Why Strength Fluctuates

biggerstronger

Oct 23

Takeaway Points:

Strength fluctuations are a natural part of training and aren’t necessarily a sign that you’re not getting stronger or something is wrong with your training program. As long as there remains an upward trend over time, you’re good!
Stress, sleep schedule, recovery time, and how much you’re eating can all effect how strong - or not - you are on any given day.
Disrupted training, like going on vacation or being sick, can also cause a dip in strength, but these setbacks are usually minor and getting back to your pre-break levels happens relatively quickly.
The changes in strength can often be small numbers, too small to be noticed when the minimum weight you add is at least 5 pounds. The use of smaller fractional plates help make the fluctuations in strength more clear.

Beginner lifters can often train and see strength improvements on a very regular basis - from month to month, or even as frequently as from week to week. In contrast, more advanced lifters develop much more slowly, and may take a few months to see an improvement on a previous max. In the meantime, strength typically fluctuates - some weeks a bit higher, other weeks a bit lower - and this can impact training significantly, especially if the fluctuations are big enough that they throw off percentage-based training programs.

Today I wanted to delve into exactly why strength can fluctuate - how we can plan around it, and what we can do about it.

Stress, Sleep, and Recovery

In general, strength naturally fluctuates in response to the usual cycle of training. You train hard, and this temporarily reduces your strength as it invokes a pretty strong stimulus. You rest up, and your body adapts during the recovery period to become a bit more muscular, and a bit stronger, than before. Then, when you go to train again, you’re able to do a bit more, and you repeat this cycle (ideally) indefinitely, or at least until the point that diminishing returns make serious training no longer worth it.

Problems can arise if this normal cycle is interrupted by anything. Disruptions to your sleep cycle or the quality of your sleep, periods of high stress, drinking, etc. - all of these can inhibit your natural recovery abilities, and thus your ability to adapt and improve.

Training naturally increases your fitness over time, but it also generates fatigue - and in the short term, fatigue can “mask” your strength. If you’re a bit stronger than previously, but you’re also a bit more fatigued than previously, the two can cancel each other out, leading to the impression that you haven’t improved.

Sometimes, this issue can be avoided by more carefully and intelligently structuring your training on a weekly or monthly basis. If you’re training two upper body days back to back, for example, your strength may suffer on the second day. In such a case, reorganizing your training week so that your upper body days are a bit more spread out may better optimize your recovery between sessions, ensuring that you’re able to work out fresh on both sessions.

Similarly, you’ll typically want to put your most important work first for the day, when you’ve got the most energy and the least fatigue. If you’re planning on testing your bench press 1RM but you start off with other upper body work first, this could impact your performance on your subsequent 1RM attempt.

On a monthly basis, fatigue can accumulate or build up over time as a result of consistent hard training. Many of us know the feeling of getting more worn down and exhausted over the course of a training cycle, as it gets harder and we start to struggle to stay on top of everything. In this case, the use of a taper or peaking week - an intentionally easy week designed to maximize your recovery - will set you up to go into a true max test while maximally recovered.

Diet Status and Energy Availability

Another consideration is diet status and energy availability. Energy availability refers to the ease with which your body can make use of energy. In a caloric maintenance or surplus, your body has high energy availability - it’s easy to mobilize energy to support training optimally, and you aren’t likely to suffer any consequences from hard training.

In contrast, when in a caloric deficit, energy availability decreases, and this means that you have less energy leftover for hard training and for keeping your body optimally running. Your hormones start to get funky because calories are being taken away from the things that they would normally be used for, and shifted towards being used to power your activity. The energy you’re relying on is less readily available, and your body has to dig in deeper into its stores in order to get the calories that it needs.

In such a case, strength typically decreases. However, an interesting thing I’ve found, is that it doesn’t do so equally for all lifts. In particular, I find that upper body lifts tend to suffer first, while lower body lifts tend to be a bit better at retaining their strength even during a cutting phase.

There are a lot of reasons that this could possibly happen, and while this affects me (and some of the clients I’ve worked with), it’s certainly not universal. So, I’d carefully examine how energy availability affects your own lifts, and use this to guide your future training.

Fractional Plates and Tiny Numbers

Another one is the problem of tiny numbers. Due to some combination of training, fatigue, and energy availability, you’ll typically see your strength fluctuate pretty regularly. If you were to take a max test every day, you’d see your strength fluctuate a few pounds daily due to these tiny changes. This is what happens often in Bulgarian style training, where trainees max out frequently and expect to see large fluctuations daily based on their daily readiness.

One problem is that these numbers may often fluctuate by such small amounts, that it’s not immediately clear that this is a normal part of the process. Most gyms only have plates that go down to 2.5lb increments, meaning that the smallest change in weight you can make is 2x2.5lb plates, or 5lbs.

Let’s imagine someone whose bench press is roughly 135lbs, and he’s a beginner gaining strength relatively rapidly. Today his bench may be 135, then tomorrow 134, then the day after 134, then 136, 135, 137, 134, 138, 136, 139, 137, 140, and so on. The problem is, that most of these numbers, if tested in a situation where you can only train with 130, 135, or 140lbs, would give a much more “stable” impression than the reality. Anything between 130-134 would be called “130”, anything 135-139 would be “135”, and only lifts at 140-144 would be “140”.

Thus if we take those numbers from the perspective of the trainee attempting to max out each day, they’d instead see 135, 130, 130, 135, 135, 135, 130, 135, 135, 135, 135, 140. Going from 135 in day 1 to 130 in day 2 might falsely give the person the impression that they lost a lot (5lbs) of strength, when they didn’t.

This is also certainly a problem when testing maxes less frequently as well. If your “real” strength one month is 135lbs, and then your “real” strength the next month is 139lbs, attempting 140lbs in the next month would lead to failure and the impression that you made no progress.

As always, the use of more accurate and smaller fractional plates will help to smooth out this equation, making those normal fluctuations a lot clearer, and making it less confusing for the lifter. Your “real” strength could be considered to be a running average of your recent performances, but even then it’s not likely you’d be able to measure that in a very careful or precise way. As a result, embracing a certain amount of uncertainty is a part of the process.

Disrupted Training

Another major culprit is simply disrupted training. For serious lifters, where progress comes more slowly, any disruption to training can certainly throw you off and cause a temporary dip in strength.

Very often, things like holidays, vacations, and other natural disruptions to our training can still have an impact for a few weeks afterwards, and disrupt the process of training, adaptation, and improvement. Luckily, these setbacks are generally minor, and will iron themselves out before too long.

Long Term Adaptation

In general, the main thing to look for is some kind of upward trend in your training. So long as you’re increasing the amount of volume you’re performing, or you’re able to handle a bit more weight, you’ll typically see your strength trend upward over time. You may not see strength improvements from month to month, and that’s fine.

What you can control is the amount of effort you put in, and the amount of training you’re able to complete. Focus on what you can control, and over time you’ll continue to see progress.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

Follow Adam on Facebook or Twitter, or subscribe to our mailing list, if you liked this post and want to say hello!

Enjoy this post? Share the gains!

Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter