Are you stuck in a fitness rut and feel like you’ve stopped making progress?
Don’t feel discouraged if you feel like you’ve hit rock bottom of your fitness journey — it happens to all of us! Once you understand how your body adapts to training, you can make changes to your routine to break through the plateau, continue making progress and start enjoying exercise again.
What Is A Workout Plateau?
A workout plateau occurs when your body adjusts to the demands of your workouts. You might start to feel unmotivated, and bored or find you just don’t feel like working out. This is a sign that you may be ready to try a new training style.
To keep seeing improvements in your strength and fitness, you need to progressively overload your body to keep it changing, adapting and getting stronger.
According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), this training principle is also known as muscular hypertrophy.
A hypertrophy workout consists of exercises utilising low to intermediate repetition ranges with progressive overload. This type of workout enables you to gradually increase the weight and duration for each exercise over time to help to increase your overall strength and muscle.
It’s normal (and exciting!) for your workouts to feel easier as you get stronger — that’s your cue to dial up your training so that you can keep progressing and avoid a plateau.
NASM suggests you should advance your training every three to four weeks to see steady and consistent results.
What causes a fitness plateau?
When you first start working out, you usually feel the results straight away, especially if you’re just starting out or if you’re returning to fitness after a long break. However, as time passes and your body adjusts to exercise you may notice the results become less obvious.
People don’t always know how to change their training style or increase the intensity and it’s easy to become comfortable with a particular routine once you get an exercise habit in place. Your body is incredibly resilient, and this means it adapts to the physical demands of training.
As your body adapts, exercises that were once challenging become easier. The American Council on Exercise (ACE) in the US says this change is known as “general adaptation syndrome” and it’s why you can hit a fitness plateau even when you’re doing everything right!
According to ACE, another common reason you might hit a plateau is due to overtraining! Getting proper rest and recovery is just as important for your fitness progress as regular workouts.
It’s also important to pay attention to what you do between your workouts. You can stop making progress if you don’t get enough rest, don’t drink enough water or don’t eat the right type of foods to support your training goals.
How To Overcome A Fitness Plateau
1. Make Small Changes To Your Routine
When you increase the weight, sets, reps, intensity, the number of sessions completed each week, the amount of rest taken between sets or use variations of exercises, you encourage a “training response” to occur. Making small changes regularly encourages your body to continue building strength using the same exercises.
Some examples of fitness progression include:
- Increase the number of reps of an exercise — if you usually do 10 pushups, try 12 next time
- Increase your weights in small increments
- Increase the number of exercises you’re aiming to complete in a given timeframe
2. Track Your Fitness Progress
You can’t be sure you’ve hit a plateau unless you’re tracking your progress. There are many ways to do this, and it’s best to use more than one method.
Here are some ways to track your fitness:
- Record your workouts in a journal — including the number of reps and weights used, as well as how you feel during and after your workout.
- Use a fitness tracker
- Take progress photos
- Take a fitness challenge every 4-12 weeks
Tracking your fitness can help you identify whether you’re experiencing a plateau and what you can change to overcome it — and using more than one method can help you see where you’re still making progress! It’s also common to experience a change in body shape or composition without seeing a significant change on the scales, so taking photos or seeing how your clothes fit can be more helpful if this is a goal for you.
3. Get Enough Rest
Rest days allow you to take a break from training and let your body to recover. According to ACE, during rest your body begins to replenish its energy stores and repair the muscle tissue used during your workouts. This will ultimately help your muscles grow and become stronger.
All Sweat programs include a rest day each week. This isn’t something to feel guilty about — use it as an opportunity to catch up with friends, spend time with your family, read a book or watch TV — whatever you enjoy! You may find that after taking a rest day you have more energy for your next workout and your performance improves.
Getting enough sleep is also critical for your recovery. If you have interrupted sleep for any reason, it’s okay to back off your workout intensity until you can get some good shut-eye and are feeling fully rested.
4. Use Progressive Overload
Progressive overload is a training principle that means you gradually increase the stress placed on your body during your workouts so your body has to keep adapting.
It’s important to use progressive overload in a safe way to avoid injury or overtraining, such as following a workout programme designed by a personal trainer with expertise in getting the results you want.
