The start of a new fitness journey is often an exciting time. You feel good about committing to a healthy routine and you’re seeing the results of your efforts each week. Unfortunately, there may come a time when your progress slows down and your best efforts feel like they’re for naught. This is known as a fitness plateau.

When you’re already making healthy choices in your life such as exercising consistently, eating nutritious meals, and getting adequate sleep, not seeing any changes can be a frustrating experience. However, the most important thing you can do is not give up. Hitting a plateau is an extremely common experience. To overcome this hurdle, it’s important to reevaluate what’s working for you on your fitness journey, as well as what’s not.

Here are five lifestyle changes you can make to accelerate your progress once again, with some insights on common causes of fitness plateaus.

1 Switch Up Your Workout Routine

Noticeable progress depends on variety in your fitness routine. When your body starts to get used to specific exercises, it adapts to them. It’s why people training for marathons often find it easier to run longer distances each time they train. Your body is no longer as challenged by the same routine.

If you’ve been following the same weekly routine for more than about 8 – 12 weeks, start incorporating new exercises into your routine or completely switching it up. This can help you shock your system back into progress mode.

2 Adjust Your Calorie Intake

Eating nutritious food is a great way to kickstart your fitness journey and maintain your progress. However, if you want to further your progress, you may need to start paying attention to your intake of calories. For instance, if weight loss is your goal, you may need to gradually cut back on calories with carbs, which may be hiding in otherwise healthy foods.

Additionally, make sure to differentiate between good sugars and carbs. For example, although foods with natural, simple sugars — such as fruits and whole grains — are perfectly fine in moderation, added sugars in highly processed foods are linked to weight gain.

3 Cut Back or eliminate on Drinking

While there’s nothing wrong with grabbing a drink now and then, regular alcohol consumption can be the cause of your fitness plateau. Alcohol can interfere with metabolism, decrease nutrient absorption, and cause imbalances in your gut microbiome.

Cutting back on alcohol can help you speed up your progress once again. If you want to take your fitness journey a step further, consider increasing your water intake. A good water intake can significantly improve your metabolism and help you avoid dehydration when working out. This way, you can improve your exercise performance on top of overcoming the roadblocks that alcohol creates.

4 Give Your Body a Break

While some people can overcome their workout plateaus by switching or intensifying their workout routine, others may need to work out less. Overtraining can lead to plateaus because your body won’t have time to recover and new muscles won’t get the chance to form.

If you’re working out every day without rest or you’re constantly feeling exhausted after hitting the gym, consider taking it easier. Taking extra rest days when you’re feeling sick or when you’re injured is also key to giving your body adequate recovery time. Finding the right balance for you can help you avoid future plateaus.

5 Seek Professional Help

When all your lifestyle changes don’t feel successful or when you need extra motivation to hit your goals, consider seeking professional help. Fitness trainers and dieticians can help you create personalized routines that work for you. Plus, they can help you stick with it or identify when change is necessary.

If trainers and dieticians still can’t get you moving toward your fitness goals, there might be a more serious health condition at play. If you’re concerned that your plateau is a sign of something more serious, consider visiting a doctor. Tracking your health and nutrition before your appointment can help your doctor more accurately identify the root cause of your fitness plateau and suggest lifestyle changes that may work specifically for your body.

Push Past Your Plateau With Lifestyle Changes

When you’re feeling stuck in your fitness journey, a few small changes in your lifestyle can make a big difference. Fitness plateaus are frequently caused by adaptations to your workout routine, such as too much repetition, too little intensity, or too few rest days. They can also be a sign of a need for a diet change, like reduced calorie consumption, even if you’re already eating healthily. Start with small changes first to ensure you’re on the right path.

If all else fails, consider reaching out to a professional for help adjusting your exercise routine or diet, or seeking a doctor’s opinion in case there’s a medical issue at play.

Author bio

Dan Matthews is a writer, content consultant, and conservationist. While Dan writes on a variety of topics, he loves to focus on feeling better both mentally and physically, and imparting health tips to others can help make the world a better place to reside. When Dan isn’t working on new content, you can find him with a coffee cup in one hand and searching for new music in the other.

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This halt in dropping pounds is what you would call a weight loss plateau.

A weight loss plateau is going to be one of the most frustrating aspects of your weight loss journey, and it may happen more than once. You’ve cut out sodas, stopped eating chips and cookies, and you’ve even started incorporating more greens into your meals. So to put forth all this effort and then stop seeing results from it can make you feel stuck like you can’t lose any more weight. Something additional to try, could be looking into electronic smart scales to help with tracking your foods and calories.

The great news is that you can still continue to lose fat, you just need to be aware of a few things. For one, your body really doesn’t want you to lose weight because that means you’re forcing it out of its comfort zone. When you cut back or eliminate calories or carbs, your body thinks you’re trying to starve it and can actually hold on to fat.

Also, what may seem like a weight loss plateau may actually be muscle gain, but your scale makes you think otherwise. The thing to understand about scales is that they lie. Your scale tells you your overall body weight, including any muscle gain you have.

Where it gets confusing is in the fact that the scale doesn’t tell you how much of your weight is attributed to muscle gain or weight gain.

That reason alone is why you can’t solely depend on what the scale says.

But you also have to consider that your body has a “set point” where it simply doesn’t want to lose weight anymore and it will work to sway you to not lose any more weight, by way of frustrating you to a point where you just give up.

But don’t give up.

As frustrating as it is to not be losing any more weight, there is still hope and you can indeed push through your weight loss plateau. Here’s how you can push through this frustrating time and start losing again.

Adjust Your Intake of Calories

Maybe you’ve already cut back on calories with carbs and you’re pretty comfortable and proud of just how much you’ve cut back. The thing about weight loss plateaus is that what you’ve been doing is no longer working. So, the amount of calories you’ve reduced this far isn’t enough.

You will need to think about adjusting the portions of your carbs/calories even more.

Cutting carbs might be one of the hardest parts of your weight loss journey because everyone loves carbs so remember t start small and keep it gradual. You could also think of adding in more green smoothies to your diet as a way to maintain weight loss goals and help with satiety.

Be Aware of Supposed “Healthy” Foods

There are foods that are indeed healthy, and then there are foods with a “healthy halo,” and are deemed healthy but really aren’t. These are the foods that can potentially throw your weight loss efforts off if over indulged in.

Foods like nuts, avocadoes, health crackers and the like aren’t necessarily “bad” foods for you to eat but they can be high in calories. When you’re trying to adjust your intake of calories, these kinds of foods aren’t going to do anything but increase your calories, especially when consuming too much of them because you think they’re “healthy.”

Switch Up and Intensify Your Workout

If your workouts are typically done in the gym, try working out outside. If you lift 180 pounds, lift 190 pounds. If your cardio is done on the treadmill, kick up the speed and incline or hop on the elliptical, or hire a personal trainer. The point is that you have to find a workout strategy that will work for you and adjust it as your body adjusts to your new intensities.

Once your workouts become easy, it’s time to turn it up a notch; keep your body guessing!

Eat Quality Foods

Once you’ve hit a weight loss plateau, your focus should no longer be on how many calories you have going in and coming out. Obviously processed foods are out of the question, so your focus now needs to be on the quality of the foods you eat to push through your plateau.

At this point, only high-quality whole foods should enter your kitchen.

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Did you ever find yourself in this situation. Initially you feel really motivated and excited to do something, be it to get started and get in shape or to work on something in the hopes of achieving a goal.

You set out and start to get into a rhythm knowing that you have to be consistent and keep at the small things because all those small steps will contribute to your end goal. When you start out major positive changes can be seen and you feel even more motivated seeing the great changes.

The quick progress keeps going for a bit of time until you stop noticing such dramatic and constant changes. The changes are there, but relatively small. At first you adjust and keep going. But still, no extreme changes like it was when you started out, only very small progressions, sometimes barely noticeable and ‘significant’ to you.

Does that seem all to familiar? Don’t worry you are not alone. It happens to everyone.

The biggest changes and progressions are seen when you just start out. Starting to exercise and lose weight is a perfect example.

Initially you seem to drop the pounds almost immediately, then there comes a time where it becomes a real slow process and you may not see much progress for days.

It can be very discouraging and can even force you to a point of giving up as you may feel like you are just wasting your time and energy.

Another example is preparing for a fitness/bodybuilding show, just ask any seasoned competitor. When the prep starts it’s all great and the fat starts to melt off, the abs show more and more. And then bam! A few weeks out it all starts to slow and so do you. You begin to feel tired and de motivated, especially if it is your first time. Those last bits of stubborn fat just don’t seem to want to go away, or it may seem.

One other example that I can relate to, is stretching. A year ago I could barely touch my toes. Through constant stretching almost every day and yoga I have managed to increase my flexibility significantly, but it was not easy at all. There were days where I felt so stiff and it made me question if I was in fact actually progressing at all resulting in the thought of not bothering and giving it all up.

So what is the key when you feel progress is slow? KEEP GOING. Usually when you have made a big change and you stop progressing as fast as you were, it’s usually one of two things.

• One, you need a bit of a rest.
• Or two, you have to stick to the process and keep at it making small changes along the way.

We sometimes try to overcomplicate things and immediately when we feel the progress ‘halt’, we try to make massive changes and try to throw in so many different things they end up running us into the ground.

It all comes down to consistency and enduring the process. You have to think of the big picture and not get caught up analysing every step every single day. Your body and your mind adapt to the change as time goes on, thus why the changes are so dramatic in the beginning. Ultimately you have to push through that and even if you feel like its not working you have to keep going, because when you get to the end you will suddenly see the massive change you made. That change that you could not see at the time.

Remember progress is progress no matter how small.

It’s like monitoring your weight every day and obsessing over it. There are many factors at play that can cause your weight to fluctuate daily, so just keep at it and enjoy the process and over time you will see the results will come so long as you stay consistent and keep pushing through those tough times! Try not to measure so regularly during such periods.

Start to measure every week or every second week and stop checking (the scale) every single day. It will ease your mind and you can just focus on keeping to the process. Time and consistency deliver the results.

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