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This post will give you insight and tips on how you can get the groove back overcome your fitness plateau.
What is Fitness Plateau?
A fitness plateau is a phase when your body adjusts to your workout routine and stops progressing further. You start to feel bored and unmotivated with the workouts or simply do not feel like hitting the gym anymore. This is a typical sign of a fitness plateau, and you may need to try a new training strategy.
What Causes Fitness Plateau?
At the beginning of your workout, you see instant results, especially if you have never exercised before. However, as you progress, you notice the results are becoming less obvious. The reason is that your body can develop resilience to adapt to the physical demands of a workout.
The body adapts to your exercise regime, and something that was challenging a while ago becomes easier. This change is known as “General Adaption Syndrome (GAS).” Therefore, in order to ensure that your workout continues to produce noticeable results, you need to create a habit of changing your training and increasing its intensity over time.
Overtraining is another cause of the fitness plateau, so you must give your body proper rest and recovery time. This is as important as hitting your gym goals because your body needs to recover from the strain it goes through after every workout.
If you are experiencing fatigue, insomnia, low energy levels, this is your body’s way of telling you that it’s burning out. Other signs include joint pains, muscle pain, and loss of periods in some women. These symptoms are often referred to as a “fitness hangover.”
How to Overcome Your Fitness Plateau?
So, you have hit the fitness plateau – here is what you must do to continue maintaining your fitness.
#1 – Making Minor Tweaks in Your Fitness Routine
Making small changes to your fitness routine can help overcome the fitness plateau. Increasing the weight, reps, sets, intensity, number of sessions per week, and resting time between each set can make a huge difference in the long run. These changes will encourage your body to push itself while using the same exercise.
#2 –Strength Training
You can incorporate strength training into your existing fitness routine. This will not only improve the size of your skeletal muscle but also your strength and endurance. Strength training also protects your joints from fitness-related injuries and boosts your metabolic rate.
Strength training, also known as resistance training, can improve your cardiovascular health when you include high-intensity resistance training along with your routine cardio workout.
#3 – Maintaining a Healthy Diet
Nutrition is an essential component of your fitness progress as you must work on improving it as you tweak your fitness routine. Remember your body requires nutrition to support your ongoing training. Therefore, eat enough carbohydrates, proteins, healthy fats, and other micronutrients to build muscles and help your body recover quickly.
#4 – Staying Hydrated
Maintaining a good hydration level in your body plays a vital role in your muscles’ performance and recovery. Even mild hydration can cause poor concentration and headaches.
If you do not drink enough water, you can use alternative intake sources such as green smoothies, herbal tea, eating water-dense fruits such as melon, and vegetables such as cucumber, tomatoes, etc. The easiest way to maintain good hydration is to drink 2 to 3 liters or more every day.
#5 – Time to Rest
Resting is vital to your fitness as it allows your body to recover and overcome your fitness plateau. A resting period gives your body time to replenish its energy tanks while repairing your muscle tissues used and strained during workouts.
This process is essential to help grow and strengthen your muscles. In order to give your body a good rest, make sure to get good sleep every night.
#6 – Progress Gradually
Adapt progressive overload meaning gradually increasing the stress you place on the body when working out. This is the safest method to avoid overtraining and injuries. Do the exercises that you enjoy to enjoy a healthy and fun fitness regime with long-term results.
#7 – Track Your Fitness
Tracking your progress is the best way to find if and when you hit a fitness plateau. You can use many methods to ace fitness tracking, such as recording your workout in a journal, using a fitness tracker watch, taking your photos as you progress, and taking fitness challenges.
However, we live in an era where most people own smartphones and love to use an app for everything. Similarly, you can track your fitness through an app such as GymBet. This app will enable you to be self-accountable for your fitness goals.
You can track your gym visits per week and whether you are reaching your fitness goals or not. You can even set up group goals with your friends and hold each other accountable to reach their fitness goals. Do this right, and the GymBet app will reward you. What you do is that all friends participating put an equal amount of money (as little as $5) into a digital pot of the app.
If you continue to hit your goals, the money stays in your own pot. Failing to hit your goals will allow the app to distribute the funds amongst the remaining group members. You can make this a challenge where the last man standing gets all the money.
GymBet allows you to change your group setting as per your goals. You can adjust workout frequency, duration, amount of money you bet when setting accountability goals, and the total goal duration. You can invite friends and family to join the group or even create or join multiple groups.
The GPS check-in feature lets you see who is succeeding or slacking in your group. GymBet even allows you to log and track your fitness progress through wearable techs such as a FitBit or an Apple Watch.
The group chat feature on GymBet allows you to communicate, help and support while holding each other accountable.
The Takeaway
If you believe that you have reached a fitness plateau, it is time to make some changes to your workout routine and start tracking your progress closely. Working out with a partner or a group can help you push your limits while developing healthy dietary and exercise habits. Follow the tips in this post, and you will be able to overcome your fitness plateau in no time.
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