You’ve been doing the same exercise for a few weeks. At first, everything was moving. Ten reps became eleven. Eleven became twelve. You added some weight and started climbing again.
Then it stopped.
- Last week: ten reps.
- This week: ten reps.
- The week before that: ten reps.
So you start wondering: Has this exercise run its course?
Maybe. But I think there’s a more important question to ask first: Is the exercise actually the problem?
Because a plateau gives us information. It doesn’t necessarily give us a diagnosis.
A Plateau Doesn’t Tell You Why
Let’s say you train chest once a week and perform three working sets of a particular press. You haven’t progressed it in three weeks.
That sounds significant when you say: “I’ve been stuck for three weeks.” But in practical terms, you may be looking at nine working sets. Is that enough information to conclude the exercise no longer works?
I’d want to know a lot more.
- How are you sleeping?
- Are you recovering?
- Are you eating enough?
- Are you in a caloric deficit?
- How is your stress?
- Has your technique changed?
- Is your range of motion still the same?
- Are your joints bothering you?
- How long has the exercise been in the program?
- What does your execution actually look like?
There are a lot of variables affecting performance at any given time. Before we replace an exercise, we should at least try to determine which variable is creating the problem. Otherwise, we risk treating the symptom instead of understanding the cause.
A plateau is information. It isn’t a diagnosis.
Hypertrophy Gives Us More Than One Lever
One of the things I love about hypertrophy training is that there are a lot of tools available to us.
- We can train across different rep ranges.
- We can manipulate range of motion.
- We can become more consistent with our technique.
- We can use pauses.
- We can alter volume.
- We can change how close we're training to failure.
We can even change the way an exercise is programmed across different mesocycles without necessarily abandoning the exercise itself.
Research supports the idea that muscle growth can occur across a relatively broad spectrum of loading when training is sufficiently challenging, even though heavier loading tends to be more advantageous for maximal strength.
This doesn't mean that every time you have a bad workout you should start changing variables. Quite the opposite.
If you're changing the exercise, rep range, tempo, technique, and volume every other week, eventually it becomes difficult to determine what is actually working. Exercise variation can be useful when it is systematic, while excessive or random variation may actually compromise adaptations.
There’s a difference between programming and simply doing something different.
Early in my training, I didn't always understand that. You see someone online doing a new chest exercise.
“Want to blow up your chest? Try this.”
Looks cool. So you replace what you were doing. Then something else comes along. Now you replace that.
Eventually, you're basically standing in a pitch-black room throwing change toward a piggy bank and hoping some of it goes in.
Training is already difficult. Don't make it harder to evaluate by constantly changing what you're measuring.
Progress It, Practice It, or Replace It
When an exercise stops moving, I think there are three possibilities worth considering.
Progress It
If your technique is repeatable, your range of motion is appropriate, your joints feel good, the target muscle is being challenged, and recovery is appropriate, the exercise may simply need more time.
Not every workout needs to produce a PR. Look at the trajectory rather than one or two data points.
If the exercise continues doing the job you selected it to do, there may be no reason to remove it.
Practice It
Sometimes you don't actually have a progression problem. You have an execution problem.
Maybe you're still learning the exercise. Maybe you started too heavy. Maybe your range of motion changes from set to set. Maybe you're so focused on adding another rep that the execution that made the exercise useful in the first place is starting to disappear.
In that case, I don't necessarily need a different exercise. I might need to get better at this one.
- Lower the weight if necessary.
- Learn the setup.
- Standardize the technique.
- Make the reps comparable.
- Then start worrying about progression.
Especially with an unfamiliar movement, I want enough exposure to establish meaningful data before deciding whether it works for me.
Replace It
Eventually, though, exercises can run their course.
If we've given the movement legitimate time, established good execution, explored appropriate rep ranges and programming variables, considered recovery and nutrition, and we're continuing to see diminishing returns, then replacing it becomes reasonable.
Joint irritation matters here too. So does fatigue.
If your numbers are still climbing but your joints increasingly hurt, your range of motion is disappearing, and your technique has to deteriorate to keep the logbook moving, I don't consider that a great reason to keep an exercise.
Sometimes you should stop trying to progress an exercise before the number stops progressing.
An Exercise Has to Justify Its Cost
For hypertrophy, I want an exercise to give me a strong target-muscle stimulus without creating a disproportionate amount of fatigue or joint irritation.
You may hear this discussed as the exercise's stimulus-to-fatigue ratio, or SFR. I think it's useful as a coaching concept, but it shouldn't be treated as some universal mathematical score. The relationship is highly individual.
Take barbell squats.
For me, traditional barbell squats have generally come with a higher fatigue cost relative to the quad stimulus I can get from exercises like hack squats, leg presses, or leg extensions.
That doesn't mean barbell squats are bad. Someone else may be built exceptionally well for them, get tremendous quad stimulus, tolerate them beautifully, and recover without issue.
Great. Keep squatting.
The question isn't: Is this objectively the best exercise?
The better question is: Is this exercise giving me a worthwhile return for what it's costing me?
And that answer can change over time.
When a Good Exercise Finally Runs Its Course
I recently experienced this with the cambered bar bench press.
I started the year using the incline cambered bar press. I loved it. My numbers kept climbing, and it became genuinely exciting to see what I could do with the movement.
Eventually, we moved to a flat cambered bar press. The numbers continued moving. My coach and I changed rep ranges across different mesocycles and continued finding ways to make the movement productive.
We got a lot out of that exercise. Eventually, though, we started seeing diminishing returns.
And I'll admit that I was attached to it. I liked the movement. I liked the numbers. Part of me wanted to keep seeing how far I could push it.
But somewhere around the second or third week of one of my recent mesocycles, my coach and I came to the same conclusion: It was probably time to move on.
We had squeezed about as much juice out of that exercise as we were going to get for the time being.
That doesn't make it a bad exercise. And it doesn't mean I'll never use it again. It means it did its job.
Sometimes the smartest programming decision isn't finding another way to force progression. It's recognizing when you've gotten what you needed and moving on.
Context Changes What Progress Looks Like
We also have to consider what phase of training someone is in.
A newer lifter may see performance improvements relatively frequently. After years of consistent training, those improvements generally become harder-earned.
And dieting changes the equation again.
If I'm deep into contest prep, significantly lighter, eating fewer calories, performing more cardio, and carrying more fatigue, I'm not necessarily expecting training performance to behave exactly as it would during a productive gaining phase.
Energy deficits can impair gains in lean mass, which is one reason the objective during a physique prep increasingly shifts toward preserving as much muscle tissue and training performance as possible while losing body fat.
If I'm maintaining high-quality performance under those conditions, that can be a very different outcome from stagnating under conditions designed for growth.
An exercise can only be judged against the job you're asking it to perform.
Before You Replace It, Ask Why
There isn't a magic number of weeks after which an exercise expires. And I don't think there should be.
Don't keep an exercise simply because you're emotionally attached to the numbers. But don't throw away a productive movement because you're bored or because your logbook hasn't changed for a few workouts.
Look at the entire picture.
- Is the target muscle still being challenged?
- Is your execution repeatable?
- Are your joints tolerating the movement?
- Is the fatigue manageable?
- Have you given the exercise enough time to collect meaningful information?
- Have you considered your sleep, nutrition, recovery, stress, and current phase of training?
- And have you actually explored the appropriate programming options before deciding the movement is finished?
If you've answered those questions and the return continues to diminish, move on. But don't mistake the first sign of stalled performance for the answer.
A plateau is information. It isn't a diagnosis.
Before you replace the exercise, make sure the exercise is actually the problem.
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