When linear progression stalls, switch to periodization. You don’t completely ignore strength or hypertrophy, rather you focus on one or the other. I’m simplest terms, it would look something like this:
Figure out the heaviest weight that you can do the following for each rep amount.
Cycle 1 (Roughly a month)
Week 1 3x12
Week 2 3x10
Week 3 3x8
Cycle 2
Week 1 3x10
Week 2 3x8
Week 3 3x5
Build more muscle fibers with the high rep work, then strengthen them with the lower rep work. This shouldn’t be to absolute failure every time. There is a place for that, but the idea here is to leave one rep in reserve on that third set. You are ramping up to give yourself more runway to take off.
If you set your 5 rep training max correctly, you will hit it in that sixth week. Then all the weights go up five pounds and you do it again.
You can even mix up the reps and weight every week if you like more variety
Week 1: 12-10-8 (weight increasing each time)
Week 2: 10-8-6
Week 3: 8-6-4
There’s are more nuanced ways to go about it. I typically have one 2-3 rep lift, one 5 rep lift, one 8-10 rep lift, and one 12-15 rep lift in each workout. But the percentages and speed of each varies and those rep ranges switch up throughout the year.
The specifics are not really the issue. There are plenty of reputable plans that you can follow. Your dick won’t fall off if you go 3x9 instead of 3x10. The idea is to vary your work between 3-12 reps (or 5-8 or 4-10 or again, it doesn’t matter) and stay in the 70%-90% of your max most of the time. Switch it up, accept slow progress, and you’ll see those numbers go up.
