How should you approach training plateaus as an athlete? Is your coach pulling their weight?
How do you troubleshoot a lack of progress?
It’s easy to be critical of others and say they’re not doing X, but often tough to bring that same level of objectivity to yourself and your own training.
As a coach, if a lifter isn’t improving, the first thing I will always look at is where my process, communication and tools are falling short and not serving the athlete I’m working with as best as possible.
Some of the most successful lifters that my team and I have coached come to the table with the same mindset about their own training. In other words, if they’re not seeing the results that they’d expect, they look at what parts of the plan they aren’t adhering to before simply saying “this isn’t working”.
The coach should aim to bring that same thinking to the coach-athlete relationship. When both parties are looking forthe best way to have the lifter succeed, it’s a pretty darn productive way to do things.
What if you don’t have a coach? Well, instead of blaming whatever program you are on, external stressors, or whatever else is “making it impossible for you to get the gains you’re looking for”, you can switch from using an external locus of control (blaming other things) to looking at your training using the frame of an internal locus of control (focus on what you can control).
Instead of just looking at the result, take a couple steps back and look at what got you there.
For example..
You end up getting to a training session and you haven’t eaten all day because work was super busy and you only had 15 minutes for lunch so you skipped. By the time you got to the gym, you were pretty underfed for the day and your workout suffered.
Yes, you can say “work was busy, I can’t change that”.
But you can also approach the same situation with the thinking of “I planned ahead and packed a lunch so that I only needed 10 minutes to eat my lunch on my 15 minute lunch break which gave me a spare 5 minutes to mentally relax before getting back to work”
Same situation, different mindset.
Having life happen to you is a pretty victimized way to live and while you’ll never control everything, you’d be surprised with how much change you can effect if you re-frame it.
Are there some things that will certainly be outside of your control/the result of tradeoffs from other priorities?
Yes.
However, there’s a surprising amount of things you CAN control when you zoom out to the big picture.
3. Apply to join my “Momentum Program” and become a case study. We’ll work with you 1-on-1 (in-person or online, depending on location) to consistently increase your PRs.
It takes less than 60 seconds to apply HERE in order to find out more information and see if you’d be a good fit.