3 Tips To Overcome Weight Loss Slumps

This is a guest post by Kal Gunay.

Whether you've been exercising regularly, or just about to start up a fitness regiment, it's important to know how your body reacts towards the movements which in turn will dictate, along with the right eating, whether or not you lose weight and see results.

A big complaint I get from clients that come to me is that they're already training regularly and eating right, but feel stuck...like they haven't been able to lose any weight in sometime.

This state of feeling where despite all of your right efforts, you're not seeing the results has a name you've probably heard before called "The Plateau Effect" and it's a real thorn in so many people's sides.

Hopefully by the end of reading this post, you'll get some detailed How-To's to avoiding this dreaded state (if you haven't hit it yet) or to getting out of your rut .

First, though Why do we Plateau?

When you go from a sedentary to active lifestyle your body goes through changes that increase your metabolism, your body's engine, burning more calories and ultimately losing weight. This is the point in time when a lot of people start seeing results and feeling a lot better.

What happens a lot of times, though, is we tend to get in a comfort zone of doing the same exercises over and over again. At first these exercises were tough, we were sore the next couple of days...but now they're not as difficult and we don't have to work nearly as hard...do you see where this is going?

Plateauing is basically your body leveling off. You threw it a curveball when you changed your lifestyle but not it caught up to its new lifestyle and now it's looking for a new challenge.

Here are some tips on how to avoid/overcome The Plateau Effect:

"Change: You Can Believe In"

There's a mind-to-muscle connection in your workouts or in any other movement for that matter. At first you have to consciously think about the movements you're making until eventually they just become second nature. It's a concept called ‘muscle memory'.

Well in regards to you exercising, your body becomes really efficient at doing the same exercises over and over again.

Solution: Change your routine! Perform different exercises, use different equipment, exercise at a different time, or try a new style of workouts all together. Change the style of repetitions/sets you use.

The goal is to continue to "shock" the body and to never allow it to get in a comfort zone. If you're a guy and you're looking to put on weight, you should be increasing the resistance as you get stronger. If you're looking to lose weight, one of my biggest suggestions is to change the entire genre of the workout.

For example, with my personal clients I will use free weights & machines a lot of times, and then for a few weeks change to lesser impact styles of exercise like Pilates and resistance band workouts.

2. "Would You Like To Double Up Your Order?"

The old school way of thought when it came to exercise was to perform (X) exercise for a total of (Y) number of times, then rest for (Z) seconds and do it all over again and on and on.

Today, though, we've learned it's much more effective to perform multiple exercises back to back (or sometimes back to back to back). You burn a ton more calories, and because you fatigue so much quicker, your workout time is cut in half!

Ex. Perform a set of pushups and then immediately after your last repetition, stand right up and perform a set of squats without resting in between.

This philosophy has gained a lot of popularity with bootcamps, Cross-Fit, and P90X.

What's great about this also is the possibilities of changing your routines are endless. If you have to fight boredom just to get in a workout, I highly suggest asking your local personal trainer or fitness professional about "interval training",or seek out a bootcamp or a group fitness class.

Eat!

I said earlier how your metabolism is like your body's engine. Now I'm no car expert, but I know the strength of a V12 is much greater than a V6 engine and would probably require more fuel too, right?

Well there's a similar connection between how fast your metabolism is and how many calories you burn every day. The faster the metabolism, the more calories you burn at rest.

How do we increase our metabolisms? By gaining lean muscle.
How do we gain lean muscle? By performing resistance exercise (see steps #1 and #2) AND properly fueling our bodies.

Now, in terms of this article I'm strictly going to talk about quantity of calories not quality. That's a completely different topic and there's tons of great information on this site to help you with that.

But regarding how many calories you need, think of it like this...if you don't meet your metabolism's demands of calories needed (regardless of whether or not you want to gain or lose weight) your body is forced to go and get the needed energy from somewhere else.

Where does it get the energy it needs? From what muscle you already have on you.

So basically, your body eats itself if it doesn't get the proper amount of nutrients it needs. Believe it or not for people who want to lose weight, when you get to the point where your metabolism has increased...you need to eat more in order to continue losing the right way!

This is why it's very common to hear people complain after they've been exercising for a couple months that they're getting hungry even though they're still taking in the same number of calories!

So if you're ever feeling hungry as you continue to workout, listen to your body because it's saying "FEED ME!!"

I really hope you've gotten useful information you can use to help get you over the hump or even get started on the right foot. Here's to your healthy success!

-Kal

About the Author: Kal Gunay is a certified personal trainer in Boca Raton Fl. He currently runs a women's only weight loss boot camp and also works and helps other Boca Raton personal trainers better their craft and help their clients achieve great results.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts