Written by Geoffrey Verity Schofield. Follow him on Instagram, watch his training content on YouTube, and read more of his writing on Medium.
When you first start training, everything works. You add weight to the bar almost every session, your shirts get tighter within weeks, and progress feels almost automatic. That phase doesn’t last, and it isn’t supposed to.
The longer you train, the smaller the return on the same effort becomes. This is diminishing returns, and it’s one of the most predictable laws in the gym. A beginner can add noticeable muscle in a few months. An intermediate lifter might take a year to make the same visual change. An advanced lifter can spend years chasing gains that used to come in weeks. None of that means training has stopped working. It means you’re closer to your natural ceiling than you were, and closing that gap takes more precision.
The mistake I see most often is lifters treating a slowdown as a sign something is broken, so they chase novelty instead of consistency: a new program every few weeks, a new supplement stack, a new split. In reality, once you’re past the beginner stage, the basics stop being optional extras and become the entire job. Progressive overload has to be tracked properly, not guessed at. Recovery — sleep, food, stress — has to be dialled in, not assumed. Volume and intensity need to be adjusted deliberately rather than left on autopilot.
Diminishing returns also means the improvements get smaller but not less important. A kilogram added to your squat in year five can represent as much hard-won adaptation as five kilograms in year one. I’d rather my clients learn to value a slow half-inch on their arms after years of consistent training than get discouraged because it didn’t happen in a month.
If your progress has slowed, don’t panic and don’t assume you need to blow everything up. Check the fundamentals first: are you actually progressing your working weights over months, not just sessions? Are you eating enough to support the training you’re doing? Are you sleeping enough to recover from it? Most ‘plateaus’ are really just diminishing returns doing exactly what they’re supposed to do — and the answer is rarely a new gimmick, it’s better execution of what already works.
