Plateau Busters

 

A.K.A. The Total Variety Regimen

Old-School Advice for Breaking Through Progress Barriers

(With a Little Help from Classic Bodybuilder and Writer Gene Mozee)

 

     “Athletes in every sport suffer through periods of retrograde progress—plateaus, or slumps, during which they lose their edge and don’t play up to par.  Major league baseball players can’t get a hit, golfers can’t make a putt, basketball players can’t buy a basket, and quarterbacks can’t find a receiver with a pass.  Such is the nature of slumps.”[1]

     So begins the legendary bodybuilding trainer and writer Gene Mozee in an article he penned for IronMan entitled “Plateau Busters: Punching Through the Progress Barrier” in the November, ’91 issue of that magazine.

     I came across this article today while going through a box of magazines that I dragged out of my attic a week or so ago when researching my last essay on John Farbotnik’s mass-building regimen.  Since a lot of the more popular essays here at Integral Strength are inspired by many of Mozee’s old-school articles—at least half of my “Classic Bodybuilding” pieces, for example, use profiles that Mozee wrote about whoever the subject happens to be—I thought this would be another good idea to write about.  Also, I was already thinking about the subject of overcoming plateaus, anyway, as I am also working on another essay on “recovery methods 101”—that’s just a working title at the moment—and the two subjects certainly coincide with one another.

     For this article, I’m going to use Mozee’s words, tips, and ideas from that original article as sort of a springboard for discussing some of my own thoughts on plateau bustin’—hopefully the two will then come together in a harmonious mass-building symphony of hypertrophy prose.  Or something like that.  With that out of the way, let’s get right down to it…

     “When a bodybuilder hits a slump and stops making muscular gains, weeks, months, and even years may pass without any progress.  This obviously brings on a feeling of doom and gloom, which can drag out a slump even longer.  While most bodybuilding slumps are caused by physical factors, mental attitude also plays a role.  A prolonged period without progress can be just as discouraging and detrimental as an injury.”

     I find it interesting that Mozee opens his article with this remark about “mental attitude” as opposed to something physical.  What’s sad is that he’s correct about a slump potentially lasting days, weeks, months, and, possibly, even years.  However, most slumps don’t last years for one simple fact: the trainee quits.  I think that the most common and longest lasting slump is the initial one after one’s “newbie gains” come to a halt.  Unfortunately, many trainees don’t get on a good program to begin with, but they do make gains—initially.  Because almost any program will work at first.  But when those newbie gains do come to a grinding halt, the lifter then either takes two routes: they either do significantly more or significantly less, neither of which is necessarily what needs to be done.  And either route may actually cause gains to resume, but only for a short period of time.  This is why it’s so important to understand proper programming, and why I spend so many of the essays here on the blog discussing it.  More on that next.

     “The most common causes of stalled progress are bad nutrition, overtraining, undertraining, inadequate recuperation, and lack of variety in training.  While the first 4 factors are often discussed in the pages of IronMan, the subject of training variety is often overlooked.”

     With that last sentence above (and our alternative title at the start), you may have figured out that the majority of Mozee’s article is about training variety, but before we get into that, let’s discuss—albeit briefly—the other 4 factors.

     The first factor mentioned is also the most easily “fixable.”  Many times, a lifter starts training with little attention paid to diet.  So, when their initial gains “dry up,” all they have to do is consume more calories and protein.  If you have stalled in your lifting and have also not been paying attention to your diet, then start by consuming enough calories.  There’s no reason to calculate your percentage of carbs, protein, and fat or to determine what micronutrients you might be missing if you aren’t just eating enough quality food to begin with.  Consume at least 15 times your bodyweight in calories each day.  Slowly increase your food intake until you are consuming somewhere between 20 and 30 times your bodyweight in daily calories.  Once you have calories covered the next most important thing is to consume enough protein.  Shoot for the typical recommendation of 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight daily.

     I like the fact that Mozee mentions both overtraining and undertraining as potential causes of stalled progress.  Overtraining is usually considered the factor that contributes to a plateau among modern bodybuilding writers, personal trainers, and strength coaches, but I don’t think that it’s any worse, or more common, than undertraining, to be honest.  I have a feeling that Mozee felt much the same way, as he often championed high-frequency training—often coupled with high-volume—in a lot of his work, this particular article no exception.

     Lifters often end up either overtraining or undertraining because they don’t understand how to properly manipulate the 3 variables of volume, frequency, and intensity.  Two of the variables must be high (or one high and the other moderate, depending upon how advanced the lifter is) and the other variable must be low.  The exception is if all 3 of the variables are moderate.  Overtraining (typically) occurs because all three of the variables are high.  A lifter may not start out on a program that way, but, as they encounter staleness, they increase one or more of the variables.  This may actually help at first.  Until it doesn’t, and progress comes grinding to a halt.  Undertraining (once again, typically) occurs because only one of the variables are high and the other 2 are low.  And, once again, this might prove fruitful at first.  For instance, “HIT” methods fit into this latter group because they utilize high-intensity but low-volume and low-frequency.  They can be great for breaking through a plateau themselves if the bodybuilder had been overtraining beforehand.  But the gains eventually come to a (often grinding) halt after 6 to 8 weeks.  You can’t keep one variable high and the other two low for an extended period of time because you will inevitably end up undertraining.

     Inadequate recuperation is tied into overtraining, but it’s not exactly the same.  Obviously, if you do overtrain for any prolonged period of time you will end up inadequately recuperated.  But that’s not the whole story.  Often times, a program would be optimal for a lifter if he paid attention to recuperation.  First, don’t do too much outside of the gym.  You might have a damn-near perfect training plan, but you would sabotage it if you took up daily long-distance running at the same time.  If you don’t get enough calories and protein on a daily basis—as we previously mentioned—that will also cause you to take longer to recuperate.  If you can, take advantage of things such as ice baths, sauna, “hot” yoga, massage therapy, or anything of a similar nature that you can fit into your weekly schedule.  Finally, make sure that you’re getting adequate sleep.  If you’re not getting 7 hours of sleep each night minimum, you are, in all likelihood, not allowing for proper recovery.  (We will cover this more when I post my “Recovery Methods” essay—that will probably be my next article after this one.)

     “A bodybuilder who trains correctly, takes in the right nutritional elements, and gets adequate sleep and rest usually makes excellent progress for 4 to 8 weeks before reaching a plateau.  At that point, the gains diminish or stop altogether.  This is the reason that most champion physique athletes change their programs every 6 to 8 weeks—to avoid getting stale and to stimulate their muscles from different angles and with different intensity by changing the exercises.”

     Mozee is dead-on here.  Everything works… for about 6-8 weeks.  And by “everything,” I mean every good program.  If a program sucks—let’s say you really buy into the HIT Kool-Aid and train a muscle group with one hard all-out set but only once every 10 days or so—then it might never work.  But even the best programs, once you become fairly advanced, simply stop working around the two-month mark.

     Now, let me be clear, you can stay on a program for much longer than that if the program naturally has variety “built” into it.  But this means that, essentially, you are using a program template that doesn’t change, but the template’s workouts might change from week to week or even workout to workout.  Strength programs such as Westside Barbell or Bill Starr’s heavy-light-medium system are like this.  You may stay on Westside’s template for years on end but also not repeat the same workout for weeks or months.  Mozee’s workout program from this article is similar in that vein.  Let’s look at it now:

The Total Variety Regimen

     “Here is a system designed to shock your muscles into new growth patterns, defeat the staleness/boredom factor, and revitalize your enthusiasm to get you gaining again.  The idea is to select 9 exercises for each of the major muscle groups and arrange them into 3 separate workouts consisting of 3 exercises for each bodypart.  It’s a 3-days-a-week regimen: for example, you do the first workout on Monday, the 2^nd workout on Wednesday, and the third on Friday.  As you can see, you work the same muscle groups with different exercises on each training day.”

     Below is the workout exactly as Mozee wrote it.  After you see the outline, I will present Mozee’s tips for making it work along with my personal insights.

Workout 1

Chest: bench presses, incline flyes, cable crossovers

Back: front pulldowns, v-bar rows, one-arm dumbbell rows

Shoulders: behind-the-neck presses, alternate front raises, incline one-arm laterals

Thighs: squats, leg curls, leg extensions

Biceps: standing barbell curls, alternate dumbbell curls, hammer curls

Triceps: one-arm triceps extensions, lying barbell extensions, close-grip weighted pushups

Workout 2

Chest: incline bench presses, flat bench flyes, parallel bar dips

Back: bent-over rows, behind-the-neck chins, pulls to thighs

Shoulders: seated dumbbell presses, upright rows, cable laterals

Thighs: leg presses, hack squats, 1 ½ leg curls

Biceps: incline dumbbell curls, close-grip barbell curls, cable curls

Triceps: seated barbell extensions, lying dumbbell extensions, cable pushdowns

Workout 3

Chest: incline dumbbell presses, pec-deck flyes, decline flyes

Back: chins, cable rows, behind-the-neck pulldowns

Shoulders: seated wide-grip barbell presses, dumbbell side laterals, bent-over laterals

Thighs: front squats, bench squats, 1 ½ squats

Biceps: seated dumbbell curls, concentration curls, preacher curls

Triceps: dumbbell kickbacks, reverse-grip pushdowns, bent-over cable extensions

     Here are Mozee’s exact recommendations:

·         All exercises are 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps.

·         Rest one minute between sets and exercises—no more.

·         Use correct form: get a full extension and contraction on each repetition.

·         You can add 50-100 reps of abdominal work for a warmup.

·         You can add 4 sets of 20 reps of calf raises after each day’s thigh workout.

·         Make a concerted effort to get proper nutrition and sufficient rest and sleep to facilitate maximum gains.

     And here are my personal recommendations:

·         This is not, obviously, for beginners, but don’t dismiss it just because it’s more voluminous than most programs you’ve read about (unless, of course, you read this blog on a regular basis).  If you are new to training—but past the “newbie” stage­—then do just one exercise for each muscle group.  If you’re a little more advanced, then do two exercises.  And if you’re an outright intermediate or advanced bodybuilder, stick with the program as written.

·         You can also experiment by rotating the volume.  For the first week, pick just one exercise from each training day.  On the 2^nd week, move to 2 exercises per muscle on each training day.  And on the 3^rd week, do the program exactly as written.

·         Once you can handle it, stick with the program for (at least) a few weeks exactly as it is.

·         The key to making these sort of high-frequency, high-volume programs work is to make sure you don’t overdo it on the intensity.  (Remember, two variables can be high and the other needs to be low.)  Stop each set several reps shy of failure.  Learn to go heavy naturally, when the weights start to feel too light.

·         Even though Mozee recommends 8-10 rep sets, you can use either slightly higher or lower reps if you know that you respond better to a different rep range.  5-7 reps or 12-14 reps are some other good rep ranges.

·         Because there is a lot of variety naturally built into this program, you can probably do it for 12 weeks or so—although you might get bored before that point—if you really wanted to.

     If you’re stuck in a rut, give some of these plateau-busting tips and workouts a try.  And if you have any questions about the program, or any other rut-busting questions, shoot me an email or leave them in the comments section below.  Until next time, good luck and good training!

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[1] This quote and all other italicized quotes are from the article “Plateau Busters: Punching Through the Progress Barrier” by Gene Mozee as it appeared in the November 1991 issue of IronMan magazine.