- You don’t know your starting point: if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you are going. Start with progress photos and physical measurements to set your reference point (your Day 1). From here you can work backwards based on a weekly timeline to make sure you are hitting your weekly milestones.
- You don’t have a customized nutrition plan: our calorie and macronutrient requirements differ from one person to another. Just because someone you know is seeing amazing weight loss results from a particular meal plan, does not necessarily mean you will too. You need to know your basal maintenance calories first before you make adjustments to your diet, based on your current fitness goals, I.e building muscle mass or burning body fat.
- You don’t track your workouts: this is a common problem that most general population face when it comes to making progress in the gym. As they say, work smart, don’t work hard. When you have a structured training program, you’ll be very surprised how much easier it is to make progress in strength and performance, without killing yourself with intense workouts every single day. In addition to this, you will be able to prevent the likelihood of injuries by progressing safely with your exercises. Preventing injuries means less downtime, which means better results!
- You’re doing too much cardio: yes, cardio burns calories and can help with speeding up fat loss. But what most don’t realize is that you can over do cardio, which can potentially lead to adrenal fatigue, physical burnout, and even slow down the recovery process from your strength training. Balance is key, it’s important to know your limits and listen your body when it’s telling you enough is enough!
- You’re not making adjustments every 4-6 weeks with all of the above. Your body is an intelligent machine, it can and will adapt to stimulus and the environment around it. Another reason individuals plateau or stop seeing incremental improvements with their bodies is because they aren’t challenging the body enough. Your body will notice if you don’t change your nutrition and training program faster than you will!
