 The most common question I've gotten probably over five years combined is how to break through a plateau, whether it be bench, squat, deadlift, overhead, my arm size. It doesn't really matter. And I think I wish I had a answer for you and anyone that gives you a answer on how to break through a plateau is full of, you know what, can't curse because YouTube's holding it back. But I'm going to try to give you guys three things to look at, analyze yourself, kind of be a little bit more self-aware on how you're doing it. Give yourself an honest rank. And then either find a coach, do more research on the topic, or just put into practice and focus so you can break these plateaus. If you guys enjoy this style of video, if you learned something, give this thing a thumbs up, let's dive into it. Topic number one, I guess, first thing we should look at when all lifting goals, whether it's strength or aesthetics, is technique. And although sometimes technique is over talked about where it's not the only thing or arguably even the most important thing. We have to be efficient at the lifts and try to get better at them and lift the lifts as possible or the best we can for not only lifting the most amount of weight or targeting the muscle if it's an aesthetic thing. So focusing on your technique, if you're plateauing over months or years or weeks, having a goal of each session or something to improve upon technique, doing a little bit of research, learning a little bit or having a coach and trying to improve your technique little by little by little, day after day, week after week, rep after rep, rep after month will allow you to continue to progress in the long term because one, you'll be able to lift the most amount of weight possible because your lift will be more efficient. And two, being more efficient, you'll stay injury free. If you're injured, you won't be able to lift, gains go down. And then most importantly though, you'll be able to handle more amount of volume over time. And that's going to allow progressive overload, which dives us right into topic number two, programming. Having some type of plan is going to be necessary. And if you've plateaued, chances are you're not following a plan or maybe you're following your own plan that doesn't have a great progression scheme to it. But for the majority of things, especially a natural lifter that's not using some kind of performance enhancing, but even people that are using some kind of performance enhancing stuff, stuff, I said, drugs, you know what I'm talking about. Hold on, big SUV, especially for the natural lifter, but someone who's also using maybe some PEDs or a little bit of assistance along the way, frequency and volume are going to be the key driving factors in not plateauing or continuing our progress. And so what we want to look at is how many times a week can we handle a certain type of lift and how much volume in that week can we handle and how can we slowly progress that more reps, more load, more sets, week to week, month to month, year to year to allow us to progress. And something that's too common, I'd say, in programming or just winging it by people is A, either going too heavy and not getting enough volume where, sure, there is a time and place for singles, doubles and heavy triples, maybe even heavy sets of five in your strength training or even your physique goals training to progress, but just hitting a heavy single every day, getting burnt out mentally and physically from that heavy single, getting all fired up, slapping yourself, listen to angry M&M, smashing close to 90% and then going home is not enough to drive strength or enough volume to drive gains, the hypertrophy that you need long term. So having some kind of goal again, some kind of, or excuse me, setting a goal and then having some kind of program to lead you there, lifting too heavy too often is something that I find very, very common. And then the other one would be is just not progressing. If you're just winging it and you kind of do two sets of curls over here and kind of do two sets of curls over here on the preacher and I kind of do some hammer curls, but you don't know the load, how many sets and how many reps you do week to week. And you end up just doing the same amount week to week, just getting that pump, no, no change in either rest periods, how much weight you're using sets or reps, then you won't progress long term. And so that's where the programming comes in or a coach may come in. Last but not least, recovery. And I've probably done videos on this in the past that maybe I have certain disagreements with myself over the years. You know, I'm constantly refining my skill as a coach, as a lifter, my knowledge as a coach and a lifter in the fitness industry. And so there's some things I might have said in the past that I don't agree with right now because all I believe the key factors to recovery right now are those two things I mentioned above. How good your technique is, the better your technique is, the less beat up you'll be from training. The more you'll be able to train over time. Two is your programming. A well balanced program will allow you just enough recovery to get a next session in while still having enough fatigue to allow you to adapt and grow over time. And then the other ones are simple. They're sad, but they're simple. But they're true is nutrition, sleep and hydration staying on top of those, making sure you get enough sleep for you, not listening to all those hustlers out there that are going to bed at midnight, waking up at 3 a.m. Cause they got a grind must hustle, murder, kill, but actually get enough sleep that you can function not only in your regular job and your family life and in training is more important in my opinion to optimize the hours that you are awake. If I can get more work done in the gym, in business, in life, and do what I want in eight hours being awake and sleeping the other ones, I think that's more important than staying awake 24 hours and sucking at every single hour. So sleep is number one for mental and physical recovery. It's all we have. And then nutrition as always, if your main goal is to gain muscle or gain strength, being in some type of calorie surplus, eating more calories in your body needs daily is going to be key. If I am 200 pounds and I eat 3000 calories every single day and I stay the same body weight at 3000 calories, I need to eat just up from that, depending on how drastic you want to get to gain muscle to gain strength. If you're really trying to gain weight and muscle, you know, maybe it's an extra 200, 250 calories a day. If you just want a slight increase, you can do 50 100, 200 calories extra a day and still make progress in muscle and gains will be a little bit slower, but it will happen. Hopefully that breaks some of it down for you. Comment below. What's your most frustrating lift and how you're plateauing. And maybe a more specific question will dig into that in the next video. I do appreciate you guys. More videos, come in and subscribe. Turn on that notification so you don't miss a video. Smash that thumbs up and we'll see you in the next one. Silent Mike, we out of here.