 On this week's podcast, it's Jack and I are going to have a chat about one of the things which can plague people's trading program and that is the plateau. So the title is something along the lines of which Jack will decide later, exactly how it appears, but how to continue making progress and plateaus can be one of the most frustrating and demoralizing episodes in a trading program in a trading block, but also over a longer period of time. So we're going to pull some of this apart real short little hit today. Just give you some ideas and hopefully some inspiration to try and kind of break through those plateaus or kind of tackle ones when they come at you in the future. So you're equipped and prepared. So if you've been around and done any amount of trading for any period of time, you know, there's always do something consistently. You make some progress initially. It's like what happens? What happens after that? And so we've, we've been through those frustrations as well. So we felt it with you, but one of the, some of the things that will actually obviously help is having some guidance and so working with some coaches, etc. We're very excited that the 2022 workshops are kicking off. We've already run a six week body weight basics that's been online, but we've got our face to face workshops coming back this coming weekend. As you listen to this, as long as the date of this is going out correctly, it should be the 16th of February on Saturday, the 19th. We are in Staffordshire. There is probably a couple of places still left, hopefully, and then we are in London on the 6th of March. We've got a brand new workshop experience. It's a full day. It's discounted to 125 quid. If you remember, there's some discount codes for you to get it for just 99 quid or if you VIP for 75 quid. So do check those out. The links will be in the show notes on the or go to the website, schoolcasts.com and just click on the workshops and retreats tab. Great point, Jack, about getting some help to get through plateau. Sometimes what you need is just a couple of different exercise progressions. The right coaching cues and that can be enough if you're working on a specific skill, but let's not go too far down that line of enquiry. Let's get into podcast. So sit back and enjoy a little bit of information about how to break through plateaus, roll that jingle. Listen, players. You're listening to the movement, strength and play podcast by the School of Calisthenics. Here are your hosts, Tim and Jacko. So, Timbo, plateaus, have you ever had one? Many. That's going to say if he said no, then it was going to be like, hold on. How come this either? So the reality is just I wanted to put some context. People have you're listening along to this, like you think in here, correctly, I've had a plato. If you're the one person out there that has never had a plato, it's like, I don't know, either you're a genius or maybe you haven't been training right. Yeah, you're a better strength and condition coach than me. But essentially, we've all had plateaus and actually continuing to make progress can be frustrating, can be challenging. And, you know, in terms of that frustration, the challenge, like how that affects our motivation, it then can actually create a vicious cycle, like a downward spiral of like, we get frustrated. We don't, we've stopped making progress to actually be like, we stop doing stuff and then, you know, if you stop doing it, you're definitely not going to progress. So understanding the psychology of it, I think, is an interesting and important point and knowing and feeling like you've got some advice and you've got some tools in your toolbox to try and utilise, to notice when is a plato upon me and how can I get through it. So what have been your, what have been some of your top tips, Timbo? Yeah, I think you make a good point about that consistency to start off with it going. If this kind of having conversations with people who are, like if you are inconsistent with your training, then you are going to find these periods of plateau because we're just not getting that consistent exposure to the stimulus which is going to result in adaptation. So if you're struggling to be consistent and you're kind of worrying about plateaus, just take a step back and just work out how you can be more consistent with your training. You often you'll break through there. So that's kind of point one. We'll go a bit micro and then I want to go like macro to finish just as a slightly bigger conversation. But I think the, the one thing to, we're just going to throw out a couple of suggestions that I see massively and is underutilized. And I'm going to put it first and it's probably the one that people don't want to hear rather than going, oh, it's this drill, this progression, this sort of reps and sets and whatever and tempo. The biggest reason I think people struggle with plateaus is rest and recovery. And they're just not doing enough of that or doing it well enough to enable the body to recover from the stress that you've placed upon it and then therefore adapt and go and break through. So we kind of talking a little bit around periodization here, which is a massive subject and people have written very long and sometimes boring books about periodization, which are quite difficult to read. And people get really geeky about it. But there's a guy in the States called Mike Boyle, who's a very well known strength and conditioning coach. And his kind of very simple approach to periodization is each week, can we put some more weight on the bar, whatever that might be. And he also says, often we kind of like sometimes get over, we get overcomplicate periodization. And he's like, rest periods will come in a training cycle for most people. So there'll be weeks where work is crazy. Or if it's an athlete population, they've got a dentist appointment or they're traveling or something happens. But for most of us, there's a lot of times in our normal kind of weeks where training or every month, I say, where you just get these breaks where actually I go from five sessions to two sessions. That's rest, right? So this kind of does that side of things to think about. Like if my life is like that, I sometimes have these periods where I just don't get to train as much so I can use those as deload weeks for other people. If you are sort of training consistently hitting four or five sessions a week and you don't have that disruption, then you need to start thinking about your rest and recovery. Because if you don't have a user's analogy before, but I think it's always worth repeating, every time you train, you dig a hole, right? And the more you train, the deeper that hole gets. So when we're training athletes and they train five, six days a week over an extended period of time, we actually dig them quite a big hole. And our job then is when we do our recovery protocols. So we sleep, whatever that might be, our nutrition, hydration, all the kind of we can get into that and probably a different podcast. But the different sort of method you've got to improve your recovery helps us to put a little bit back in that hole and fill it back up a little bit. So we're constantly trying to balance this idea of creating enough stress that creates a favorable adaptation. The body then and the brain want to respond to adaptation to make you stronger, fitter, faster, whatever it might be. So it super compensates. And then we go and dig a little bit more of a hole through training and then we allow the recovery where a lot of people go wrong with this and one of the major reasons for plateauing is that they just keep digging all the time. And there's no there's no space in their week or training program months, whatever it might be, where that hole actually gets filled back in a bit and the body then gets chance to supercompensate. We don't have rest weeks. We don't de-load. If we are training consistently over months, you are one going to hit plateaus and two risk of over overreaching to a point, which is kind of that when you go towards that over training. And then really chronic cases, we get over training, which is like a real system shut down, big problem. People need to get more comfortable with resting. And this would be this would be tea upjackets, talk about the psychology, but they get that training addiction. I don't feel good about the train. You've got to learn that resting recovery is part of the process and you will feel better in the long term because you'll see those performance improvements that you're looking for. You've got to get comfortable with doing a little bit less every now and again to allow that body to recover. Yeah. And I think that if you are someone that, you know, you mentioned there, that sort of like attitude where you get you are a bit addicted to it and it's difficult to have those times often if you don't have those natural sort of breaks in your in your in your training cycle, where you just train less because like you say work or family life or something. Some stuff comes up and it just interrupts you if you are one of these people that maybe a professional athlete or you're you just have the luxury of where you train doesn't really get interrupted and you actually prioritise it higher than other things. And that's that's a different conversation of prioritising, training over everything else in your life. But it's a case that we need to therefore plan to actually have those reload weeks. And I think psychologically, when you've planned to have it, it allows you to to deal with it, that psychologically a little bit better. It's like, OK, I've entrusted this process that Tim's talking about. I understand that the science behind the super conversation actually need to have this I've planned to have it in. And that's that's a week where I'm going to do this, this, this different. Or, you know, deloading doesn't have to be like doing nothing, but you're you're you're reducing the amount of intensity of the things that you are doing and maybe do a few different things and have some variation. But when you've planned it and just then start to trust the process, it allows you to well, when you've planned it, it's going to probably go ahead. But then it allows you psychologically to just deal with it as a disruption to your normal life. I love going after it, but yeah. And when you feel then the benefits of having some of that supercompensation taking place when you've been resting, then you start to get the buy-in of like, OK, these deload weeks, as long as I'm working out when I'm supposed to be working out, these deload weeks will really do help me push on and, you know, to to echo something you said at the beginning. If you're training really hard and you're not getting any better or any stronger, it's not that you're not training. So you've just said, yeah, consistently training really hard is that you're not recovering. And so addressing that as a great first point in both and very, yeah, super, super, super important. When we're talking about longevity, talking about looking after ourselves and talking about, you know, as our philosophy of wanting to be able to do cool things and be able to move and enjoy my body when I'm very old, like it's important that I'm addressing some of those issues right now. And it's also this considering the rest of the emotional stress and load you've got on during the week, because if I work super busy or I've got a baby, it doesn't sleep for the night at the moment. So me going in and thinking I'm really going to go and bust out PB's at the moment is unrealistic. And then also like it's a little bit dangerous. Like if I'm going in tired, I don't really want to be going, pushing that red line because my system is going to be under a little bit of stress. And please, like I've been in this game long enough to know this to be true. Don't let what you see on social media indicate or determine or affect influence. How hard do you think you should be training because you see other people training hard? And everyone's sending it on Instagram, right? Everyone's doing like absolutely like hard out sessions. There's there's a time and place for that. But their search circumstances and situation is very likely to be different to yours. So listen to your body, do what's right for you. Play the long game and focus on yourself, not on everybody else. What about then if we switch gears into the opposite of rest of training when we are if someone's struggling with some with some plateaus and it's like actually what can I do lads in my actual training to try and get through these things? And a friend of mine, he's actually been S&C coach Matt Parr, he's an S&C Lester Tigers and he's just moved to to France for a common which club there. But he used to say you've got to keep the body guessing. He liked like for the like interesting things like keep the body guessing but variety or changing things up. And there's a whole load of different variables that we've got potentially to play with the everything from the tempos that you're working out, isometrics. There's there's those types of things would be nice to touch on, I think. And the other thing that's coming that I'd like to maybe just throw in the mix is figuring out like what's the strength issue? What's the what's the thing that's holding you back causing this plateau? Is it that actually like shoulders a bit unstable or your hip or whatever the thing is? Like trying to actually find and enjoy the process of problem solving. OK, I hit this plateau rather than being frustrated with it. Flip it on its head and go, OK, so I've hit a plateau. Why have I hit a plateau and trying to understand that? And then you can start to potentially use the some of these changing up these variables to to to go after that point in your your training and your strength, whatever it is to actually address it. I'm just thinking of saying someone like I realized that actually I'm really weak in like this position. I might use an isometric at the like midpoint in my pull up, for example, to help me through that section or whatever it may be. But there might be an opportunity to use a different variable within my training rather than having to like carte blanche train change everything. And if I've thought about and tried to do a little bit of investigative work of what the issue is causing is, I think then we can be a little bit more efficient with what we do. Yeah, I think it's a good point. And I think just before I sort of respond to that bit, this this just deal with a skill component side of things, because one of the oftentimes people talk about a plateau or they're struggling to make progress in something like a handstand training. I won't dive into too much about that, because we can we can do another podcast with that we put in the past. But there is going to be a period of where you're learning a complex skill where you just got to keep going like it will feel like a plateau. But in your early days of handstand training, this kind of cognitive phase, you can make quite fast progress. And then you hit this kind of associative phase. And it's like it just takes a long time and you just got to keep going. So if you're following a structured training program and you've got the right sort of methods and progressions and drills, you will get there. But you just got to dig in and go through this period where it feels like not a lot's happening. I'm watching my daughter learn to walk at the moment. And she's just she's in that phase right now. She kind of could do it if she's but she sits like she bottles it and but yeah, just keep going. If it's a skill side of things, you've got the right drills and progressions. Just keep going. Loads of times people come to workshops and they're like, what am I not doing? I'm like, there's nothing you're not doing. You just need to do more of it because your brain has got to learn this this this new movement pattern. Now, the other side of that is going is often then as to your point, Jack, of going, what are you not doing? So maybe you've exhausted the level of a neuro muscular controller. So if you nearly kind of eat out everything you can do from muscle, we had this conversation with Ross, actually a while back, then one way to go in and that's kind of like you're getting your muscle up, but you want to go and do you got one muscle up, but you can't get any more out of it then and you've really kind of exhausted that from a neuro perspective. So you've done quite a lot of maximal strength training, power training, which you will end up doing like with our programs to get that first muscle up to go and do more muscle ups. It might be that you need a bigger muscles so that you've got more fibers to their core contributes towards creating more force. There's a reason why strong people are quite big most of the time. So because bigger muscles can produce more force quite simply. So it might be that you switch tactics and go, I'm going to go and do six, 10, 12 weeks, three, six months of hypertrophy training, like strength, mass development, because I'm going to create bigger muscles, which can produce more force and then I will come back and I'll make that muscle faster and more explosive so I can go and do five consecutive muscle ups on the bounce or whatever it might be. The other one would be like pull ups and people often kind of go, I see people going and hitting four or five pull ups and they're like, I can't get any more. Now we could apply that same strategy, but equally it could also be that you are losing the stability around the shoulder and therefore your body can't actually stabilize a joint and it won't, the brain won't let you produce or high levels of force around an unstable joint. It'll just shut it down because it's trying to protect the system. So in that situation, often what we'll find is people kind of got some pull ups, but what they really need is a block of scapular shoulder stability type work, which is going to create stronger foundations. So essentially they can hang from the bar for longer in a stable position and then you'll be able to get to do more pull ups. So identifying what your weak link is and there's a really easy takeaway from this. The thing that you don't like doing is probably the thing that you need to do more. Yeah, that's a lesson for life, Tim, though. That's just not training. Yeah, it's easy there, isn't it? Like go in and go, I'm really good at handstand push ups. I'm going to go and do that. Like, but what am I, like if I want to do is a given movement, like I probably need to go and do something that I'm not very good at and I don't like doing, but that's often where you're the biggest plateau buster is recovery and then do the stuff you're not very good at. That will probably get you where you need to be. Yeah, yeah. No, love that. Love that. And I think that that's if you can, if you can simplify, if you can try and gather a simple message for a potentially complex, but certainly frustrating topic or area, having some more rest and like you say, doing the things that you know you should do, but you put off or you just shy away from. It's difficult, though, like, and again, the psychology comes into that, it's hard to do something you don't feel good at. Your ego has to take a bit of a hit. It's just physically actually harder to do something you're not good at. And sometimes it's, it's something that you're not good at in terms of, say, we took that example, like stability compared to, like, all-out strength. Maybe, maybe you're quite good, your system's well-conditioned to, like, do five by five on something heavy, but when you're asked to do, like, 20 reps of something, you just hate it mentally and physically hate it. But actually, it's those stabilizers need a bit more time to work on. So if, and that's probably, because the thing I was wondering, if I was listening to this and we're saying, like, try to understand where your weak link is or what is your issue, my question would potentially be like, well, how do I know? And I think that you'd hit the nail on the head in the simple, you can obviously do it for some investigative work if you're working with a coach, like, in more detail, but you hit the nail on the head and go, like, what are you really crapper and hate doing? Like, that's probably the weak link. Yeah, I think that's, and that's where, like, to shout about our programs too much, but, like... Yeah, it's our podcast. You can shout about our programs. That's fine. We've actually phased them in a structured approach. So the reps and sets will change throughout the week. So you'll do some of that work where it's nice. It's just like engine work, which can get bigger muscles and then we're going to go and make you more explosive and powerful. So it's periodized for you. But it is sometimes difficult if you don't know training to kind of work out what you shouldn't be doing because you might even know about scapidizability for or stabilizing the shoulder for a pull-up and how that might contribute. So I think, like, you mentioned it before, of, like, becoming a bit more of a student of the sport and understanding why you're struggling and what's going wrong for you, understanding your body, getting some support from some people that you trust and can help you along that journey. And it is just, is that process sometimes of just switch the stimulus? And often you'll find that, I was just going to say, one hard thing around this is that if we say, right, you're in a plateau, you're probably not feeling great about your training. And then what Tim just said, I just talked about myself for the third person, and that's what I just said, was then go and do stuff you don't like doing. Well, in a plateau, it's much easier to go and do the stuff that you do. So this was kind of like my zoom out bigger picture kind of conversation of going, if you're in a plateau and it's beating you down, remember, training is supposed to be fun. So if we are, if we're not professional athletes, at least I'm not doing it for a living. So I think I was going to switch the stimulus. So you might just go and do a block of training that makes you feel good, or you might, so say it's a pull-up example, just go and do some back hypertrophy training. Most people enjoy that sort of stuff because it's a little bit easier, it's not so complex. Just reps and sets, grind it out. You generally feel pretty good off the back of doing it. So switch the stimulus, find out about different types of training and try and go and dive one of those routes and keep the movement pattern specific. So if you're doing pull-up work or muscle-up based work, it makes sense to go and do something around pulling, strength, speed, stability. Don't go and start doing pushing stuff because it's not going to have a massive help. And then the other thing I was going to say is like just change the stimulus, give yourself a break. Like oftentimes out of done stuff, like plans training for me got into this kind of, this realm and I was kind of getting frustrated with it, hit a plateau, it wasn't getting anywhere. So I just bend it off for a while. I went and did something different and wasn't in my mind anymore training plans. But when I came back to it, I had not really lost anything. If anything in some ways, if I'd done some strength-based work of just like general pushing-based work, I came back and felt pretty good. And then I've got a rejuvenation of life around it. I went, you know, I'm going to go and do a little bit more into this. I'm kind of in that phase now. I've not touched it for ages, but yesterday I was like, I got back into a little bit of planche kind of push-up stuff. I'm like, yeah, do you know what? I'm ready to go and play around with this again. And then just my last point on this one, and then I let Jacly wrap it up, sometimes go and change it entirely. So we'll get a lot of people who come from one more form of exercise into calisthenics. We'll get people who come to calisthenics and they go, I'm going to go to somewhere else. Like I've started CrossFit for a bit and Jacly was doing some running. And calisthenics is still a very much part of how I train the upper body, but I've just brought a different stimulus in there because sometimes a plateau can just be around training in general. It might not be specific to calisthenics. And sometimes in those scenarios, it's okay to go and do something else. There's a lot of thought in my head and Jacly and I've talked about this offline and podcast around identity and stuff of like, I don't have to be, I just, because I do calisthenics and have a business called the School of Calisthenics, it doesn't mean I can't enjoy other things. It's just that I have, it still remains part of my training. So you are free to go and do whatever you want and try other things. And that's good for your physical literacy. It's good because CrossFit for me has made me address some deficits in my metabolic and fitness side of things. And then I'm still going to go and do that for a while. It doesn't mean I'm gone forever, but I might come back and go, now I'm ready to go and do this other thing and you can come back to it with a little bit of freshness around it. And that is huge. I think if people have never done that before, gone, right, gonna do something completely different. If you've never done that or just left something alone for a while, I'm not gonna touch on that. And I'm just gonna, I might just do a different element of my training or you might do something completely different. When you come back to, so long as that you're doing some work and it's like in some way related, then you'd be quite surprised at how much better that thing that you were previously platted on. It's like, wow, this actually feels pretty good. And then it, like you say, it gives you back that like, that love and that sort of desire to go chase after it because if you're getting super frustrated and you're not making progress and you're in a plateau, like it can be demoralizing mentally. So yeah, there's, if that's something you've not tried, and there'll be something, because if you're into your training, there'll be something that you've never done before. And you're like, I ain't got time to go and do karate as well. I don't know, whatever it is. Do you know what I mean? Like say something. And it's like, well, just do that for a few weeks and just like enjoy doing something completely different. Then come back, then come back and just see how that improvement in just your overall physical literacy and what you'll, when you start to move in different ways to your training differently, you'll learn again more stuff about your body. You say there, like doing some more metabolic work, you find out like where you're actually out on that and you go, okay, maybe it's good, maybe it's not, maybe it's something I want to work on. But until we go and dab our toe in these different areas, we're not actually going to know and bring it right back around to where we started. Like it can be a great way to get yourself through a plateau because some of it could be just, the whole thing's just got a bit stagnant. Yeah. I've got one. Look on him. Sorry, I had to cough then. If you listen to this and go out and listen to you boys and you've not addressed my problem yet and doing all those things, if you're going into sessions every week and you're doing the same number of reps and sets every week, every session, then there's no reason why that's why you're not progressing. So if you don't know what you did the week before, that's also a good reason. So if you've got to continue to try to do some more loads so that we have to scale with this progressive overload either through volume, intensity, whatever the variable adjustment might be, we need to be doing more effectively of whatever it is each week to try and get that progressive overload. So what that means is it might be rather than doing three sets of 10 every week and doing that for four weeks, I'm manipulating those rest periods. So say I'm doing a weight or I'm doing pull-ups and I can do certain amounts, I might just keep a note of that one. And that's where this within calisthenics is important for a training diary because in the gym environment, you might go on did 22 kilo dumbbells last week, I'll try 24 kilos this week or whatever it might be. If you can do five pull-ups like how and you can't do six or seven or you're aiming for eight, it can be quite difficult to kind of work out how you're gonna make that a bit easier. So a real easy way to get overload in that environment is just all that context is keep a trained diary and if you do four reps one week, that's cool. The next week try and do five, that's dead simple. And you'll find that there's that adding stuff on or you go three sets one week, I'm gonna try and do four sets the next week or five sets the next week. And this is where periodization can be really simple. Just try and do a little bit more each week and then do that deload because if you're doing that, you're going to need that recovery phase. So those two things can go together. And it might be that like broken sets like we talked about before. So use that example like four pull-ups and then like five. Like it's quite difficult to like a 25% increase. It's a big jump. So actually maybe you do three pull-ups, have a little rest and you do two and that makes up your five or you do four plus one with like and a little rest is only like 10, 20 seconds or something. So there's little ways that you're just able to add that little bit in. It doesn't have to be all exactly the same. Like if you, what's that phrase? If you always, you'll always get what's the, I don't know, I'm gonna butcher it. If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. So if you always go in and do three sets of 10, you're just gonna get good at doing three sets of 10. You're not gonna get any better at doing anything else. So you do have to provide something different and it can be as simple as have a little break, do another rep. I didn't do that last week. Well, that's a progressive overload from the week before. Sweet. So if you are, yeah, if you want some training programs which are periodized for you, you can take some of the guesswork out of this sort of stuff. Then we have those in our online programs, all sorts of things. Hannah Sands must have human rights. Yeah, I'm here. Lots of different stuff in there if you go and play around with, all of it is laid out in this way. So you are getting that periodized overload and the deloads scheduled for you. You'll learn a lot about training as well. We are an educational organization as well as a training platform and provider. So if you want to go and get a little bit of knowledge around your training, then all of that is in our online platform as well. And you will leave, not only having to achieve the skills that you want because we put self-assessments in, we help you to check bays, we give you a little directions, cues, all this sort of stuff. It's designed to help you avoid plateaus at each journey step along the way, but you'll also come out of it knowing a lot more about your training so you can then become a master of your own training. That's gotta be worth a time of investment to read a little bit and learn a little bit along the way. Yeah, investing some, you never regret investing some time in understanding yourself, your body and your training if that's what you're into. So yeah, and a reminder, what we said at the beginning of the podcast, if you wanna come and you're fed up of doing it online, you wanna come in person. We've got workshops in Staffordshire on the weekend on the 19th of February. That's coming up very quickly. And then the 6th of March in London. Details are on the website. Look at the click on the workshops link and yet there will be some more being announced very soon too. We hope to see you there. Amazing. And so next week, keep exploring your physical potential through movement, strength and play. Class dismissed.