You rarely walk right up to a training plateau and see a sign that says, “You’ve reached a plateau here.” More likely, it creeps up on you slowly until you realize, “Hey, this workout is just as challenging as it was a few weeks ago,” or, “This particular drill isn’t progressing.” Sometimes you hit a wall because you lose motivation, the feeling of putting in effort just to get better starts to disappear. For a beginner, this can happen surprisingly early, especially after the first burst of excitement wears off. The good news is that a plateau usually does not mean the body has stopped adapting. It usually means practice has become too vague, too repetitive in the wrong way, or too demanding to recover from properly. There is no real worry if you start to hit plateaus early on, though. Often, it just means your body is still adapting, and all that’s needed for the progression to continue is to be a bit more specific in the type of practice you employ.
One of the most common reasons a beginner will hit a training plateau is the failure to work on technique. Say that you are doing three sets of 10 air squats 3 days a week and you aren’t seeing any improvement. If your reps in each set look the same as they did at the beginning of your training (but aren’t perfect reps, necessarily), you are essentially just practicing the exact movement that is stopping your progress. Instead of just repeating your drill, pick a goal to work on during the drill. So with a bodyweight squat, you might want to keep your heels down, you might want to focus on knee tracking, or you might want to pause for a second at the bottom of the squat each time.
Plateaus can be related to recovery issues, too. It is easy to think that if you are really sore, you have worked hard, but that usually means you are working hard at getting more sore. If you feel heavy, sluggish, and tired all the time and do not want to train the same as you would have before, it does not mean that you are being lazy or that you cannot handle your training. Sometimes you are just doing too much in your training for your current level. In these cases, you may need to trim volume before changing everything else. If you are doing 4 rounds of your drills each day, drop it down to 2 or 3 and keep the quality high.
In these times, it is useful to take a few days off and reset. In these times, you may be able to do 15 minutes of a lower body drill, an upper body drill, and a conditioning drill without any of them really being too hard on you. You do not want to push these drills, though. Do 4 minutes of mobility, think hip circles, arm circles, ankle rocks, etc. Then do 7 minutes of alternating between two different drills and take as much rest as you can in between reps, making your movement very deliberate (say chair squats and incline push-ups). Then do 4 minutes of walking or doing step ups or some other active recovery method, just to keep your pulse down. The reason these types of drills will be so beneficial during these times is that they allow you to take stock of your own movement. You are not trying to complete a set of exercises, but to see if you can move with less effort or maintain better posture. You are checking to see if you are maintaining good breathing patterns, which are often more difficult to maintain when your body is in a fatigued state than usual.
During your plateau, it is also helpful to have some means of feedback to ensure that you are actually improving. The reason feedback is often helpful is that you usually do not feel like you are improving until you actually get worse before you get better. One way to improve this process during plateaus is by keeping a simple log where you write a few notes on how your body felt throughout your workout. If you are doing squats, make your progress check if you are able to reach more depth with good form. If you are doing pressing, you may check to see if you can keep your core tight, rather than sagging. If you are doing a conditioning drill, you may be able to check to see how long it takes you to catch your breath. It does not always have to be that complex, though. “Last set felt off because I got off balance” is a useful bit of feedback, as is “I felt better during the second set than in the first.” While it is tempting to look to your workouts as progress markers, and while longer workouts and harder workouts are often a sign of improvement, there are often many other signs to look at, including smoother movement, better rhythm, and less tension.
One last thing to note when you hit a plateau is that it can be very easy to get stuck in your head. It is common for people to stop trying things that they were once successful at when they feel frustrated. People will often turn to trying something completely different in order to escape the boredom. Sometimes this is a great thing, but when your progress feels stagnant you should look at whether a new variation is helping you to reach your goal or simply distracting you from the one that you are currently using to meet that goal. If you are really struggling with push-ups off the ground, try a higher surface to start from and try to work your way up to the ground. If you find yourself breathing hard during an interval, maybe you need to shorten the distance or steady the pace more in order to make it more effective. If you struggle with the lower body during training, focus on the negative phase of the movement and hold it before the movement ends. These small changes in your training can be great at keeping you grounded in your practice. You may even find some progress if you just give your body time to adjust to the movement you are repeating and let repetition and patience guide your practice.