If you want drastic gains, drastic measures must be taken. If you have kept up with my other blogs the past couple of weeks you know the first step towards improvement is developing a high level of consistency in everything you do. Where I see a lot of people start to struggle or “plateau” is when they stop adding weight to their lifts. Bottom line if you want to get stronger, you need to pick up heavier objects on a more consistent basis. Each week you should expect to lift heavier weights. I’m not talking 20 lb gains a week but you need to push it. Check your WOD book, or whatever you keep track of your lifts in and if you noticed you Back squatted 100 lbs for your final set last week you better have 105 lbs on the bar for you final set of back squats this week. Consistently increasing your efforts in small increments like this will allow you to continually set new records every couple of weeks and help you avoid plateaus.
If you are training hard, you are going to miss often, probably on a daily basis. But with the variety of exercises performed in a crossfit gym there is no reason you cant set a new record on one of them. You might press 5 lbs more than you’ve ever pressed before, or you might back squat 100 lbs more times in a workout than you ever have, both are signs that your strength is improving. It isn’t always necessarily a new 1 rep absolute max that shows you you are becoming stronger; if you are waiting for that you are going to get frustrated fast. Take notice of your small daily accomplishments; take note in your journal when weights that once felt heavy are feeling lighter. Pretty soon you will start to realize that there probably isn’t a week that goes bye when you don’t set some sort of new personal record in the gym.
Remember always push the weights on a weekly basis. It’s okay to miss, you are probably expending just as much effort on a controlled miss as you would on a make. You won’t be adding 100 lbs to your back squat in a month, but you can probably attempt 5 more lbs than you did the previous week. I’ll agree with you, trying heavier weights is scary sometimes, but it’s a healthy fear that prepares your body to attempt something great that it hasn’t attempted before.
written by: Nic Scudamore
Lift Heavy, Lift Often, Dream, and Repeat.