If your goal at the start of this year was weight loss and you saw some progress, but then a tail off it’s easier to be disheartened. For some people this set back is enough to knock them back completely, but others simply increase their effort in the belief that hard work will lead to more results. The reality is not that you have to work harder to see results, but rather alter what you are doing.

When it comes to exercise you are either adapting or maintaining. If you aren’t seeing any progress anymore then in all likelihood you are now maintaining. This means the exercise you are doing is having little to no benefit, as the stimulus on you is so small. Working harder and increasing output is certainly a way to overcome this, but it’s difficult to take the work rate up for that long, before you start seeing burn out and fatigue.

It’s far better to seek another adaptation principle, something else that will make your body change. That could mean a change of exercises, or reps you do.

Different changes cause different physical responses, however. High reps stimulate muscular endurance, whilst low reps stimulate muscular strength. Each gives the muscle a different look. Different cardio exercises challenge the body differently, and create a need for adaptation. Working harder is only one way to make a change.

The best example I can think of it with a conversation I had with a lady in the gym last week.  She told me that she had been doing an hour of cardio three times a week without fail for over a year.  Initially she had seen a weight loss of around ten kilos, but from the summer onwards she had not lost any more weight, and over the Christmas and new year period had gained five kilos back.  Her concern was that she wasn’t making any changes at all, and was in fact regressing.  Why was this happening?

I explained to her that her body had simply adapted to what she was doing.  She was barely raising a sweat when she was doing cardio in the gym now, and as a result wasn’t creating a need for her body to make a change.  And, because the exercises she was doing had become so easy for her now, it was having almost a nil effect on her, hence the weight gain and inability to get that weight back off.  I proposed that she alter her workout regime to see progress again. 

Hitting a plateau and thinking you might need to make a change? Then email enquiries@rkfitness.co.uk to discuss the best way forward for you in your workouts!