St John’s Wood Blog by Imran Ilahi-

The slogan which should appear on the doors of a gym should be: “half the battle is getting here”. This phrase is true.

It can be very difficult to getting started with a workout. However, most of the time, people really enjoy it and after one or two weeks they are able to stick with a workout. They see the challenge aspect and the consistent results which are involved.

What Happens When You Stop Losing Weight or Getting Stronger?

You can notice results rapidly when you start consistently working out for the first time. You will lose weight if you combine cardio and resistance exercises. Moreover, you will become stronger and more toned.

For people who follow this plan, you can wait for one to two months to see real results but for everyone, there is a point where you stop to progress. At the beginning you think that you had a bad workout and when you continue and you see that there is no more improvements, you start to get concerned.

We speak about a hitting plateau. You need to learn how to manage a plateau so you aren’t totally derailed from working out because stalled progress is extremely frustrating.

You have to understand what a plateau is, if you want to deal with it because your body is not used to the increased actively level when you first start working out. To fuel your workout when you start your body has to burn a lot of calories and because your muscles have not used to being worked, they become stronger.

You can’t obtain the same results after one or two months when you work out: indeed, your body is accustomed to your workouts and it becomes more efficient: it is no longer needed to burn as many calories as before. Therefore, it is not possible to obtain the same results as before.

When you’re doing the same number of reps with the same amount of weight, your body’s going to get strong enough to handle that weight and then stop improving. It is the same problem when you search to get a more toned body by increasing your strength because your body stops improving because you do the same number of reps with the same amount of weight and your body is going to get strong enough to handle the weight.

You have to change your workouts if you don’t want to stay to the fitness plateau which is the result of your body adjusting to what you’re doing during your workouts. This change is going to force your body to work as hard as possible.

You may assume that you simply need to increase the amount you’re doing if you’ve been doing the same amount of cardio.

Conversely, breaking through a plateau by increasing the intensity of your cardio may make you more successful. Whether you try different machines or different structures for your sessions, for example you can experiment with different type of cardio. The main aim is to be ramping up your intensity and adding variety.

Mainly if you’ve primarily been doing machine or isolation exercises, perform different resistance exercises is all you need to break through strength plateaus. Conversely, you should try basic exercises with free weights if your workouts were based on machine resistance exercises. A trainer can help you to teaching you proper form if you’re concerned to the exercises incorrectly.

It could be a good solution if you add compound exercises to your workouts to past your plateau, if you used free weight but that you have mainly been doing isolation exercises because they require you to use more supporting muscles and finally your body will have a much time adjusting.

Do You Really Need to Do Resistance Exercises?

Cardio helps to lose weight because it burns out more calories and many people spend all their workouts doing cardio. However, they have to complete them with resistance exercises. Indeed, they can be a good way to slim down and they aren’t only for athletes or people who want to get big.

Muscles being more compact than fat, for example, one pound of muscle takes up less space than one pound of fat, if you add more of muscle to your body and if you get rid of fat in parallel, it will give you a much slimmer physique. This is the reason why resistances exercises can help you to lose weight.

You can lose weight by increasing the amount of calories that you burn out with another way resistance exercises even if you don’t workout. Indeed, even if the amount of calories that you burn out with the cardio can still be important, when you end a session, you’re not going to burn any additional calories as a result of this workout conversely to the resistance exercise.

You can increase the number of calories you burn on daily basis if you add lean muscle to your body because your body has to burn calories to build and maintain muscle. Cardio and resistance exercises are very different.

If the only thing holding you back from doing resistance exercises is a fear of getting bulky, you can safely let this fear go. Since women’s bodies produce less testosterone than men’s, resistance exercises aren’t going to cause you to pack on mass. Instead, they will give you a lean and toned appearance.

The fear to become bulky is an aspect which can restrict people about resistance exercises but you can safely let this fear go because this type of exercises will give you a lean and toned appearance and don’t cause you to pack on mass.