If you find that you do not see any improvements in your fitness journey, don’t be alarmed. Don’t fret, don’t give up — this is part of everyone’s fitness journeys. You may be experiencing a ‘plateau,’ and it is something many fitness enthusiasts eventually experience. Especially if you’ve been working out for quite some time, a ‘plateau’ can hit you suddenly and randomly. Here’s how you can overcome that.
You Don’t Let Your Body Recover
We often heard fitness influencers say “go hard or go home,” but that’s not exactly the best advice. Regardless of how much the fitness industry makes it appear as if you need to work out every day of the week, that’s not the case. You need to give your body the time to rest and recover. After a day of heavy exercises, the last thing you want is to do the same thing again tomorrow.
There’s a false but popular belief that ‘going hard’ every day would yield better results, but it really just invites injury and fatigue. If you really can’t bear to go a day without working out, considering scheduling different muscle groups on different days. Or maybe you can do cardio after a day of weight lifting. What’s important is you let your body rest, and your body will treat you will.
You Rely Too Much on the Same Exercises
Once we find an exercise that works for us, we tend to stick to it and do it all the time. Unfortunately (or fortunately, actually), the body adapts fast, increasing the amount of force and pressure it can withstand. This makes our favorite workouts seem to have little effect. In truth, it’s really just the body adjusting to the load you give it.
A simple solution to this is changing up your exercises. You can either try out an entirely different exercise, which can revitalize not only your body but also your interest in fitness. Or you can try out progressive overload, which involves increasing the intensity and the quantity of your workout. What’s necessary is that you don’t stay complacent with an exercise you found effective and try something new to surprise your body (and yourself).
You Don’t Get Enough Sleep
As mentioned before, letting your body recover is crucial in developing your body. A large portion of that ‘recovery’ happens when you’re sleeping, making sleep absolutely crucial to fitness. Getting at least eight hours of sleep is necessary for the body to replenish its energy stores.
But besides the eight hours of sleep, the quality of the sleep is also what’s important. Continuous and uninterrupted sleep is the best kind of recovery. Consider changing your soft pillows or firm mattresses into something more ergonomic to facilitate better sleep. After a good night’s sleep, you’ll immediately notice an improvement in your performance. It just might be what you need to make your workout effective once more.
Your Form Needs Work
If you’re doing free-weight exercises or even bodyweight exercises and you find that they’re not working for you, you might simply be doing it wrong. Your form and technique during exercises absolutely matter as the primary reason your biceps aren’t growing might be because you’re not actually doing micro-tears to trigger hypertrophy.
When exercising, make sure that you’re hitting your full range of motion and contracting the intended muscles. It’s easy to slack off during workouts, especially if you’re doing something you’ve done a hundred times before. But maintaining your form and technique is crucial to making your workouts effective and to see results.
You Don’t Meet Your Macros
One of the biggest factors why your exercises aren’t effective is nutritional deficiency. And this is an easy mistake to make. Many people falsely equate a diet to simply not eating. Of course, this is very far from the truth- there’s a particular macronutrient goal that our bodies have.
To be truly fit and healthy, you need to meet this macronutrient goal, which may sometimes mean eating more or eating less. These macronutrient requirements vary from person to person, and the only way to find out yours is to visit a health professional. However, once you know how much you need to it and have decided to follow it, you’ll find that your workouts will be more effective.
There are many reasons workouts stop taking effect. Regardless of the reason, what’s important is that you don’t let it dishearten you. Trying repeatedly is an integral part of the fitness journey, and not giving up is a value that every fitness enthusiast should learn.
