Ways to Overcome Your Fitness Plateau
Ways to Overcome Your Fitness Plateau
Plateau: A state of little or no change following a period of activity or progress.
There is nothing more frustrating than a weight loss plateau. Whether you are a fitness guru or new to intense physical activity everyone will reach a point where their results will stall.
Our bodies are very smart. After a certain amount of time of doing a specific work out regime it figures out what you’re doing to try to change it. Once it does, it will then find a way to execute the same workout with the least amount of energy possible, making you burn fewer calories even though you are doing the same amount of work.
If what was once working for you is no longer showing the results you want, you need to change up your workout. Below are some pointers on how to break through your fitness plateau.
1. Increase Your Resistance
Try upping your weights or resistance during your strength training workouts. Muscle burns fat, contrary to some beliefs weights will not make women bulk up. Women have different hormones then men. These hormones make it physically impossible for female bodies to NATURALLY gain muscle and look like the male physique. When you weight train, you build fat-blasting muscle mass necessary to reach your weight loss goals.
2. Take a Break… Or Not
You need to know your body in order to tell what it needs. The only way to know your body is to be physically active, nurture, and care for it.
If you aren't seeing any changes despite still hitting the gym hard, you might be over-training. You might need to take a week off to let your body rest and heal itself so you can come back to your workouts stronger and more motivated than ever.
On the other side, you might not be working hard enough. Just because you get out of breath or you feel a burn doesn’t mean you have reached your limit. If you are struggling with knowing where the line is, group fitness classes help continue to push yourself, or get a personal trainer so you can get more one on one attention to fully know your limits.
3. Try Drop Sets
Muscle confusion is the key to continued growth, and drop sets are the perfect way to confuse them. Drop sets are a series of 3 or 4 sets of weights with varying resistance. Start with the heaviest weight and max out. Pick the next lighter weight and do a few more reps to failure. Then, pick an even lighter weight and do more reps to failure. Working past failure will stimulate new growth.
4. Eccentric Training
Another way to work past failure is to use eccentric training. Eccentric is the controlled downward phase of lifting weights. The concentric phase is the up phase or the contracting phase of the work out.
You may need to use a spotter for eccentric training, but it can also be done by doing body resistant exercises like pushups and pull-ups. This is just another method to confuse your muscles.
5. Choose a New Rep Range
If you follow the 3-sets-of-15-reps rule, or something close to it, your body is going to figure you out. Try a new rep range to create muscle confusion. Just remember, if you do fewer reps, you will need to up your weight accordingly to ensure the last rep of each set is the last one you can do with good form.
6. Eat Less or Eat More
Surprise…consuming too many calories will always lead to weight gain. It might come to a surprise that if you don’t eat enough you could gain weight as well. If you cut calories too quickly or drastically, you can enter starvation mode, where your body hangs on to every calorie you eat for survival.
Keeping a food journal for a few days to record what you are eating is important-those extra calories add up fast. It is imperative you have the correct calorie intake for your age, gender, and fitness level in order to reach your fitness goals.
7. Try Something New!
Try a new piece of equipment, a new exercise, a group fitness class - anything to put some variety into your routine and throw something new at your body it’s not expecting.
8. HIIT-High Intensity Interval Training
HIIT is a type of interval training in which you alternate short, very high intensity intervals with longer, slower intervals to recover. Some of the benefits of HIIT includes improving performance, burn more fat, and shorter workouts.
9. Sleep On It
A night of restful sleep resets your hormones, making everything run at maximum efficiency. Even missing out on a little bit of sleep can cause you to produce more cortisol, the stress hormone, which signals to your body to store fat around your midsection, no matter how hard you are dieting and exercising.
For more information please visit http://www.fitnessrepublic.com/fitness/10-tips-to-overcome-weight-loss-plateau.html
The authors
Tami Whatcott is originally from Utah, but is currently based out of Chicago. She graduated from Utah Valley University with a BFA in Modern Dance and a BS in Dance Education. Tami has been an instructor for Universal Dance Association for the past 9 years. She has had the opportunity to travel not only across America, but internationally as well working in countries such as Spain, England, China, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Slovenia, Austria and Mexico to teach, perform, choreograph and judge in many genres from high school to college levels.
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