A fitness plateau happens to 99 percent of exercisers, and usually at new years resolution time.
Keen to lose weight, beat the bulge, get healthy, or just learned how to tone up with the latest gadget, many of us start to train and do experience results initially.
Whether that’s effective weight loss or packing on lean toned muscle, if you see results you’re going to be happy. Right? Read on to keep getting results!
The Fitness Plateau
Unfortunately most people experience a fitness plateau after 2-4 weeks and stop seeing the weight loss results, so give up!
If you exercise at home this is one thing, but if you use a gym, the membership still gets taken monthly and you literally pay for nothing! Its sad that only about 1% of gym members achieve their goals.
How To Beat A Fitness Plateau!
Don’t worry, because its so easy to remedy this plateau. By applying the FITT principle. So what is the FITT Principle and how does it affect your results?
Described as the FITT principle, frequency, intensity, time and type are the variables that you as an exerciser can manipulate in order to get the most gains from your training.
Time or duration of a training session will depend on your goal and current fitness levels. As a busy person training I advocate doing the opposite of what most coaches suggest, and keep the training volume as consistent as possible during the training period.
More on this later, but from a logistics perspective isn’t it better to know you have 45 minutes of training each Monday rather than a variable volume that you have to work your meetings, shopping, picking the kids up, child care and work around? Which brings me nicely to the next variable – intensity.
Intensity is my favourite variable to play with. It is so easy to do and requires no logistical changes to your life – think back to the set 45 min session on the Monday – this can be easy or it can be so hard you can barely pick up your water bottle at the end of it!
Intensity variables may include weight lifted, power generated and heart rate, running speed or even RPE. Oh yes, for you the busy person intensity is the key to periodisation.
Frequency refers to the number of training sessions per week. You may only have time for one session per day four days per week, or you may be able to consistently perform two sessions daily six days per week.
These two examples would result in a training frequency of between four and twelve sessions. The latter would allow around 8 to 16 hours recovery time and the former around 36 to 48 hours between sessions.
How To Keep Getting Fitness Results
So, in a nutshell, to keep getting fitness results go and mix things up to get the results for the long term.
Effective health, weight loss and fitness can be achieved this way. Lean muscle can be built this way. Wondering how to overcome a fitness plateau? Keep getting short term results? Apply the FITT principle and get the results forever!
If you like the sound of this and you want more support, you’re welcome to get in touch. Feel free to share and ask questions below too. Have a great day!