Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher tackle one of the biggest frustrations in fitness—plateaus. They break down why plateaus happen, the role of recovery, nutrition, and mindset, and how to adjust your training to keep moving forward. Tune in to hear why slow progress is better than doing nothing at all, the importance of balancing effort with rest, and practical strategies to help you train smarter and stay consistent even if you’re not seeing any progress.

• Amy and Dr. Fisher start by exploring factors that influence our workout performance. 
• What is a plateau? According to Dr. Fisher, a plateau isn’t a dead end—it just means progress is happening in ways you can’t see.
• Dr. Fisher on workout performance: Your workouts aren’t just about what you do in the gym—everything from sleep to stress to hydration plays a role. 
• If you’re running on fumes, skipping meals, or not drinking enough water, your body won’t have what it needs to perform at its best.
• According to Amy, what you eat before a workout can make or break your session. A heavy meal leaves you sluggish, cutting carbs completely drains your energy, and too little protein slows down recovery. The better you fuel your body, the better it performs.
• Dr. Fisher on recovery: Muscles grow and get stronger during rest, not during your workout. 
• Dr. Fisher breaks down the bitter truth about recovery: You might think you’ve bounced back from a tough workout, but recovery isn’t just about soreness going away. Your hormones, muscles, and energy systems all need time to reset.
• Amy on overtraining–It’s easy to think that pushing through fatigue will get you better results, but your muscles need time to repair after intense workouts—if you don’t give them that time, you’re only making it harder for your body to perform at its best.
• Understand that recovery is personal–some people bounce back in a day, others take longer.
• Dr. Fisher shares his thoughts on hydration. Even being slightly dehydrated can make your workout feel harder than it should. 
• Amy and Dr. Fisher talk about exercise mindsets. 
• Some days, you walk into a workout ready to go. Other days, your mind resists it and everything feels harder. The trick is to show up anyway—once you start moving, your body usually catches up.
• The key to long-term progress in strength training is making workouts sustainable so you can keep benefiting from them for life. A good personal trainer will emphasize building habits that last, not just quick results. 
• For Amy, not every workout will be your best, and that’s okay. Even on an off day, you’re still doing more for your body than if you skipped it entirely. 
• Dr. Fisher on chasing numbers. If you’re obsessing over one bad workout or a lower number on the bar, you’re missing the bigger picture.
• Dr. Fisher talks about process vs. outcome: Chasing a specific number can be frustrating. Focus on the process—consistent training, good nutrition, proper rest—and the results will take care of themselves.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher discuss how and why plateaus happen. 
• No matter how well you train, you will hit a plateau at some point. Accepting it as part of the process makes it easier to push through.
• Why do plateaus happen? No one fully understands why they occur, but they happen in every form of training. Your body adapts to stress, and sometimes it needs a little extra challenge or rest before making the next leap forward.
• The relationship between strength and life span. 
• Understand that strength training isn’t just about fitness—it’s about maintaining the ability to move freely and do the things you love for as long as possible.
• Dr. Fisher breaks down the myostatin factor and why your body naturally limits muscle growth.
• For Amy, even if you hit a plateau, you’re still miles ahead of where you’d be if you weren’t training at all. 
• Dr. Fisher on sustainability: Strength training isn’t about complicated programs or extreme effort like most personal trainers want you to believe. It’s about what you can stick with for life. 
• The reality of plateaus: Whether you’re lifting, running, or training for any sport, plateaus are inevitable. But they’re not a sign to quit—they’re a sign to adjust, stay consistent, and trust that progress is still happening.

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If we think of strength training like brushing our teeth, you know, I brush my teeth so that I have my teeth when I’m older, and I train my muscles so that I’ll have my muscles when I’m older and for good systemic health.

Even if your workout isn’t as 100% today, you’re still doing 10 times better than your friend who’s at home sitting on the couch. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and wellbeing. I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co-hosts are Brian Saigon, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training.

And now for today’s episode.

In today’s episode, we are talking about the factors that influence our workout performance. Have you ever thought that you were plateauing in your exercise efforts or that you weren’t seeing that constant improvement up into the ride that you were plateauing in your exercise efforts or that you weren’t seeing that constant improvement up and to the right that you were hoping for. We’re going to talk in this episode about what causes plateaus, what causes and what factors to

consider when looking at your progress going through an exercise program. I am here with Dr. Fisher and we are going to cover a lot of information that I hope helps you to evaluate correctly where you’re at in your journey and also perhaps to give yourself some grace when it comes to considering you know where you are on any given day with your exercise efforts. Hi Dr. Fisher, I am so excited to tackle this topic with you today. How are you?

I’m doing great today, Amy. Thank you. How are you doing?

I’m doing well.

I am doing well.

Great.

Well, let’s let’s start by diving into my brain question first that I would love to share. And the reason why I’m interested in this is because our coaches do end up sharing and encouraging our clients oftentimes with these reminders. And that is, what factors on any given day are going to influence workout performance?

What are those factors and why is that the case? Let’s start there. What are some of those things?

Yeah, so there’s definitely a number of factors that can influence day-to-day performance. Our hydration levels, our energy levels, maybe the sleep that we’ve had, the current stresses in our life, and they may impact our present state of fatigue. For example, if it’s stress or if it’s previous workouts or if it’s having been woken up early or not having had a good night’s sleep. If it’s nutrition or hydration then that might simply impact our body’s ability to produce energy on demand or as on demand as we’re requiring it in a strength training workout. So there are certainly a number of factors that could influence kind of a day-to-day variation in strength performance.

Can you give me an example of, with nutrition for example, what type of nutritional changes might somebody be implementing that may influence their body’s ability to produce that quick energy?

Yeah, certainly. So, I mean, first of all, if people haven’t eaten, you know, in a number of hours before a workout So, I mean, first of all, if people are having eaten, you know, in a number of hours before a workout, and I mean in multiple hours before a workout, or if there’s religious fasting like Ramadan or anything like that, then their energy levels might be particularly low. So their ability to produce the energy, the adenosine triphosphate is the actual energy kind of molecule that’s used in strength training, that’s used as that immediate source of energy when we perform exercise. And our ability to produce that quickly is limited. If somebody has changed their diet and they’ve maybe, they’ve cut carbohydrates out of their diet, then in the short term, their energy levels might drop while their body kind of finds a natural homeostasis with their current intake of proteins, carbohydrates and fats and things like that. If they’ve had a particularly heavy carbohydrate meal, they might actually just feel a bit sluggish. I’m sure many people perhaps around Thanksgiving have kind of experienced that time immediately after the meal where it’s easy to kind of sit down and you know fall asleep on the couch because we’ve got that kind of natural diurnal variation, so just variation of energy level in the day anyway based around our hormones but also as a product of kind of a southern influx of of calories and of sugars our bodies working to digest and to kind of direct those sugars around our body that actually it’s challenging to then go produce energy to do exercise in that process or as required. So there’s kind of a number of factors around there that certainly can impact day-to-day exercise performance.

Yeah, we talked in another episode about eating before and after a workout and the other one that we’ve mentioned to clients before is protein and we have seen clients when they eat enough dietary protein their performance feels a little bit stronger to them and they’re able to sometimes add more muscle mass. Getting adequate dietary protein is important for those that are strength training.

Can you talk a little bit more about how other exercise or where our recovery is at? Why does that influence today’s workout?

Absolutely. So we’ve got to remember that exercise is a stress or a stressor on the body. We apply it as a stimulus to create an adaptation and the adaptation doesn’t occur during the exercise. It occurs after the exercise. Well, as soon as we recognize that exercise is a stress, we’ve got to look at the number of other factors in our life that might also impact us in a stressful way. And we might only think of them as being psychologically stressful, but they can effectively have the same physiological impact by increasing maybe our cortisol levels or so forth. So for example, employment, our work, there might be stress factors there. We might have deadlines with family or with employment, there might be for example money stresses or sitting in traffic, anything like that can also act as a stressor on our body and can impact our hormones in a way that can inhibit our body’s ability to produce energy and our body’s ability to perform in a workout.

We would tend to look at those things and say, well, maybe they don’t make a big impact. But if we’re looking at specific numbers, and of course, when you use exerbotic strength training equipment, you see the numbers in front of you on the screen. So that’s where that kind of data could be incredibly useful, but we can also potentially get a little bit bogged down by chasing numbers and looking at the numbers and saying, oh well I was at 350 yesterday and I’m only at 345 today. So that’s where we might see that that variance occur. That makes sense, yes, and that’s, is that the same reason then why stress itself influences today’s workout is that I’m already under stress. Yeah. And my recovery maybe isn’t there.

Yeah.

100%. So if we haven’t recovered from our previous workout, even if it was a few days back, we might think that we are recovered, but there’s a hormonal recovery as well as a muscular and acute recovery within the muscle and within our energy systems. So if we haven’t got our hormones back into kind of a balance, then our ability to suddenly, uh, demand our body to perform a given task, and we know that the, the workouts that the exercise coach are, you know, they’re the right intensity, they’re sufficiently high intensity that a person is working hard. So if our hormones aren’t balanced, then they’re certainly going to impact that. And that might be a product, as you said, of a previous workout or of other societal factors.

Right.

Overtraining can lead to that. If somebody did a lot of intense gardening the day before they come in for their exercise session and they’re not fully recovered or they’re still sore, they’re not going to see the same ability to generate force as they normally would had they not had that that day. And so it’s important to factor that in. Exactly and what one of the things that we found in some of our research over the years was that especially working with people that maybe had low back pain or people who had poor, functional performance day to day, as they would get stronger and as their functional performance would improve, they would then go and do more and more day-to-day activity, which of course is great for them. And we would never discourage that, but they come in on a Monday and we look at the numbers and go, Oh, you’re a bit, you’re a bit weaker today, you’re not as strong today or whatever it might be. And they say, oh yeah, I went for a hike yesterday, I haven’t been for a hike for six months. Well, of course, that’s also a novel stimulus. That’s quite a different stimulus from what they’ve done. So there’s quite a degree of muscle damage attached to that if it’s a different stimulus than they’ve done. If it’s a large amount of exercise, like you said, a few hours gardening, uh, where we’re maybe in a kneeling position or, or, you know, our muscles are lengthened or a short in the position, if it’s a posture we’re unfamiliar with, there are, there are kind of stress hormones attached to that as well as the impact at a muscular level.

I like what you said. And that brings up a point that we want people to understand is that after any kind of a stress or, or using your muscles your muscles, working them, training them, exercising, there’s a recovery period that your muscles need. There’s a repair period when you’ve adequately stressed your muscles in a workout or doing something else strenuous that the repair has to happen before your muscles are ready to really function at 100% again.

And so for some people that takes 48 hours, for some people that takes 72 hours. And so you have to learn your own, you have to kind of listen to your own body. Um, sometimes to give yourself that, that grace that you may need, um, that to understand that some days you might not you may not have given yourself enough time to fully recover and that’s okay, you can still choose to strength train, but understanding that your performance may not be what it’d be if you weren’t fully recovered.

Yeah, exactly. And you talk about the natural kind of variation between people. There was a study done a number of years back now and the uh it was quite a significant amount of exercise uh of eccentric exercise which is the the most notable exercise in in uh in creating muscle damage and elevating hormones and it was a high volume as well it was a program specific to uh to create a very big stress response but they found that in some of the participants, their hormones hadn’t reached a balance even after 18 days. So if we do the high enough or a sufficiently intense amount of exercise and we don’t allow our body time to recover with appropriate nutrition, appropriate rest and so forth, then there will be a prolonged recovery period required to allow our body to adapt to that exercise. Wow, 18 days is pretty crazy, but that must have been a sufficient stress for sure. So we’ve covered, just a recap here, are the factors that influence our performance. You mentioned hydration. Actually, can you tell us why hydration influences my workout performance?

Yeah. So there’s a number of things. So, uh, as an academic, the, one of the things that I always pointed at to my students with regards to hydration is it can impact attention. By about 10%. So if somebody is dehydrated, their attention can drop by around 10% and that kind of mental focus, um focus can decrease, but also their ability to kind of create energy on demand, as we talked about before, can be impacted. Uh, uh, hydration is one of the biggest things that impacts fatigue very, very quickly. And that’s why we often see, you know, in endurance events like a 10 K or marathons, half marathons, we see a lot of water stations, the importance of staying hydrated to allow our body to continually produce energy to perform the task. So it might even be that we see in some workouts that we can start the workout and the first rep is great and our strength per se hasn’t dropped, but maybe it’s our muscular endurance that’s actually limited by our hydration level. Um, and we only obviously see that later in the workout after subsequent repetitions or subsequent exercises.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So we’ve covered hydration, we’ve covered sleep and stress, you know, recovery. Um, your body’s not really ready. Sometimes we’ve covered nutrition and one final area that we sometimes remind clients, you know, just our mindset on a given day or a level of focus on a given day can impact our workout. Um, you know, coming into a workout, it’s important to keep in mind, we’ve talked about this on other podcasts that muscle burn is our friend. It should feel challenging. And so if we come in, um, having sort of an aversion to working hard that day, for whatever reason, it’s going to be a little bit more of a slog on that day, right? Because we’re sort of resisting mentally, the participation in the in the workout that we are trying to achieve. But, you know, that’s where our coaches come in and remind us just to give what we can. And one phrase I love to encourage clients with if they come in on a given date for their exercise session and they say I just don’t want to be here today, I’m not in the greatest mood, you know sometimes we like to say well even though even if your workout isn’t as 100% today, you’re still doing 10 times better than your friend who’s at home sitting on the couch and not working out.

Right. It’s just, you’re still doing that positive behavior. You’re still taking a stride forward, even if it’s not beating all of your records. And so I hope people find that encouraging.

Right. A hundred percent.

And that kind of leads me into another thing that we talk about when we talk about plateaus. And that’s the idea that there’s, there’s a natural fluctuation in performance anyway, once we kind of begin to reach a plateau. Um, and it’s only because we have the numbers directly in front of us that we, that we chase those numbers. Um, so for example, you mentioned the client whose friend is on the couch.

Well, anybody can only give what they’ve gone any given day and that’s it. And the idea of doing something and doing something productive is more often than not better than doing nothing. Um, unless there,, unless they maybe trained that morning or the previous day, you know, there’s certainly, we’ve already talked about the amount of rest that’s required.

But the fact that we’re chasing these numbers means that we, we often then think, Oh, maybe I didn’t have a good workout or maybe I’m not making progress anymore. And I think we do have to remember that there is a natural variance in our performance day to day anyway, uh, almost irrespective of hydration or nutrition or other stresses.

And, you know, we might go into the workout feeling great and our numbers aren’t quite as good as maybe the previous session. And I guess the point that I’m making here is there’s a degree of sensitivity in the numbers that we’re chasing. So, uh, you know, the example that I gave to you before we stepped on, uh, on air today was if I get on the scales today and I weigh 190 pounds and I get on the scales tomorrow and it’s 189.5 pounds, then, then not only anybody would think that that’s a weight loss. They would just think that that’s just a natural fluctuation from day to day. So if you’re on a machine and your strength is 300 pounds and tomorrow or the next session, your strength is, um, you know, has dropped by five or 10 pounds, that’s arguably not a decrease. That’s really a natural variance in your performance on any given day. of a negative performance. It’s effectively a plateau as we are talking about today.

And I think that’s a helpful reminder to people is that we don’t, we have to be careful drawing conclusions based on one day’s data. Because we understand that it’s natural for things to fluctuate on a day-to-day basis. So thank you for that reminder. I know, you know, for the rest of this episode we do want to dive a little bit deeper into the topic of plateaus and you know, let’s think about an actual plateau, so more of an extended period of time where somebody isn’t seeing up into the right progress in their muscle mass, can, can you start by describing really what a plateau is, um, in the sense that we’re going to talk about it for the rest of this episode?

Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, for those of you watching on YouTube, I’m going to put some figures up on the screen now, some diagrams and some images to support this and I’ll do my best to describe those for the people listening on the podcast. So the image on the screen right now shows two different curves. The left is what’s called a logarithmic curve and that’s what we tend to see an increase in the initial stages and increasing results on the y-axes and they effectively diminish and begin to plateau over time on the x-axes. And on the right hand side we can see what’s called our exponential growth curve and that might be something that we see in technology, technological development. We might see that in bacteria, we might see in populations or disease or so on and so forth. And it’s the same thing we see over time, an increase in growth, an exponential increase in the results. Now we tend to track the numbers where we would see a, um, a logarithmic adaptation. So if we’re looking at strength, we know we’ll make strength, strength increases relatively early. Uh, if we’re beginning a workout, you know, in the first six weeks of a workout, we’ll make considerable strength increases and maybe after six months, we will have started to plateau.

And if we’ve been training for six years then we’re probably further along that kind of plateau line and that might be a steady increase or it might be a an exact plateau it might be that the numbers just aren’t shifting at all. We might see the same with weight or with weight loss and fat loss or we might see the same with muscle mass increases. So a lot of the numbers that we have great access to, we do tend to see this curve. One of the things that I often highlight with this is that there are a lot of other factors at play within our bodies where we’re not necessarily seeing this curve and we just simply don’t know. So for example, there are a lot of morphological adaptations occurring within the muscle that maybe don’t occur early on, but after a period of time, they might occur more exponentially. There’s something called myokine release, which is the protein release from muscular contraction, which is a signaling, from muscular contraction, which is a signaling messenger that travels around the body and positively impacts different organs and our overall systemic health. And we know that that increases more based on a repeated bout effect. So the first workout might stimulate some, but then as we get into a pattern of doing more workouts, we know that my kind of release can can sort of increase from there. So just because the numbers that we’re tracking. Are plateauing doesn’t mean that the other numbers that can be positively impacting our health well being by mineral density, glucose regulation, myokine release are following the same curve. And I guess I raise this because I would hate to think that somebody is tracking their strength when they see a plateau and they think oh I don’t need to train anymore or I shouldn’t train anymore I’m not getting any stronger because there’s a lot more happening behind the scenes or under the surface that we’re just not seeing. Wow, I really like that reminder. It’s easy to take one metric and then make that mean way more than it should in terms of our conclusions about our progress and in our health. It’s kind of like I’m picturing if you take a bar graph showing your progress in every area that we potentially could measure or that we may improve when it comes to exercise like you just mentioned. Our bone density, even our mood, I mean every factor that we can that we can see improvements in. You know our disease risk, our metabolic health, like if we measured all of those every workout and saw our bar graph on those, I mean, we can’t, but if we did, we may see, um, all these wonderful peaks in other areas that are kind of hidden or they’re behind the scenes and then, but, but yet we’re focusing all of our attention on the one metric, you know, our strength or our muscle performance.

And it’s unfair to draw the conclusion that what we want to have happen isn’t happening or we may artificially get discouraged because we’re focusing on that one metric. And so thank you for that reminder because it’s so true.

So true.

Yeah.

And I think to some extent lends itself back to the podcast we did about goal setting at the start of the year. We talked about being process driven, not outcome driven. If we’re outcome driven, then we’re chasing a number. And if that number is not moving in the direction we want to see, then we might become disheartened. Or once we achieve that number, we might kind of lose interest. whereas if we’re process-driven and if strength training is more about the process of engaging in it rather than the numbers that we’re seeing, then we can allow all those other positive adaptations to occur without fear that the one that we were chasing isn’t changing. So we just become more process-driven instead of outcome-driven.

Great reminder, great reminder.

So just moving on, there have been a couple of nice kind of papers published that have talked about plateau. This is a 2022 paper published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. For those of you watching on YouTube I’ve shown an image of it there. For those of you listening it’s titled a subject tailored variability based platform for overcoming the plateau effect in sports training, a narrative review. Now, don’t fear, I’m not going to get into detail of this paper, but I guess what I’m highlighting here is that a plateau is to some extent inevitable in everybody in most physiological outcomes. So this is talking about in athletes in sports training. So whether it’s speed over 100 meters, whether it’s throwing or jumping, running, whatever it might be, a plateau is almost inevitable. We will make adaptations, but those adaptations are not infinite. There’s another paper shown here by Jeremy Lonecki’s group, the plateau and muscle growth with resistance training and exploration of possible mechanisms. And a big shout out to

Jeremy Lonecki at University of Mississippi. Prior to this, a few years back, he titled the paper something about muscle growth and then managed to get in the, uh, the famous Toy Story phrase to infinity and beyond, uh, making the joke that. You know, our adaptations are not infinite. Our strength and our muscle growth adaptations are not infinite. Now within this paper, obviously he’s talking specifically about muscle growth, but he makes some really nice points, um, that I’m going to raise if I can.

In this case, she says, in a broad sense, muscle growth can be dictated by both exogenous, e.g. resistance training or nutrition-related variables, so external to the body, and endogenous, e.g. genomic, epigenetic, transcriptomatic, and proteomic variables. So there’s that external factor of what we’re doing that might impact our adaptation. And then there’s an internal kind of physiology that’s going to impact our response to that stimulus.

And of course, we’ve said that this is around muscle growth, but this is around most variables and most physiological outcomes, but also many, many health outcomes as well, because some people are predisposed to their, a certain body composition or predisposed to certain medical conditions and so forth. So it’s important to kind of recognize that our body is, is already kind of built a certain way and will react, um, independently and individually compared to other people, uh, to the stimulus that it, uh, that is acted upon it.

We mentioned that in another episode. Yes. My, my outcomes and my results or how my workout influences me really is dictated by many of my own genetics or internal factors going on. And then what you just said here too, there’s some external factors that are going to influence it as well so I am following along that makes sense. Okay so moving on, the key points from this research paper he raises that the first key point was a plateau in muscle growth has been attributed to reaching a genetic potential however why it eventually occurs with resistance training is largely unexplored. So there’s still a lot of question marks over why we reached that plateau, what could be done around it and so on and so forth, and we’ll talk a bit more around that in a second. But the other comment that he makes, and I love this point, is he says, early exposure to resistance training may provide a window of opportunity for achieving a higher muscle growth potential by spending more time in an ideal anabolic condition before anabolic resistance becomes the major contributor to hindrance of muscle growth. So that’s a typical scientist sentence let me break that down for you. Early exposure to resistance training so what we’re saying is the earlier that we engage in resistance training and ideally in our youth or in our younger years, they may provide a window of opportunity for achieving a higher muscle growth potential. So what we’re saying is that when we’re in our anabolic years, when we’re in our late teens, twenties and thirties, to some extent, our ability to build muscle is greater and bone mineral density and so forth, is greater than maybe when we’re in our 60s, 70s and 80s. And I think we all know that. And this statement actually lends itself back to something we’ve talked about previously, where we talk about strength span and lifespan. And this idea that the earlier that we can engage in resistance training, the more we are investing in our body’s physiology and we’re building up this insurance against kind of ill health and against muscle loss and sarcopenia and loss of bone mineral density and so forth. And the phrase he uses here is we can spend time in an ideal anabolic condition, so when our body’s building and it’s building phase before anabolic resistance. So anabolic resistance is our body’s natural resistance to continually building muscle or building bone mineral density and so forth. Now that’s not to say that we can’t continue to build bone and build muscle. We know that in postmenopausal women for example where hormones are let’s say suboptimal for increasing bone mineral density, bone mineral density can still be improved as a product of resistance training. But we also know that a lot of those studies are done in postmenopausal women because if you can increase bone mineral density in that population group, you can increase it in almost any other population group where there isn’t the same anabolic resistance. So I really like this statement because it kind of highlights the earlier we engage with muscle building and resistance training, the better.

It reminds me of paying into a 401k when you’re younger, you’re, you’re putting that in there now, and it’s going to set you up so much better when you need to make those withdrawals or you’re just going to be that much better off later on. It’s it’s. Would that be a fair analogy?

I think that’s a perfect analogy. I think that’s a perfect analogy. I think that’s a perfect analogy. In the UK, we call it a pension, in the US it’s 401k. But, uh, and you know, and the young people who are listening, they may not even be thinking about this yet, but I can guarantee at some point in your life, this is something you definitely want to start to think about because you want to make sure you’ve got that when you’re older. And in this case, what we talk about is you want to make sure you’ve got that physiology and that muscle mass and that strength and functionality as you age. So we talked a bit about genetics and all of that, and I’ve shown on the screen here what’s called the Belgian blue. And this is a myostatin deficient cow. So, and this way we’ll make in just a second. So, if you’re listening on the podcast, what we can see is a cow that is often referred to as double muscle. If you can imagine a bodybuilding cow or bull, that’s exactly what we’re looking at on the YouTube channel. And maybe that makes you want to pause the podcast and actually click on the YouTube link just to see exactly the path this podcast has gone down. But the reason that this is relevant is Jeremy Linecke and earlier on we talked about how plateau can be a product of genetic factors and our adaptation can be a product of genetic factors.

And this cattle is often talked about in this sense because there’s a gene called myostatin and myostatin effectively works to prevent muscle growth or to inhibit muscle growth. So all the strength training in the world is fighting against myostatin. We’re trying to build more muscle and myostatin is limiting that. And there’s evolutionary reasons why that would be. We know muscle mass is metabolically very, very expensive.

So from an evolutionary perspective, having a large amount of muscle wasn’t good for us because we didn’t necessarily have the energy surplus or energy requirements available to maintain that muscle mass. In this instance, this cow is actually myostatin deficient and it can effectively continue building muscle without any barriers as a product of this gene. Now there are multiple other genes that kind of play the same role and there are of course genes and there’s of course muscle protein synthesis that goes the other way. But effectively, this is a nice way to present what we call our homeostasis. Our body wants a nice balance between anabolic and catabolic conditions. We want to be able to build and rebuild, but we also want to be able to break down what we don’t need and not over build certain cells. So this is a really nice example. And actually we’ve seen the same things done within the laboratory in mice.

They’ve kind of done the same thing. They’ve created what we could call bodybuilding mice where they have double the muscle of normal mice.

How do they suppress the myostatin?

Yeah, so that’s way, way out of my scope of practice. So you know, that’s scientists doing a way of, you know, very different stuff than what I’ve done in the past. But yeah, they’ve effectively knocked out the myostatin gene and they’ve allowed, that’s allowed the mouse to increase its muscle mass considerably more than other mice. Yeah, so it’s interesting from that point of view.

Yeah, I don’t know if a lot of people realize that there’s another force at play which is preventing us from gaining too much muscle mass, which is myostatin. I certainly didn’t know that. And so, yeah, that’s an interesting thing to consider. But the reason why that is metabolically speaking is because muscle is so expensive. So it does make sense. And we’ve talked about before in another podcast is that we said evolutionarily or historically, um, for human survival, it’s our bodies want to be as lean as they can yet as strong as they can but they’re not going to be infinitely adding more and more muscle mass because that is so expensive and it’s a high cost to maintain. So thank you for clarifying that. I think that might be an aha moment for some people.

I find it really interesting regardless of whether you’re interested in strength training or anything else. I find it fascinating to see cows that have all this additional muscle. So there we go. Moving on to a paper that myself and a great colleague of mine, Dr. James Steele, published with a number of other authors a few years back. This paper, again, for those of you watching on YouTube, you’ll see the title on the screen.

But for those of you listening, his title is Long-term Timecourse of Strength Adaptations to Minimal Dose Resistance Training through Retrospective Longitudinal Growth Modeling. And I apologize, that’s a typical scientist’s title for a research paper, but effectively what this was, was about seven years worth of data of about 15,000 participants training once per week. So we have this long-term data to look at exactly what we can see a strength curve should and does look like over time. And what we see, I’ve showed the the image that I’ve shown on the screen again for those of you listening, the x-axis is time and the y-axis is the leg press exercise load which is indicative of our strength. And effectively we see exactly what we’ve talked about, that in the initial phases of undertaking resistance training there’s a strength increase and then over, there’s a strength increase. And then over time, there’s a gradual plateau. And there’s kind of diminishing returns and then an effective leveling out over the sort of seven years of data that we had here.

So first of all, it’s completely natural that we would expect that. You know, anybody who’s experiencing a plateau, as we’ve talked about through the podcast so far, it’s, it’s just a natural product of continued training. But what we can also do, and what I’m going to add onto the screen is I’m going to add a dotted line here at the baseline. So that was their starting point. Um, that was, uh, there’s a dotted line now, which corresponds to their, their beginning exercise load. And then the final line I’m going to their beginning exercise load. And then the final line I’m going to add is what we might expect, and this is purely hypothetical, is what we might expect their strength to look like over the course of seven years. So the group of people involved in this study, the population group, were an average of about 60 years old. So we wouldn’t expect their strength over time to naturally increase unless they were doing something to make it increase. And in fact, the yellow line that I’ve added is just a gradual decrease in strength over time. And obviously we’ve had Wayne Westcott on the podcast, and we’ve talked before about a natural decline in functionality and strength and muscle mass and so forth. So it’s not unrealistic to think this is what our strength might look like. At best, at worst, there might be a more stepwise decrease in strength because of maybe specific incidents, a fall, a fracture, an accident of some kind that causes immobilization, causes a drastic loss of strength at any given moment. But over a seven year time period, it’s quite realistic to think that our strength would decrease once we’re into our 60s. But what we can also do is we can add, and I’ve added two green arrows that effectively show our strength at around 150 week mark and at around our 300 week mark. And even though we’re not seeing a huge increase in strength between that time period, what we are seeing is a larger difference between what our strength might have been with a strength loss at each of those time periods. So and I think this is really interesting because when we talk about people being on a plateau or maintaining, they are often forgetting that actually they’re probably at a stage in life where their body is naturally on a decline and the person, you know the client you said before whose friend is sat on the couch, they’re almost certainly getting weaker, you know year upon year and losing muscle mass and losing bone mineral density and losing physical function so even though the client that’s coming in doesn’t seem to be making observable improvements, they’re not making the same decrease. So it serves as a, as to me, a net increase in adaptation. Yes, I hope everybody really takes a second to absorb this information because it’s pretty profound. You know, If you consider where your strength would normally be with doing nothing, it’s a slope downward. Or at best, even if you could maintain the status quo, picture a line that’s just flat. But really when you start strength training, even if you plateau, your strength curve is way above where you would be normally at if doing nothing.

And so that differential, as you get older, gets larger and larger over time. The difference between where you would be naturally and where you are because of strength training is larger as the years go by. And so that means you’re doing that much better for yourself as the years go by. And it’s important. I don’t think it’s, I think it’s easy for us to forget what is, what isn’t the case or the reality that could be. Because all of I see is what I have in front of me. But if we remember the disease I don’t have, the weakness that I don’t have because of where I’m at, man, that’s really encouraging and I hope that people absorb that because I think that’s a great point. Yeah 100%. I mean I often make the joke that somewhere out there there’s a parallel universe where I live this life without ever having engaged in strength training and I have all these other comorbidities and this poor function and poor health and I’m creating a completely different future for myself. You know and I think like you said it’s hard to see the things that we the ill health that we don’t have. The other thing that I think is really profound about the the image on the screen is if at any given point if for the people who are watching on YouTube, the black line that shows the strength increase and plateau, if at any given point we were to disengage in strength training, as you said, Amy, we’re now starting from a higher point. So even if we do start to lose strength, we’re starting from a higher point.

But if we were to become disheartened by progress and disengage, we would start to make that decline. So, you know, we might look at it and say, oh, we make a decline from zero if we don’t begin. But if we stop at any point, then we’re also going to, to some extent, make those decreases. Now, for those of you listening, if you think that what

I’m saying is that strength training is going to be a lifelong activity, then you’re 100% right. That’s exactly what strength training is. I’ve made the analogy before, and I’m sure I’ll make it again on this podcast, but if we think of strength training like brushing our teeth, you know, I brush my teeth so that I have my teeth when I’m older and for good dental hygiene and I train my muscles so that I’ll have my muscles when I’m older and for good systemic health and metabolic health.

So, um, you know, it’s exactly that it’s, it’s habitual. And of course we’ve had Matt Brisky on the podcast where he’s talked about, you know, sustainability and strength training. It should be something that can be sustainable over time. It shouldn’t be something that’s hugely time consuming or overcomplicated or so forth.

So anybody who’s workouts, uh, you know, aren’t something that you can continue over time. They maybe need to think about some of their processes.

Mm-hmm.

Well, and that, yeah, it’s a good reminder. It’s a sombering reminder that if you stop, you’re going down. Unfortunately, you don’t get to just coast along at a steady line, because by default we will, we will fall downward. So okay, so that is, that’s a really helpful point. Now is there anything somebody could do to push through a plateau if they were really, really focused on it?

Yeah. So, I mean, it’s really interesting. A lot of people talk about, we’ll often see in magazines, plateau busting, uh, you know, methods and things like that. And there’s so much hyperbole around this because it sells newspapers and it sells magazines and it gets followers on Instagram and social media and so forth. Now I think the first thing that we want to do is get our strength training right. Is it a good effort level? Is it frequently enough? Are we truly engaging with it twice per week? Are we really putting the work in when we’re there? And once we’ve done that we can then say okay am I now getting the right amount of sleep? Am I shutting my phone down an hour before bedtime to allow my body to kind of take that break from technology and blue light and things like that and allow my body to kind of recover properly and to rest? And then we could say, am I getting my nutrition right? We’ve talked about the metabolic comeback challenge and talk about eating whole foods and unprocessed foods i think, the reality of a healthy lifestyle. I’m in a world world probably relatively tuned into you know fruits and vegetables and good proteins and you know good fats and so forth and sleep and other functional activities, walking, getting a certain amount of steps in per day can be good. So I don’t like ever to say that there aren’t things that we can do to break through a plateau, but there certainly aren’t novel or amazing things that we can do to break through a plateau. But there certainly aren’t novel or amazing things that we can do to break through a plateau. We just need to get all the other processes in place and then we should continue making progress up to our genetic potential. Yeah, go back to what we said at the beginning of this episode, right? And see how those are, how am I doing in those areas? Yeah.

And we talked about, you know, stress and so maybe there’s a need for meditation or mindfulness training. You know, everybody’s completely individual and the way that the way that society impacts them, the way that they think about kind of political or economic kind of factors might impact them differently. So maybe there is a need for kind of other, uh, other things that help them take care of themselves, um, that might then see an improvement in their physical function and their, and their health and so forth.

So just to summarize, I mean, what are the, in your mind are the most important takeaways for a listener from this topic today?

00.10.10 for a listener from this topic today. Yeah, okay. So first of all, a plateau in adaptation that we’re seeing does not mean a plateau in every adaptation that our body is making as a product of strength training. So we might see that our numbers in strength aren’t continually going up and to the right, as you put it, Amy, but it might be that we’re still building muscle mass. It might be that we’re still improving our glucose sensitivity, it might be that we’re still improving our brain health and not our cognitive function and so forth, or one of the other numerous health benefits. So a plateau in one factor does not mean a plateau in others. I think acceptance that a plateau is going to occur at some point is probably a healthy approach to take. It happens in almost all physiological outcomes as we highlighted, whether it’s strength, whether it’s speed, whether it’s throwing, you know, any other kind of sports performance that’s going to occur. And then I think the final take home would be that it’s not just about, sorry, that a plateau can be equivalent to a net increase over a long enough time period.

So if we consider that we might have seen a decrease in whatever factor we’re looking at, whether it’s strength, whether it’s muscle mass, whether it’s body composition, whether it’s functionality, we would have probably seen that decline over time. And if we are plateauing in those factors, then that’s effectively a net increase. Thank you for talking us through this, Dr. Fisher. If you’re listening to this today and you’re a client at a studio or you use Strength Train, go make that investment into your health. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time. go make that investment into your health. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time. Remember, strength changes everything. never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health. ♪♪