Have you reached a plateau?
Got this via email this am, decided to share:
Use Variation to Intensify Your Progress
Have your fitness efforts reached a plateau? It may be time to put the principle of Variation to work for you.
The body is incredibly adaptive and resourceful when it comes to adjusting to any program geared at fat loss or muscle development; in a word it’s downright stubborn.
The only intelligent way to combat this resourcefulness is to constantly change things up in your program, to get variation into it and not allow the body to become "comfortable" and readjust set-points.
In other words, if you’ve been doing 20 minutes on the treadmill 3 times per week for the past three months, then you may have made some great initial progress, but it’s not uncommon for the rate of progress to eventually slow or stagnate altogether.
Your body has become used to this training and it’s no longer having as dramatic an effect. The solution is to mix things up by 1) upping your intensity (go to level 7 rather than level 4); 2) breaking the routine (take a week off from cardio work, or shift to two 40 minute sessions, or five 15 minute sessions. Change it anyway you like, but CHANGE IT!
The bottom line rule is if you’ve hit a sticking point or plateau, the last thing you want to do is what you’ve been doing. Drop the routine, try something new, and start making progress again.
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