How To Avoid A Plateau

When you’ve been on a fitness journey, it’s common to experience a plateau in your progress.

This can make you feel like you’ve hit a brick wall and can demotivate you very quickly. If you are trying to lose weight or tone up, here are some tips to help you get closer to your goals.

Push harder

Be honest with yourself, are you really putting 100% into every workout? Could you give some more energy into those burpees, lift those knees higher or sprint a little faster? The more you can push yourself the better your results will be. If you love a fitness class, try a more intense one such as those from the Les Mills GRIT series.

Try HIIT training

Speaking of pushing yourself harder, try HIIT training for an intense workout. With short burst of exercise for around 30-40 seconds and 20-30 seconds of rest, this method of training encourages you to push yourself to the limit because you know it’s not long until you get to rest again. Overall, this method of training burns more calories in a shorter amount of time than traditional cardio training so it’s easy to incorporate into your week.

Add some extra reps

If you like circuit training or lifting weights you could try adding a couple more reps to each exercise. If you currently do 10 reps of your exercises, up that to 12 and work those muscles a bit harder.

Lift heavier

If you feel like you can do 12 reps of your weighted exercises easily, that means it’s time to increase the weights you are using. You should be able to do no more than 12 reps of each exercise with the ideal amount being 8-12 reps. It should be a struggle to finish the set but you should still be able to complete the exercise without compromising your form.

Try zig zagging your diet

The body is very good at using energy efficiently. If you are consistently eating less calories over a long period of time, your body will get used to that and adapt to the reduced amount of calories you are consuming. An easy way to help combat this is to vary the amount of calories you consume per day. For example, if you are aiming to eat 1700 calories a day, workout how many calories you need for the week and slightly vary the amount you consume each day. I.e. Monday 1500, Tuesday 1800, etc. As long you don’t go beyond the total amount of calories for the week, you’ll still be in a calorie deficit overall.

Start a food diary

A treat every once in a while will not harm your progress but too many treats can easily mount up and increase your calorie intake without you realising it. It’s easy to forget what we’ve been eating during the week so try keeping a food diary to track your diet. You may find that those treats are happening more often than you thought and that could be hindering your progress.

We hope these tips helped you but don’t forget to have a chat with our fitness advisors in venue if you have any questions or need further guidance.