Anything Can Be A PR: Broadening Your Horizons To Eliminate Plateaus
I like people who think a little differently. The GGC is a little different. And those that compete in it are often, a lttle different. I mean, dedicating space in your house to lifting a ton of weight is weird enough. But today I’ve got an interesting read for you. Expanding the concept of a Personal Record, or PR … from our Top Male Athlete from the Spring event.
Five Point Summary
- At a certain point fixating on and structuring your short/mid-term goals around a narrow group of lifts becomes detrimental, both mentally and in terms of progress.
- Expanding the scope of the PRs you chase and track, in terms of new lifts, new variations, and new rep ranges, is a solution to this problem.
- Improvements in new areas can later contribute to improvements in old areas.
- When comparing your current lifts to lifts you’ve previously performed, consider the context of both sets.
- A proposed application of these ideas into a loose training structure.
Introduction
This will be a short description of the need for, benefit of, and application of the “anything can be a PR” mindset. I will clarify here that this is not necessarily good advice for beginners. I won’t say exactly where it starts to apply. Saying ‘this is for intermediates and up’ bases the recommendation on one of the most poorly and inconsistently defined classifications in lifting. But I feel like this kind of approach and mindset will probably push a beginner into a pattern of ‘fuckarounditits’. Largely due to the fact that a beginner is probably not plateauing for the same reasons as a more experienced lifter. With that said let’s jump in.
The Problem
The problem I am hoping to address and offer a solution to is a fixation that many lifters have on a narrow selection of lifts when determining what represents a PR/goal. The most common collection of goals/relevant PRs to lifters is probably the Squat/Bench/Deadlift (SBD) 1 rep max (RM). They are ubiquitous lifts, anyone who lifts knows about them and can probably appreciate them. Maximum single rep is also probably seen as the gold standard for ‘strength’ for the majority of lifters, or at least the most significant minority.
The most common goals I see in progress posts or comments establishing goals revolve around improving 1RM in lifts like these. I know that there are several other fairly common examples but I won’t list them all here. Now these are NOT bad goals, nor unimportant PRs. In fact they are great goals and exciting PRs as far as I am concerned. I care about, push for and track my 1RM in all of these lifts and more. The issue comes about when these are the ONLY goals you set/PRs you care about.
Diminishing Returns
Lifting offers diminishing returns, that’s just the sad fact of it. Progress will always become progressively slower the better you get. Weekly increases in SBD 1RM become monthly increases, become yearly increases, become multi-year increases. A lifter will rapidly reach a point where the positive feedback of getting a new PR or meeting a goal becomes less and less frequent. This kills motivation. There is boatloads of research on the importance of regular positive feedback, small victories, and the like in the preservation of motivation and productivity. If you cut off the stream of achievement and results you slowly erode your motivation and damage your mindset.
Beyond that even the most disciplined lifter who cares fuck all about motivation and will go to the gym and bust ass like some kind of forklift robot will still see reduced progress and results from continuously pounding their head against a wall when plateaued in an effort to reach a new level on the same lifts. Trying again and again with the same approach when it has not worked before is not determination, it’s insanity.
Broadening Your Horizons
The solution to this fixation and inevitable stagnation is change, and one way to create that change is to expand the scope of what is a PR and what goals you set. Lets look at an example of this:
–Your initial goal/tracked PR: Squat 1RM.
–The expanded list of potential goals/PRs you could also set and track:
- Squat 10RM,
- Squat 20RM,
- Safety Squat Bar Squats,
- Front Squat, Buffalo bar,
- Giant Camber Bar,
- Spider Bar,
- Split Squat,
- Zercher Paused Squat,
- Wide Stance / Narrow Stance,
- fucking LOG BACK SQUAT,
- for 1/5/10/15/20/25RM, for 5×5, 10×10, most in a minute, most in a single breath,
- best 1RM wearing a diving suit, whatever.
Endless Possibilities
The list is almost endless. You can pick ANYTING to be a goal and eventual PR. And it can be just as rewarding and valuable as your barbell back squat 1RM once you adopt the proper mindset. Chase any of the above for weeks or months, as long as you can while making consistent progress. But once you hit a plateau1 just let it go, you do not need to keep grinding with minimal progress towards that same goal, there is a very long list of new goals to reach and new PRs to set.
If you rotate enough variations of movement, rep range, bar, etc you can be making near weekly progress almost indefinitely. Instead of sitting on a plateau baking in the sun seeing very little return for your lifting investment. When you eventually cycle back around to the same lifts, bars, rep ranges, etc you will have grown so much bigger and stronger in a general sense that you will be ready to see rapid progress again.
Footnote
1 *I’m going to make a footnote here. A plateau is not a bad day, it’s a prolonged period of stagnation. Please don’t read this and start whipping around to different goals and programming every time you don’t do strictly better than the last session. Give things some time and make sure your fundamentals are in order before you start calling things plateaus and jumping ship. This is very important for newer lifters as you almost certainly are ‘plateauing’ for reasons that are unrelated to the lift itself and will just carry over to any new goals you make.
* I am speaking from personal experience when I make these suggestions. I spent over a year gaining only 10lbs on my SBD 1RM total. Not per lift, that was on my entire total. After I hit my first big plateau I kept trying to beat those lifts, they were what I cared about. I trained harder, longer, and all I had to show for it was a 10lb jump to my squat and some various injuries. The programs that turned this around for me were Deep Water (Beginner and Intermediate) by Jon Anderson and Average to Savage 2.0 (A2S2) by Greg Nuckols.
Programs
To give a brief description of each, Deep Water (DW) has a progression based on 100 rep days in the big barbell compounds. Beginner uses 10x10s dropping the rest period every other week, and Intermediate takes those 100 reps and has you complete them in a progressively lower number of sets. A2S2 has you working on 10 different lifts (an upper body and a lower body lift each day in the 5-day version I use), progressing through a range of weights and rep ranges, with as many reps as possible (AMRAP) sets each day on the last set.
Deep Water
I ran DW first, it came on the tail end of over a year of fruitlessly pushing a butchered version of 531 BBB. With this program the goal was not 1RM, it was 100 reps. That is massively different. The first week was awful, with 4 minutes rest between each set of 10. The next time was still awful, with 3 minutes between sets, but I completed it. And that was a PR. That was quantifiable progress that I could see and be proud of.
This continued down to 2 minutes, and into intermediate where I ended up being able to complete all 100 reps in 7 sets (1 less than the last weeks required) with increased weight. That was huge progress in only 12 weeks, it was the first serious achievement I had felt since setting my last SBD 1RM over a year beforehand. In my mind I had done more in those 12 weeks than I had done in the previous ~70.
A2S2
Later on I did A2S2 and once again I got to experience regular, consistent progress in the 7 lifts that were not barbell Squat, Bench and Dead. Every week was a PR. I was developing muscles in ways I had not before because I was pushing new movements in new rep ranges. Every time I came back to a rep range I had done before, or a weight I had done before I knew what I had done the last time and was driven to beat it by just a bit. There were sets I would have probably called earlier but I was so close to that new PR that I powered through.
This broadening of my views on what goals could be and what PRs were worth thinking about and tracking not only returned motivation and enjoyment to my workouts, but fed into progress in my initial goals. After that long plateau I have had regular progress on my SBD 1RM, adding 150lbs to my total in ~2 years after the ~1.5 years that gave only 10lbs.
These Days
These days I am spending less and less time focusing on SBD 1RM, keeping my time and focus on new goals, which makes me bigger and stronger and enables me to get PRs when my focus comes back to S, B, or D 1RM.
What it all boils down to is by changing your focus regularly you can maintain a steady stream of progress in the short term. This not only has the benefit of keeping your training mentally rewarding, but also forces you out of your ‘comfort zone’ by making you train your body in new ways, this builds your overall strength and size, and that will ultimately help with everything else.
Next Week
We’ll come back next week with the conclusion of this write up. If you enjoyed it, check out Mark on Instagram:
