Everyone on a body sculpting journey has experienced a phenomenon where despite continuing to exercise and eating right, the numbers on the scale just won’t budge. Progress seems to halt and sometimes even reverse. This is a frustrating phenomenon known as a fitness plateau. This article will outline the most common reasons why people experience plateaus and will provide ways to get back on track to achieving your fitness goals. Whether it’s engaging a personal trainer in Caulfield, or shaking up your fitness routine, this article will get you back on track in no time.
Chapter Overview
Check-in With Yourself
Before we get into how to get off that plateau, it’s important to assess yourself. Be honest with yourself. Have you been sticking to your fitness routine and diet? Or have you been slacking? Make sure that you are not slipping into any old habits of skipping a gym session here or there and make sure you are not consuming more calories than necessary. Remember that as you lose weight, your body will require fewer calories. So, be sure to adjust your calorie intake as you progress.
Change Your Routine
After assessing your routine and diet, if you are certain you’ve plateaued, then it’s time to mix up your routine. Our bodies get used to our routines and the body actively finds ways to be more efficient each time we repeat a routine. If you do the same routine enough times your body will become more efficient and burn fewer calories than when you first did it. So change up your routine. Your body will be forced to work harder because you’ll be engaging in something your body isn’t used to. If your exercise routine includes squats, try and squat better. Squat with higher frequency. Your body will adapt and overcompensate by getting stronger.
Change Frequency
Review your fitness routine and ask yourself if you are doing too little or too much of each routine. Try not to do strength training on the same muscle group two days in a row, it’s important for muscles to have recovery time in between workouts. If you are doing cardio only twice a week, maybe that is not enough if your main fitness goal is weight loss. Reassess what you are doing and adjust the frequency as necessary.
Increase Intensity
Another aspect of your exercise that you can adjust to see results is increasing the intensity with which you exercise. Try doing a double whammy to your routine by doing more frequent and intense reps. Get your heart rate up, and for a longer period of time. Really push yourself to your limits and more than what you usually do. Consider adding jumps, sprint intervals, or weights where possible to any cardio training.
Try Something New with a Personal Trainer
After doing the same fitness regime for a while, it can be hard to break out of it and shift to something new. If you are having trouble changing up your routine you can enlist the help of a personal trainer to introduce you to some new exercises and routines. Personal trainers are great motivators and are great at pushing you to your limits. They can help you to achieve beyond what you think is possible and are ideal for helping you get out of a plateau rut.
Change What You Measure
There comes a time in weight loss journeys when the scales are no longer a reliable measure to gauge your weight loss progress. We gain muscle through weight training and this adds to our overall weight. If your scales are not budging but you are steadfastly sticking to your fitness and diet routine then it could be time to also take waist measurements or notice if you are continuing to drop in clothing sizes. By changing what you measure you can see more reaffirming and motivating results.
So, are you going to let this plateau get the better of you? No way! This is just a scheduled stop on your body sculpting and toning journey. Don’t let it demotivate you, the plateau is par for the course. If you are struggling to get out of the plateau, what are you waiting for? Monitor yourself, shake up your routine, measure progress in multiple ways or make that call to a personal trainer to help get you unstuck today.