Many exercisers have encountered the staled progress of what once was an effective, fat burning workout. You have hit what is called in the fitness world, a plateau. This is when your body has fully adapted to whatever changes you have made, whether through your current diet or exercise regime, and has adjusted its calorie expenditure with your calorie intake to try and hold onto remaining fat reserves.
To fully understand this concept, you must understand that the body's chance of survival depended many, many years ago, on having a sufficient fat reserve on the body. Your metabolism has created a system of expending energy based on the amount of calories it takes in. If you were originally taking 2,100 calories per day in and then switched to 1,600 calories, you would initially burn more calories per day due to the fact that it was not expecting a drop. Then, in several weeks your body becomes used to you eating at the 1,600 calorie level and your metabolism adjusts to that. You are not going to be burning anywhere near as much fat as before because your body is used to this new level, and is reserving its fat stores in case of emergency. It is a great trait for survival but not nearly as good for vanity's sake.
The most effective way to break out of the plateau is to incorporate some type of advanced training technique into your current workout. A personal favorite of mine is to add in drop sets. A drop set is when you extend your set until muscle failure, then decrease the weight and resume lifting until failure again, and then decrease the weight again and resume lifting until failure. This completely burns out the muscle, and should not be repeated more than once per week per muscle group. You can also try giant sets whereby you perform several exercises usually for the same muscle groups in a row without rest between them.
Chances are, if you were successfully losing weight before you hit the plateau, you have already changed your eating habits to be more health conscious. Instead of keeping to a traditional diet, try cycling your carbohydrates. This is when you have one to three low carbohydrate intake days, followed by one to two high carbohydrate intake days, and then one to two moderate carbohydrate intake days. This will confuse your metabolism and possibly be the jump-start you need to begin burning calories again.
Another great way to break through your plateau is to incorporate high intensity interval training, H.I.I.T., into your workout. This can be performed on any piece of cardio equipment and it is when you alternate between periods of high intensity cardio and low to moderate intensity cardio. An example using the treadmill for a beginner would be one minute sprinting followed by two minutes at a fast paced walk and repeated a minimum of six times.
To break out of the plateau, you will need to change something in your routine to jump-start your metabolism and start the weight loss progress again. Remember, everyone goes through plateaus whether they are beginners, advanced trainers, or even bodybuilders. It is a common occurrence that requires patience and hard work to break out of.
Author Resource:
Josh has been writing for many years on topics that interest him. An example of one of his websites is http://osterblenderparts.org which provides information on Oster blender parts .
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