Overcoming Fitness Plateaus and Pitfalls

Simple changes in your exercise routine and eating habits can propel you past those dreaded plateaus and get you back on the road to success!

This is called hitting a plateau and it is not uncommon! In fact unless you continually update your program to the changes your body has already experienced, you can almost be guaranteed to plateau at some point along your journey to reaching your goal.

The first thing you should do upon hitting a plateau is to try and determine the cause. Could you be eating more calories than you think?

Research shows that most people under report the amount of calories that they eat. It is not that they are lying, they simply do not know how to make an accurate assessment of how much they are eating.

And even if you are eating less calories than before you lost the weight, you could be eating just enough to maintain your current weight at your current activity level.

It is important to keep in mind that as you lose weight your metabolism slows down, because there is less of you to fuel-both at rest and during activity.

This leaves you with two options. lower your calorie count even more or increase the intensity or the amount of time you are physically active.

The first option is less desirable because lowering your calorie count even more may disable you from getting a sufficient amount of nutrients from your diet, and it would be hard to stick to on a long term basis. It is better to slowly reduce your calorie count to a level you can maintain once you hit your goal weight.

The same is true for exercise. Trying to exercise several hours a day or every day of the week is a good way of setting yourself up for failure. Not only will it be an enormous time commitment, but it will be too hard on the body.

So what do you do???

If you stopped losing weight, the key to getting back on track is to vary your program. If you normally walk-start biking. If you use an elliptical trainer, get on the rowing machine. The human body is an amazing piece of machinery, capable of adapting to any circumstance or stimulus. By shaking things up a bit and varying your program by introducing some new elements, you most likely find yourself of the plateau and back on track in no time.

Another means of getting through a plateau is through strength training. This has shown to be effective in helping people manage their weight because the added muscle helps to offset their metabolism, lowering the effects that dieting and weight loss has on it.

Muscle is about 10 times more metabolically active than fat; therefore, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism will be and the more calories you will burn at rest or during activity.