As we start a new year millions of people across the world will be looking to make positive changes to their life this January. An age-old resolution is to reach a fitness or health goal. They are often performance and aesthetically orientated, for example “running my first marathon”, or “running my first sub 3 hour marathon” compared with “I’d like to lose 2 stone”, or “I’d like to have a six pack” As I have previously alluded to, any kind of goal setting is important so if you are looking to make a change in 2019 and have set yourself a target, good on you!
As a personal trainer (outside of the work I do with athletes for sports performance) the most common goal people have is an aesthetic one. Many girls want to lose weight and look good, and many of the guys want gain muscle and look good. This is often suffixed by being told that they have been training a while with little or no success.
Whilst many factors can be at play that can cause a lack of progress there are two huge ones that are my go to re-start their journey towards achieving success.
Number 1. Diet.
I will begin this paragraph by saying I am not a nutritionist, and I don’t pretend to be. But, if you are trying to gain muscle and your bodyweight (not just muscle mass) remains unchanged after months of training, you are not eating enough. Simple as that. If your training was awful and you were eating enough you’d get fatter but not stronger, but as it stands if your weight remains the same you need to eat more! Use a very simple macro counting approach to your diet to work out how much you are currently eating. Assess your macros, align them to what they need to be, and add in a good 400-500 calories more of good food!
If you are trying to lose weight and your weight remains unchanged after months of trying you are eating too much. Regardless of how much exercise you are doing, you are still eating too much. It doesn’t matter if you tell me you’re hardly eating anything you are still eating too much! In simple terms – if you want to lose weight you need to be in a calorie deficit, i.e. eating less calories than you are burning. If you do this, you will lose weight. Easy! If you are not losing weight you are not in a calorie deficit, so eat less! Again, use a marco counting approach to assess what you are currently eating, align your macros to what they need to be and reduce your intake. How much you reduce it by will depend on how heavy you are, and how much you are eating. a 100kg person eating 4500 calories a day can afford to take out 1500 calories from their diet. A 65kg person eating 2300 calories a day, cannot!
Number 2. Periodized Progression.
Another very common comment that goes into my ears is something along the lines of “I’ve been benching 100kg for months now but can’t break that barrier”. It’s always bench press as well, why do people care only about their bench! Anyway, I digress… repeatedly training at 99-100% of what you are capable of, not progressing but expecting to is akin to attempting to use your head to knock down a building made of bricks. It doesn’t work, it hurts and you’re likely to get injured!
Well-designed training programs use periods of varying rep ranges, intensities and exercises. They will also have a planned loading progression throughout these changes to elicit a favourable response both muscular and neurological in order to coax progression out of your lifting. It’s the right thing to do and if you’re not doing it, you should be. There are load of different ways to go about this and coaches will all have the preferred methods but in truth as long as your program addresses the specifics you need it to for your weaknesses, goals and ability level and has progressions planned into it it will work for you. The only time this doesn’t apply is if you’re a total noobie to strength training and have never lifted anything before then it really doesn’t matter what you do in the gym, you’ll get stronger lifting any old way – but that doesn’t last for long!
Like I said earlier there are plenty of other reasons why some people may not be progressing but for a huge amount of people – have a look at those two points and if they apply to you, make a change and see some progression!