Thank you everyone for the motivation and helpful comments. I really liked that video from Caltene.
I’m 5’6 and ~155 at the moment. So yes, my squat and deadlift are a bit more. Bench press not so much! I’m just striving for 135 at the moment!
Height and weight above, I’m not sure about my bf%. I’d guess something like 25-28% but I have no idea. These are the most recent progress pictures I have taken during my weight loss:
Could be - I saw awesome progress on both Starting Strength and 5/3/1 when I was just starting out; though of course that’s certainly attributable to beginner gains. I’ve heard conflicting ideas on the importance of volume - I was doing some heavy volume for a while, but then I’ve had people say that doesn’t apply to women as much, or that it’s not ideal for my workouts to take more than an hour, etc. While I was losing weight I cut the volume as well.
However, when I did manage to bench 125, it was when I had hurt my back and was doing no lower body, so all of my workouts were upper body. Perhaps that should lead me to conclude I do need more volume!
I’ve had logs on here a couple of times but never kept up with them (though I do log everything in a notebook). Perhaps it will be the extra motivation and support I could use?!
Best performance: Squat 380, 260 bench, 480 dead on the platform at 161lbs, August 2011.
From there, my dead slowly went down (post-injury to my hand), my bench dropped 10lbs and my squat went up to 405 briefly (in October 11).
From that point forward, everything did a slow decline. My dead plummeted to 3-fucking-65, my squat to 320, my bench to 215. I got angry. REAL angry. real depressed. Would start getting stronger and then take another nose-dive. Frustrating that I couldn’t figure it out.
Recently (a couple months ago) I realized I changed my grip on the dead when I hurt my hand and never switched back. The new grip became “normal” for me… and when I tried the old grip again, my lifts started to go back up. All of them, even squat. I consider it partially psychological and partially due to the grip change. Now, my bench is lagging behind more than I want it to, but it’s going up again too. It’ll take awhile to get back to my former strength level, but I have to be patient about it.
That said… analyze EVERYTHING. You might feel like you’re spinning your wheels trying to figure it out (I tried multiple things that I thought might be responsible), but eventually, you’ll figure out what’s causing it.
This seem like another example of program hopping that seems to be effecting a lot of people. It really just makes you stall faster, I only know of a couple people on here who have gotten away with it.
Im at a plateau myself, running 5/3/1. What i am doing is moving my training maxes down 10-15 pounds and continue running the program. In my experience the best way to bust through a plateau is take a step back, gain some momentum and bust through it. Sucking it up and just trying harded is much easier said than done.
