 What's up guys, Salamike for kaisentraining.com. Today I want to talk about breaking through plateaus and how to kind of identify if you're in a real plateau and if not maybe identify the weaknesses in your lifestyle, your training, and things that you can fix to break through those. One thing I think with plateaus is that people think that they're in one too soon. Progress, whether it's diet, muscle building, or strength, all take a very long time and it's going to take some patience. Just because you haven't lost weight or hit a new PR in a couple of days, even weeks doesn't mean you're in a real plateau. All of our strength, our weight loss, our muscle gain, all goes in waves. Nothing is completely linear and so it takes time, it takes consistent work done every single day over a long period of time to reach these goals. The more advanced you get, the more you've been lifting, the longer you've been doing this, the harder it becomes. In the very beginning, if you've just started dieting, you may drop a couple pounds in a couple of days or when you just start bench pressing, you're going to hit new PRs and lift more weight every single day if not every single week. But once you start doing it for months and months, let alone years and years, the progress slows, which is totally normal and totally different than a real plateau. A couple of things we need to really look at when we're getting into if we've actually plateaued and how to overcome those. Number one would probably be our recovery. Now recovery is a huge buzzword all over Instagram, all over YouTube, talking about foam rollers and different tanks to sleep in and different oxygen masks to use and that's not what I'm talking about. If those work at all, those are 0.001% of our actual recovery. When I'm talking about recovery, I'm talking about adequate sleep, adequate calories and adequate hydration. Sleep, yes, it is dependent on the individual and how much sleep you need to fully recover, but the more sleep, the better. Eight plus hours for every active individual with low stress, dark room, cold room, comfortable deep sleep is going to help you recover more than any supplement or any gimmick out there. Calories, now that obviously depends on if you're trying to lose weight, where calories are going to be in a deficit, but if we're trying to gain muscle or gain strength, eating enough calories, a slight calorie surplus, meaning just above what we need to maintain our current body weight is super, super important. Adequate protein is also very important. Averaging about one gram per pound of body weight that you weigh or lean pound of body mass and that just doesn't mean every once in a while or every other day. That means hitting your calories and sleep consistently every single day. If you're on kind of a three day on and then you're up till 2 a.m. and you're not eating enough the next day off and here and there, it's not gonna be consistent enough for you to recover. You're adding a lot of stimulus and stress to your body, lifting these heavy weights and training so hard. We need adequate recovery in form of calories and sleep. Hydration is a very common topic as well with sodium and all these different drinks you can buy at the stores and gas stations. Just try to get enough water in that you're feeling good every day. If that's eight cups or about an ounce per half your pounds or that's about an ounce for about half what you weigh in pounds. So I weigh about 200 pounds. If I can get 100 ounces of water or more a day, I'll be set. And again, that's consistent. That's not 200 ounces one day and then none the next day. It's about 100 or whatever the common goal is. What do people say, eight cups a day consistently every single day, long term, week after week, month after month, year after year. It's gonna take consistently chipping away to get better at these things. Next, what we'll have to look to is if we're plateauing in a strength manner or even a muscle building manner is our lift itself and our technique in the lift. Now, when we're lifting day in and day out, working hard, just cause you're lifting more weight or you're doing more reps doesn't mean that you're necessarily progressively overloading. We're only progressively overloading if those reps look the exact same and are to a standard which we hold ourselves or if you're competing a powerlifting that's held within the powerlifting competition. So I want you, if you're benching 225 now with good form, once you bench 245, I want that form to be even better if not the exact same. We have to hold ourselves to these standards to not only bring our muscles through a certain range of motion, but also good technique allows us to activate the correct muscles, allows us to stay safe and allows us to be more efficient. So if you're trying to lift more weight over time and you're using less than efficient technique, obviously that's another form or another way that we may be plateauing. Last but not least is programming. To get anywhere in life whether we're trying to drive somewhere new or we're trying to make new goals in out of the gym and business and school, whatever it is, we have to have a roadmap and in powerlifting, bodybuilding, fat loss, we have to have some kind of program to follow. There's a lot of good coaches out there. There's a lot of good programs out there. There's some programs that maybe aren't so good but most important part is that we have some kind of program which means planned workouts with progression, well thought out intent to lead us towards a goal. A program doesn't mean just a list of exercises that we're gonna do. That's just called a workout or with random input, you're gonna get random output. We need well thought out plans whether it's four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks or even a year long for some of the more competitive power lifters or Olympic weight lifters that are looking to take their sport to the next level. They're planning things out four years ahead and working way backwards to have proper programming to peak and to break plateaus time and time again. It's gonna be a little bit of a hills and valleys. You're not always gonna be lifting your most but there are different times and phases where we need to build rather than just test. I guess that leads me to our last point is something that's very common beyond the recovery, nutrition, sleep, beyond the technique and being efficient in the gym and beyond general programming. It kind of ties into the programming is too often people are lifting too heavy and have again no plan on what they're gonna do workout to workout week to week, month to month. Let's start focusing in on these things doing the right habits, building the right discipline day after day, week after week, year after year. And if you're kind of check off the list which ones you're doing well, give yourself an honest ranking and then try to approve upon those. I guarantee you'll be less likely to hit plateaus as well mixed in with the patients knowing that sometimes it takes weeks, months or even big blocks of training eight or 16 weeks depending on how advanced you are to hit new PRs in the gym. Appreciate you guys for checking out the video. Go break your plateaus, rate yourself out, check it out, try to make yourself a little bit better every single day and we'll break through new videos every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, vlogs coming, be sure to subscribe, turn on notifications, new Twitch, Twitch streaming every day, Sunday through Thursday, Silent Mike with 2Ks in the number two, link in the bio. Check out that Kaizen power building, we're plugging away here. And also follow me, Silent Mike 2Ks, Instagram, Twitter, catch you guys in the next one, appreciate you.