They say a change is as good as a holiday. Want to know what’s better? A holiday followed by a change.

If you’ve been training for an extended period of time, normally around 4-6 months for most people, you’ll probably find you’re not making significant gains any more. This is perfectly normal, so instead of fruitlessly plugging away why not try taking some time off to let your body fully recover and prime yourself for renewed gains.

When your gains have ground to a halt make sure you take 7-10 days off. Enjoy your rest and work out a new programme. It doesn’t need to be drastically different - small changes go a long way!

One word of warning - don’t automatically assume you’ve plateaued if gains get smaller. Towards the end of a training cycle, it's normal to see less progress. And if you’re an advanced trainee, you'll obviously be spending most of your time maintaining anyway. It's the couple of strategically short bursts of higher intensity/ volume training 3-4 times per year that give you the biggest gains.

Any plateau busting tips out there?

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I have a rest week off every 4-8 weeks, depending on the routine.

One thing I have noticed with people who do plateau more then others, they do not change their routine - routine structure, exercises and or rep-set range.

For example, always doing bench press and if they given advice to change it, they think incline bench press or dumbbell press would be a change.

Others are always training in the hypertrophy range (6-12 reps per set) and only doing full bodies or a certain split.

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I think I *may* have hit a plateau in terms of weight loss (to be confirmed next week) and I think I was struggling to increase weights much at the end of MM08.
I have since dropped some weights and concentrated on cadence at the start of the DD. I just had a week off. Do you always expect to constantly increasing reps/weights whilst on a calorie deficit?
What about a weight loss plateau? Do you just keep doing what your doing?

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