Why have I stopped gaining strength?

nossmf · April 9

I was making regular progressive overload increases with my program until a few months ago, but I can't regularly hit my set/rep targets anymore.

This statement was made five years ago in a different thread, and I started to type out a response until I realized not only was my answer growing excessively long, but it also was hijacking the original thread. So, just in case somebody has the same question, or on the remote chance @friedpet is still hanging around, here's my take on what caused the change:

When you begin a strength-training program, initially it's easy to see steady, even rapid, gains in strength. Then all of a sudden these gains come to a screeching halt. What happened?

What happened is that gaining strength comes down to three things (the legs of the Triangle of Strength):

Mind-muscle connection
Improving technique
Gaining muscle

Increase any of the sides of the Strength Triangle, and the area inside the triangle (your strength) will increase. During the initial surge of strength gain by newcomers to the sport, nearly 100% of their "newbie gains" come from improving the first two legs. Let me explain.

Mind-muscle connection

For sedentary people (or even athletes who do not use specific muscles, say marathon runners who want to improve their upper body), their brains and their muscles are strangers, with the muscles only doing the bare minimum work to do what's asked of them…walking across the floor requires a mere fraction of effort of what your leg muscles are capable of doing, even untrained.

Once a person starts to exercise those muscles and demand more from them, the neurons in the brain establish more connections to the muscle cells, including cells which had been sitting idle before. When you are now using 20% of your muscle instead of just 10%, your strength increases. Keep training, and over time the brain is now able to access more and yet more of the existing muscle, until you're using a much higher percentage of the muscle.

(You will never actually reach 100%, the brain has built-in limits for safety; a trained lifter could literally snap their own bones just from flexing if these limits did not exist! Elite athletes can push these boundaries, but they still exist. But when you hear news reports of people performing amazing feats of strength to save a life, part of that surge comes from these internal limits being temporarily bypassed in an emergency, allowing 100% recruitment of the muscle.)

Improving technique

At the same time, two people of equal strength performing the same lift may appear to have different strength levels, if one person has better technique and is performing the exercise correctly. The more dialed-in your technique, the easier it is to move the same weight.

And who is best suited to improving their technique? People new to strength training! During these first few months of training, newcomers are learning and practicing technique and reaping the benefits of improved biomechanics, lifting heavier weights at the same strength level.

Eventually, newcomers will notice their strength gains are slowing down or stopping. This is because their brain-muscle connection is as strong as it's going to get, and they have perfected their technique. Does this mean the strength gains are forever a thing of the past? Nope, now it's time to focus upon the third leg of the strength triangle:

Gaining muscle

Give your body the materials it needs (calories and protein) and a reason to turn those extra calories into muscle instead of fat (keep training), and you will gain muscle. Keep the gain slow (250-500 calories per day over maintenance) and the protein high (at least 0.7g/lb of BW) to hopefully ensure your gains are mostly muscle with minimal fat gain.

Unfortunately, gaining muscle is slow, and will be measured in months and years, where the newbie gains often occurred from one workout to the next just days later. Fortunately, these strength gains will be accompanied by the improved appearance of increased muscle. Congratulations, you have graduated from newbie status to long-term-lifter status. Welcome to the club!

yirara · April 10

Cool! Another thought: Sufficient sleep, and not working out every single day.

Unknown · April 10

This content has been removed.

tomcustombuilder · April 10

The curve goes down after you've been lifting for awhile until it stops, then you add more reps and switch your technique around or start using other exercises. If strength continued to go up we'd see 1,000 lb bench presses

Retroguy2000 · April 10

Very interesting first post, but I feel it's conflating strength and muscle building a bit. You touch on it when talking about improving technique, and neurons making connections. That's because it's a skill. Strength is a skill, built with 1-5 reps, not to failure. However, you can also slowly grow strength at higher rep ranges like 10-15, using various progression methods which add more reps and weight and total volume over time. This helps build muscle, which helps with strength. No amount of "bodybuilder" style training of 10-15 reps with great technique will get someone the strength of a powerlifter or strongman though.

What I'm getting at is, if you want to build more strength, maybe you need a cycle focused on strength or power, rather than hypertrophy. Or if strength has stalled, it may be that you've built up fatigue and need a deload, especially if you're in a calorie deficit. Or as Tom says, mix things up.

I would dispute this though:

"The more dialed-in your technique, the easier it is to move the same weight."

Yes and no. For example, it's harder to do a strict curl than a cheat curl, and it's harder to do a slower eccentric than longer, and it's harder to do an eccentric with a pause, and so on. All of those things can be considered better technique, and they're all harder than just banging the weight up and down by any means.

nossmf · April 10

@tomcustombuilder and @Retroguy2000 thanks for chiming in.

Just to clarify, this post was not me personally complaining my own strength has stalled, but was in response to another post I read where a new lifter was highly dismayed that his early gains had stalled and he was wondering what he was doing wrong.

Retroguy2000 · April 10

Yes, when I said things like, "if you want to build more strength", I was meaning the general 'you'.

nossmf · April 10

👍

AnnPT77 · April 10

I feel like this OP is informative and useful for folks we see here often, who are relatively new to lifting, and not necessarily tuned in to expert sources about the physiological underpinnings.

It's common to see people worry in that transition where they start to tap out early strength gains from neuromuscular adaptation (especially the early nervous system changes in recruitment, firing rate, etc.). They can think that gains have stopped when it's that the early strength gains can be fairly fast, but will slow down later, and probably also require more nuanced programming at that point.

I also think that during early strength gains, quite a few posting here may have mistakenly conflated strength gains with mass gains. It seems common to believe that strength increases through mass gains (which it can) but also to believe that strength gain always means there's mass gain (which isn't necessarily the case at first).

The latter is sometimes further complicated by something I've fussed about elsewhere here, the phenomenon where people think they've gained muscle mass in a steep deficit because BF% went way down while weight was lost . . . but when the BF% estimates are converted into estimated BF pounds/kilos, they've actually lost substantial amounts of lean mass, more lean mass than the 20-30% lean mass and 70-80% fat mass that would statistically speaking be a pretty reasonable result. Many people are bad at arithmetic and comparisons that involve percents.

Further, if someone's losing fat, the increasing visibility of pre-existing muscle can further persuade a person that there are mass gains before there are actually mass gains.

Seems like really a lot of people who post here have started strength training and fat loss around the same time period, and when that happens to someone without much knowledge of the exercise physiology, inaccurate conclusions can be drawn. This post speaks to the aspect of "don't give up on increasing strength/mass because progress seems to have slowed", keeping it informal, i.e., not wading too far into the weeds of physiology.

I feel like some of the comments, while excellent and useful, are speaking more to the practical side of progressing, but less to the intellectual/cognitive side of understanding why there may be a pseudo-stall or actual stall point in the transition out of beginner-hood (which can be temporary, with the right practical changes).

tomcustombuilder · April 11

One good way to bump up strength on an exercise is to do ramping. This is an example of ramping for strength, hypertrophy is a little bit different.

This primes the CNS without fatiguing the muscle.

Let’s say your top set goal is 405 lbs x 1:
• Set 1: 135 lbs x 5
• Set 2: 225 lbs x 3
• Set 3: 315 lbs x 2
• Set 4: 365 lbs x 1
• Set 5: 405 lbs x 1 (top effort)

You’re not doing multiple sets at top weight like in volume-focused training. You build up to one or two top-effort sets, then maybe follow up with back-off sets (e.g., 80% of top set for more volume).

Why have I stopped gaining strength?

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