Everyone has been there – you finally start your fitness journey, see some results, and build motivation to continue with your training. But after a while, you find that your results have slowed or stopped altogether, and your motivation starts to fault. You’ve hit a plateau, and it has caused you to lose interest in your workout regime.

 

Hitting a plateau can be one of the most unmotivating aspects of exercise. Whatever your goals are, if you are not seeing progress, you feel like you are just wasting your time. Instead of letting this hinder you, take a step back and examine your training. Try and find why you’ve plateaued and what you can change to overcome it.

 

When looking at what you’ve been doing for your workout program, answer this question: what has changed over the last few weeks/ months? If the answer is nothing, then that is the problem! You may still be working out hard, but if nothing has changed, then you have just been maintaining, not progressing. Take a look at what you can improve on to further your training.

 

There is a certain principle that must be applied to your workout to break through a plateau, called progressive overload. This means progressively increasing certain training variables to keep allowing your body to improve and adapt as it grows. Overall, you will need to change one or two aspects of your training – the intensity (how hard you’re working out) or the volume (how much you’re working out). These can be done by altering the load you’re using, the sets and reps you’re performing, and the rest you’re taking. To increase the intensity of your workouts, you can push more weight, and/ or take less rest between sets. To increase volume, try adding in more sets and/ or reps. You can also change these together! Try performing super intense workouts with less volume, or performing more volume during your workouts but at a lighter intensity. And of course, you can throw in some workouts that are more intense and with more volume. These ones will be the most exhausting, and will require enough rest to allow your body to recover.

 

Including progressive overload into your training program guidelines allows you to keep pushing yourself further. Your body is designed to adapt to the stresses at hand, and it will learn to perform the exercises at hand in the most efficient manner. You need to keep pushing your body’s limits to keep improving.