There are some things to keep in mind.
First, the gains of a detrained person are typically the fastest because of the enormous increases in motor pattern efficiency. Your greatest progress should have come in those first three years. The fact that it didn’t–despite very clear and hard effort on your part–suggests to me that your body is not supercompensating as quickly as it should, for any number of possible reasons.
We’re all experiments of one, so none of what I say is meant to sound like a rule. I can’t back it up with studies. However, in over 20 years of training, some of which overlapped with watching the Turkish national weightlifting team train, I can honestly say that every single weightlifter I’ve personally seen has improved the fastest, percentage-wise, in the first 1-3 years.
You can get everything wrong (nutrition, form, etc.) and still make great gains in those years as long as you are training consistently and hard (which it seems you are). If you don’t make rapid gains in that time, then something is wrong with your body’s response, not the training.
I don’t have my older training logs in front of me now. However, from what I remember, my untrained front squat went from 95 pounds the first time I tried (it must have been in 1997) to 280 pounds in 1999, and I am a horrible responder to training. My wrists are 5 inches around, which is less than my wife’s wrist circumference (and she weighs 120 pounds). I have friends who quadrupled their squats in a comparable time-frame.
I became completely detrained in 2010-2011. I didn’t touch a weight for two years. Then I started training again about two months ago. I’m attaching a graphic of my front squat progress, from 200 pounds cold on day 1 to 257 on day 48. Obviously, that number is not at all sustainable, and I don’t expect it to be, but it’s about a 29% strength increase in less than 2 months. Because of my detrained state, I consider this fully equivalent to ‘newbie’ gains. Percentage-wise, it took me 48 days to obtain the increase in your front squat that it took you 3 years to achieve.
I’m not saying this to be an asshole. My genetics are bad to ordinary. I was once playing soccer with Halil Mutlu and I ran into him. It hurt. He was so damn dense that contact with him, just at normal speed, bruised me and threw me back, and at the time I was 40 pounds heavier than him. Erol Bilgin, another 62 kilo Turkish lifter at the time, went from front squatting the bar to 140 kilos in something like 3-4 years. These are strong responders. I’m an ordinary responder. From what I know of your training history, you’re a very weak responder. You’ve put in the work, your form is good, everything is good–except, for whatever reason, your body isn’t responding.
I’m an ever worse responder at cardio than weightlifting. You could give me 5 good years of training and I could never, even run a 6-minute mile.
It’s like unrequited love. Do you do what you love, even if it doesn’t love you? That’s the question some lifters, especially the less gifted ones (or the gifted ones, when they hit a plateau), have to ask. Honestly, from your posts, it seems you’ve done more than enough work. Could it be your hormonal profile that is somehow holding you back? I don’t know enough about that kind of stuff; maybe it’s worth investigating.
