Selena Deleon – THE WORKOUT TRAINING PLATEAUS AND WEIGHT PLATEAUS
IF YOU are not making gains on your current exercise programmes, chances are you are doing something wrong. If you are not seeing results on a monthly basis, you need to reassess your training protocol. As with any other endeavour you can not achieve greatness haphazardly. You need to have specific, objective goals that are recorded to check for progress. Select a date in the future, formulate a specific goal for that date, keep a training and diet journal and periodically check your body composition to accurately gauge your progress, or lack thereof. If you do not set specific goals, and if you do not monitor your progress toward those goals, then how can you accurately determine if you are making progress? Once you have a specific timetable and a specific goal, then you need to assess the two aspects of changing your body composition: nutrition and the training itself. Causes of training plateaus Many people do not have a solid understanding of how their caloric intake relates to their energy expenditure. In order to sustain muscular growth, you need to supply your body with an appropriate number of calories. A pound of muscle requires 25-30 calories a day to maintain, and 100 calories a day to build. This is one common cause of the training plateau: improper caloric intake. To assess one's daily caloric requirement, we must take caloric expenditure into consideration. There are three components to caloric output:
1.Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)
2.Energy expended with exercise and daily activities
3.The thermic effect of food
The RMR accounts for about 60-75% of daily caloric expenditure and is generally higher in individuals with more lean body mass. This lends true to the idea that taller individuals and those with more muscle mass use up more calories or have faster resting metabolic rates. It is for this reason that it is important to preserve lean body mass when losing weight, to help to maintain the metabolic rate. Several studies show that severely restricting calories lowers the RMR. Other factors that affect the RMR include gender, age, air temperature and physical activity.
Energy expended with exercise and daily activities accounts for approximately 20-30% of daily expenditure and is the easiest component to alter. The thermal effect of food refers to the increase in RMR after eating and is roughly equivalent to 10% of the meal's total caloric value, which is used for digestion and absorption. A simplified formula which can be used to calculate one's minimum daily caloric requirement, is to multiply your weight in kilograms by 24 which gives you your resting metabolic rate, then multiply that number by 1.5 so as to include moderate exercise and daily physical activity. For example a woman who weighs 52 kilos will have a daily caloric requirement of 1872 kilocalories. (These numbers are approximations and vary from person to person.) If you want to build muscle, the caloric intake would need to be increased to sustain gains, based on one's current weight. Be sure to increase calories with the proper foods -foods that will help you construct new muscle and stay lean. Not all foods do this. The same number of calories from different foods have different effects on body weight. Just try increasing the number of calories in your day by eating more potatoes and pasta (complex carbohydrates) versus candy and ice cream (simple sugars) and you will see the difference that it makes in your body composition.
The same is true for body fat losses. For fat losses, the daily caloric intake would have to be decreased. To lose a pound of fat per week one would need a caloric deficit of 3500 calories per week (3500 calories = a pound of fat). That equates to eating 500 calories less per day for one week. After ten weeks, if one were to drop 10 pounds the new daily caloric requirement would now have to be readjusted, based on the new weight. It sounds relatively simple, but many trainees do not take this into account. The other possible problem if you hit a plateau could be your training. Your problem could be associated with overtraining, under training, or improper training intensity. This is why the concept of periodisation is so important to your training progress. As with your nutrition, you need to make the appropriate adjustments as you increase or decrease in bodyweight. You need to make a concentrated effort to progressively increase your intensity to meet your overall goals. This is where having a journal with a specific timetable is important. Your muscles need to be presented with new stimulus every 4-6 weeks to progress, and if you do not keep track of your training you will eventually hit a plateau. The bottom line is that you have to emphasise the basic exercises, train hard, train to failure, progressively challenge your body and periodically adjust your programme. You need to assess your current programme as far as your nutrition and training is concerned, if you want to break through your plateaus. Have the courage and foresight to alter your programme and you will be back on the road to progress.
Selena DeLeon is a fitness expert.
