2 minute read
Ways to Keep Holiday Stress at Bay - pg. 3
The human body is an amazing thing. If you do the same workout routine over and over, it will become more efficient at doing it and not have to work as hard. But, that means you are not burning as many calories, if losing weight is your goal, or tearing as many muscle fibers, if you want to build muscle.
If your workout isn’t working out as good as it has in the past, you can get back in the groove by implementing these simple lifestyle tweaks.
Change the Intensity
Because the body adapts to doing the same thing, you may have to change it up if you have hit a plateau. One easy tweak is to increase the intensity of your routine. For example, if you typically run on a treadmill for 30 minutes, instead sprint for a few minutes, walk, and sprint again.
Under this routine, you push yourself hard for a few minutes, rest for about half the time you pushed hard and then push hard again. Keep this work/rest routine up for as long as you can.
Change Your Routine
Another change you can make is to do a different routine. This way you are challenging different muscles. Because muscles do adapt if doing the same thing over and over, your fitness progress may stall out. By switching to a different routine, it will push your body in different ways. To change intensity and routine, choose HIIT. It alternates between going all out for a few minutes, walking for a few minutes and then going all out again. Keep up this routine for as long as you can. Expect to be sore the first time as it is something different for your body.
Change Your Diet
Changing your routine, intensity and diet all at the same time gives your body the one/two/three punch it needs to get going again. Vegetables should be your mainstay of foods and you should be eating at least five to nine servings per day. In contrast, limit your intake of processed foods to lower the amount of saturated fat and sugar consumed.
All calories are not created the same. Take a 100-calorie cookie and 100 calories of carrots. Not only is the quantity vastly different, which means the carrots will fill you up more, but the nutritional make-up is very different. The cookie is basically empty calories while the carrots are nutrient dense.
Change the Amount of Sleep
Getting enough quality sleep at night is paramount to good fitness. When you are sleeping, your body is recovering and your muscles are repairing themselves. And if losing weight is part of your fitness plan, you can actually gain weight if you are not getting enough sleep.
Changing intensity, routines, diet and amount of sleep are just four tweaks of many that you can implement to get your fitness efforts back on track.
