Plateau 2 and Workout v2.0

In February of 2012 I had run into another of the dreaded plateaus that happens during weight loss. I had been sitting at the same weight of 230 lbs for quite some time with this particular plateau. If you have read my previous post about my first plateau you would know that the cause of that plateau was because my diet was quite lacking in direction and discipline. To overcome that plateau I did get my diet in line and set specific caloric goals that got me back to losing weight. This plateau however had a different culprit that eluded me for a while. I knew my diet was good and that I was at a sufficient caloric deficit, so I was fairly certain that my diet wasn't the cause and went back to researching other possible causes. After reading several articles about how to get over weight loss plateaus I realized that my workouts had become stagnant. I had been using the same amount of weight with the same amount of reps for quite some time and my workouts were not pushing me enough to induce weight loss.

My workout had been the same routine now for several months. I would go to the gym and use the same exercises on the same days (which isn't necessarily bad) with the same amount of weights and the same number of reps. I was in a set routine and my body was too used to that particular workload. When you don't push yourself your body isn't forced to react to overcome the situation and if your body isn't reacting to overcome the situation it means you won't lose fat or build additional muscle.

I started to figure out what I needed to change to swap my workout to v2.0 so that I could overcome this plateau. There are several ways you can change up your workout to make your body work harder. One of the ways you can accomplish increasing your workout intensity is by changing which exercises you are doing. Even if the exercises are ones that workout the same muscle groups, sometimes the slight variation is enough to cause your body to react and start the process of fat loss or muscle growth again. The second way, instead of changing exercises, is to add additional exercises or increase the number of repetitions in your exercises. If you have been using 30 lbs for curls and doing four sets of ten start trying to do four sets of twelve or more if you can handle it. Or if you have been only doing one bicep exercises try doing two or three types of bicep exercises. Obviously this will be more total work and help increase your workout intensity. The third way is to lift heavier weights. Again in the example of the curls if you are currently doing 30 lbs for four sets of 10 instead try doing it with 35 lbs. The last and fourth way to increase your workout intensity is to decrease your rest time between exercises. This will help keep your heart rate up and will cause your cardio vascular system to work harder.

What I decided to do with my workout was to implement a couple of these options to bring up the intensity of my workouts. For starters I changed the types of exercises I was doing. I had predominantly been doing most of my exercises on the weight machines and changed over to doing stuff with free weights. This helped to vary how my muscles were being used. I also added a couple additional exercises to each of my muscle groups. This was a big help in increasing my intensity in my workouts. Lastly I also decided to try to keep my rest periods between workouts shorter. I also decided on a system that I would start for all my new exercises to ensure my intensity would keep increasing in the future as well. On pretty much all of my exercises I would do four sets of eight reps and continue to increase my number of reps until at that specific weight I could do four sets of ten to twelve reps. Once I could achieve this I would use a heavier weight and start back at 4 sets of eight and work my way up again.

All of these small changes added up to big results because I wound up overcoming this plateau and continuing down the path to weight loss and muscle growth. So if you find yourself hitting a plateau either in your weight loss or your muscle growth, remember that your workout might be suffering from stagnation. If your workout is stagnant you will need to revise it to ensure you are keeping the intensity of your workouts high to keep you on track.