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Плато в тренировках

Мнение Пита ван Дюзена

Источник: How to deal with diminishing returns / training plateaus

Eduardo
I was wondering if any of you have experienced this with patients / clients: You do an assessment, establish a training plan, start training, recommend certain lifestyle changes that are followed but after a while (10-20 sessions in), the client starts complaining about not seeing progress anymore or at all or being in a "plateau". Is this something expected? Is there a way to assess, aside of the obvious benefits / improvements, if an acquired plan is the most effective means to achieve certain states in the customer's brain? Do you regularly reassess the situation with another assessment to correct what seems to be wrong? How do you manage this?

I'm aware that certain changes are almost immediate after training and others take more time. But what happens if you're following the recommended plan and after a reasonable while, there are no evident gains or those start to "lose traction"?

Pete
Any process designed to change homeostasis in body systems--including diets, exercise programs or training--works to change stable patterns. So-called "plateaus" occur in any such process. Changes happen, and then there is a period during which all the rest of the body's systems have to reorganize around the new set point to make it stable. Often additional changes will start happening as training continues and another plateau will be reached.

When I was working with lots of ADHD children/adolescents in the early 90's, we told new clients to plan on about 40 sessions (though this was pre-HEG and we used simpler training approaches). In some cases we were able to graph changes in the Theta/Beta ratio from session to session, and it was not uncommon to see a downward trend during 10-15 sessions, followed by a plateau of 4-6 sessions, then a second down and a second plateau. Some even showed a third stage of the graph.

If your clients have ever done any kind of dieting or exercise program, I suppose they must have experienced this. There are several options on a plateau.

  1. Get frustrated and quit. If this is done in the first stabilizing period (stopping the diet when you are no longer losing a pound or two every day or so), the chances are the body will regain the weight it lost--or perhaps more. You have been counting temporary responses to the changed behavior and then quitting before the body had a chance to stabilize the response;
  2. Change the diet, which may or may not result in additional changes, but again, without going through the stabilizing process, the changes may not last;
  3. Our usual recommendation: Start spacing out the sessions and tracking how long the changes are sustained. For example: Sleep improved, but initially this will be seen in the 12-24 hours after a training. Training 2-3 times a week eventually results in maintenance of the improvement. Try training once a week and see how long before the sleep cycle "falls back". When you can go a week between sessions, then see if 1/10 days or 1/2 weeks sustains the change. I usually figure that if you can go 2 weeks without a session without backsliding, the brain has stabilized the changes. Then the client can stop training if desired and likely will not need to come back for boosters. In fact, once a new homeostasis has been established, improvements will often continue to occur without training over 6 months or more following termination.

Part of the question you are asking actually relates to the expectations you have fostered in your clients. If you approach training as a symptom-based process focused on changing a specific system or a few, then the client's expectation is that as soon as "the headache goes away", you can stop taking aspirin. If you approach training as a process designed to change a standing set of habit patterns in the brain and to establish a new stable-state, then you might shift your focus during "plateaus" in specific symptoms. I like to shift toward more of a focus on "peak" protocols, which should be included in your Whole-Brain training plan (e.g. SMR training, alpha-theta, default-mode or alpha/gamma synchrony.) In this way we shift from trying to avoid symptoms to developing the brain's ability to operate in peak states more naturally and to maintain them for longer periods.

Мнение Себерн Фишер

Что-то писала в книжке, можно скопировать

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