You’ve been exercising consistently for a while, and things were going well.
The weight on the bar was increasing. Your pace was improving. Maybe the scale was even trending in the right direction.
And then… things slowed down.
The weight hasn’t increased lately. Your pace has looked the same for weeks. The scale hasn’t moved, even though your habits have been consistent.
When those or similar plateaus occur, it’s tempting to assume something is wrong and immediately change the plan.
But in reality, when progress slows, one of three things is usually happening. And the right response might be to do more, less, or exactly the same thing.
Let’s take a closer look.
The stimulus is no longer sufficient
Sometimes progress slows simply because the body has already adapted to the challenge being presented.
This tends to happen most often early in our journeys. When we’re new to an activity—whether that’s lifting weights, running, or making changes to our nutrition—our bodies usually improve quickly. But because of that fast adaptation, the stimulus that worked last month might no longer be challenging enough to create progress today.
In those situations, the best response is usually to slightly increase the challenge.
That might mean increasing:
- Intensity—using a heavier weight or bumping up the pace
- Volume—adding more reps or sets, or going farther
- Density—doing the same work in slightly less time or otherwise gradually increasing the difficulty of the activity we’re practicing
Recovery or life stress is limiting adaptation
At other times, progress slows not because the stimulus is insufficient, but because the body isn’t fully recovering from it.
This often happens during intermediate stages of training. We start to understand what it takes to improve, and the progress we’ve been experiencing makes us excited to keep pushing forward.
But when we make mistakes at this stage, they tend to be in the direction of doing more rather than doing less: adding extra workouts, pushing every set harder, traveling farther, or constantly chasing a faster time.
Meanwhile, sleep, nutrition, and life stress quietly become the factors limiting adaptation.
In those situations, the best response—slightly reducing the training load or improving recovery by focusing on sleep, nutrition, and stress management—is often the opposite of what we instinctively want to do.
In other words, sometimes less is more.
Adaptation is still occurring “under the hood”
Finally, there are times when progress simply appears to stall even though improvement is still happening.
In a prior tip about myelination, plateaus, and strength development, I discussed how repeated high-quality practice gradually strengthens the neural circuits responsible for producing force. Each individual change is extremely small, but over time those changes accumulate until they reach a critical mass and produce a noticeable breakthrough.
As training experience increases, this type of “hidden progress” becomes more common. Improvements simply take longer to appear.
In those situations, the best response is often to stay the course and continue practicing with renewed patience and consistency.
How do you know which response to choose?
While all three situations can occur at any stage, they tend to appear more frequently at different points along a training journey.
Early on, plateaus usually mean the body has quickly adapted and the challenge needs to increase.
During intermediate stages, plateaus often signal that recovery is lagging behind effort.
And in later stages of progress, plateaus are frequently a sign that improvements are happening more slowly and require greater precision and consistency.
So the first place to start when experiencing a plateau is assessing where you are in your specific training journey.
By “specific”, I mean “in relation to what you’re currently doing”. For example, if you’ve been running for the past 30 years and just recently started strength training, you fall into the beginner category with weights—even though you might be very advanced in the running category.
After you’ve assessed where you are on the experience spectrum, implement the corresponding strategy and allow for a couple weeks to see how the experiment shakes out.
While this isn’t a foolproof plan for picking the correct strategy, it should work more often than not. Either way, it will help you learn what works, what doesn’t, and make you better at choosing the best response the next time you experience a plateau.
Putting it into practice
If progress in your training or health habits has slowed recently, pause before making a major change.
Instead, ask yourself a few simple questions:
- Where am I in my specific training journey?
- Am I still applying the fundamentals consistently?
- Has the challenge become too easy?
- Could recovery, sleep, nutrition, or life stress be limiting my ability to adapt?
In many cases, one of those questions will point you toward the adjustment that helps progress continue.
And occasionally, the answer will simply be to keep showing up and trusting the process.