I edited Dave's talk a bit to make the message a bit clearer.
The question is “it's been close to a year and a half since the person has made any progress beyond his “newbie” gains and he wants to know if it's time for him to throw in the towel." Basically, time for him to quit. The [idea] that jumps out at me right away is, “yeah it's probably time for you to find something else to do.” The reason for that isn't going to be genetic, the reason for that is going to be because “you don't care.”
Training is [probably] just something that is fun for you. It's a hobby. It's not something that you're really placing as a very high priority. You can continue training because you like to do it or for health reasons. I don't want to tell anybody just to stop training, but the red flag that I'm seeing here is you've gone a year and a half without making any progress.
You can make progress in lean body mass. You can make progress in strength. Hell, you can make progress on a concentration curl. There's so many different ways that you can make [continuously] progress with your training. It's not like your big three lifts [Squat, Bench, Deadlift] are going to be able to go up every single month after month after month, year after year after year. Strength doesn't work that way. Lean body mass doesn't work that way. [However,] there's always micro objectives that can be hit along the way to be able to know if you're moving towards what that ultimate goal is.
The first thing that I'm seeing is that there's no long-term objective [that you’ve mentioned.] You’re training just to train. If you had a long-term objective like, “four years from now, I want [an additional 20 pounds in lean body mass.] Then, you know “okay, on average I need to add five pounds of lean body mass each year and two and a half pounds every six months.” Well after the first six months of this “year and a half of no gains,” you would have been saying “what the [hell] is going on!?”
You'd start asking people “I've been stagnant for six months, what should I try to do” [and] you'd be trying to do different things. You would find ways around it when it comes to bodybuilding, powerlifting and competitive strength sports. [Training is] not it's not [a] linear happy-go-lucky process. It's a process of overcoming different adversities over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Once you get through one sticking point, there's just another one waiting two or three months down the line. Maybe you're lucky and you you can ride a wave for three, four, six months or whatever. Then, boom, something else is gonna happen. So it’s always that. That's what I love about the training process.
Now, there's genetic outliers that just fly all the way to the top, but that's not most people. It's obviously not this person that's asking the question. So given the fact that it hasn't even been a priority for a year and a half to even ask shows me that there's no indicators [that the individual is tracking,] that there's enough caring about [training,] that they don't give a shit enough about the fact that they weren't making progress until a year and a half later. So with that in mind, find something else that you really love and that you're really passionate about because when you find that something that you're really passionate about, you'll always find ways to overcome those little hurdles. That's not saying that you're going to be the absolute best at it someday. It's just saying you're going to find ways to keep progressing over the long-term.
That would be my advice. You're either ignorant, stupid, or lazy. I don't think that you're stupid, and I don't think that you're lazy, I think that you're ignorant in the aspect that you haven't set any type of long-term objective and broken that down into key objectives to be able to shoot for as indicators to know if you're making progress or not. [The fact that you didn’t do this is the only reason that made] me question how much you really cared about [training] in the first place.
If you feel you're stuck at a plateau but you know you want to keep going and succeed, hopefully this will give you some guidance on what your mentality should be in regards to overcoming those hurdles. If an approach isn't working, change it up. If you have a weak point, dedicate the time to bring up that weak point. Set long-term goals in your mind and micro-goals you can hit along the way. If you're not hitting those micro-goals, learn from the people who have "made it" in regards to how they continued progressing.
If you feel like you're not making progress, but the process of continually finding ways to progress past plateaus, injuries, and any type of obstacles seems like way too much effort to be worth it, be honest with yourself and find another hobby that you enjoy. Just workout enough to maintain your health or to whatever other degree makes you happy.
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