Change Things Up To Overcome The Dreaded Fitness Plateau

Change up your workouts to keep seeing progress – (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How’s your training going? Sometimes it feels like we are on top of the world, where excess weight comes off easy and strength arrives in spades. But inevitably the dreaded plateau rears its ugly head and your progress grinds to a screeching halt. This happens because the amount of exercise and healthy diet you started with was good enough to get you to a respectable level of fitness. To get beyond, it’s now time to pay attention and start working harder.

But you lead a busy life and spending more time at the gym and managing your nutrition is not something you want to hear about right now. What happened to slow and steady? It still applies, but you have to do things smarter now. A healthy diet doesn’t require constant management and calorie counting. And a more challenging workout will take more effort, but not necessarily more time.

Here are some tips to overcome your plateu:

1. Tighten your nutrition - You may think you’re eating healthy, but if you take a closer look and start writing things down, you’ll find that you’re not eating as good as you think.  80% of your results are based on your nutrition, and only 20% is based on the exercise you do. To see the changes you desire, make sure your portions are not too big, eat healthy foods and make sure they are of the best quality (and least refined).

2. Hit the weights - The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn when you exercise or are at rest. We’re not talking about bulky muscle here, but the lean, pleasant looking type on women. Don’t worry, you won’t bulk up because you simply don’t have the hormones to do so – you’ll just get leaner. Faster, weight based workouts enable your body to burn more calories day after day.

3. Keep it fresh - Our bodies have an incredible ability to quickly adapt to whatever we do.  If you continually do the same workout, your progress will stall. A good approach to beating a plateau, is to overhaul your workouts and change not only the exercises, but the intensity and tempo as well. Perhaps you’re only running on the treadmill and your body is used to steady state running. Change it up! Try some interval running, something you couldn’t do a few months ago when 30 pounds heavier. It’s a new challenge which is stimulating to the body and mind, making for another successful training period until a new change is needed. You can also increase reps, weight, tempo, frequency, intensity and so on.

4. Avoid overdoing it – many hit a plateau and believe they should now keep cutting calories. But you can actually damage your progress by creating too much of a deficit between your calorie intake and calorie burn, slowing down you metabolism. Sometimes it’s better to up the workout intensity as WELL as calorie intake, to keep progress coming. Some women take in as few as  800-1000 calories daily. They forget it’s not so much about the deficit as it is about making sure you’re getting enough calories. Everyone is different. Calorie-monitoring devices are very helpful in gauging this.

Try these tips and see if you don’t overcome your plateau. Nothing tastes quite as good as success and anything else is like biting into a lemon – it leaves a sour taste in the mouth. A positive change affects your mind, body and fitness outcome.

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