing everything right in the gym. Prioritizing our sleep, rest, nutrition, hydration, and keeping up with a good routine.
However, we’ve been in the game long enough that our muscles have adapted so much to working out, causing us to hit a plateau.
This is unavoidable and just means we’ve been doing right for so long.
This is a good thing, whew! Congratulate yourself for having stuck in the game for this long.
However, this is the time we can start feeling discouraged and start questioning ourselves.
Here are the important things to keep in mind when that happens.
This is the mental part of the game
As if it wasn’t hard enough to get ourselves showing up to the gym everyday, now we have to do it seeing no progress!
That’s because this is the mental part of the game. It’s not talked about enough, but there are a lot of mental battles that go into being a weightlifter.
Sure, there are a lot of physical battles too, but that’s something that everyone considers.
Everyone knows it’s hard to go to the gym and have an intense workout when you’re feeling tired, everyone knows you’re muscles feel sore and fatigued after a workout.
But seriously, not many people consider the mental side of things.
Just keep in mind that this is just another mental battle that almost everyone who lifts will have to overcome. Eventually, you’ll be back to seeing great progress again.
Learn how to be patient with your progress
Now’s the time when it’s very important that you learn how to be patient with your gym progress. Progress takes time, and a lot of it. But we knew that going into things.
You’ve been patient and stayed consistent for this long, so you need to keep doing just that. Even when you feel like you’re making no progress, STAY CONSISTENT!
Eventually you’ll push through things and be on the other end, but you can’t do that if you give up.
Don’t make the mistake of becoming discouraged because your progress is slow, you think someone is making more progress than you, or you aren’t where you want to be.
This is how you lose hope and motivation. Don’t make the mistake of also losing your discipline and slipping into a pattern of inconsistency.
Remember that two nonnegotiable things you need to make significant progress in the gym are time and consistency.
You could have everything else down but if you don’t give yourself time and stay consistent, you’ll never get to where you want to be.
So remain consistent even when it gets tough and you WILL get there!
Takeaways
It’s never fun feeling stuck when you’re constantly putting in the work.
Hitting a plateau is the most discouraging part of someone’s weightlifting journey, but almost everyone will have to go through it.
The good news is, it doesn’t last forever.
If you can just stick it out and keep doing what you know you need to be doing, soon you’ll be back to making progress like never before!
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