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Tackling a Weight Loss Plateau With Exercise

Tackling a Weight Loss Plateau With Exercise

(1 of 3 pages)

As you start to get your nutrition and exercise right, your body will become more efficient and therefore you will need to change something to keep the calorie deficit occurring on a daily basis.

As you reach a good level of endurance fitness, the amount of calories you burn when say running or rowing, will essentially be far less then when you first started. As we improve, we develop an energy saving technique, which is great for our running or rowing performance but not so great in terms of burning calories.

So, just keep your nutrition healthy and consistent and try one or more of the following suggestions to kick start your fat-burning potential!

1) Weight training - the most successful way to achieve long-term weight loss/control is to increase the lean muscle tissue on our bodies and this is achieved through weight training. Whether you do a program in the gym or at home, use bodyweight, resistance bands, dumbbells, barbells or machines, it doesn't matter, as long as you fatigue the muscles so they respond and strengthen.

The toning effect you achieve is great but more importantly, muscle tissue is alive and requires energy (calories!) 24/7 just to be on our body. It is because of this demand that muscle tissue increases the amount of calories you burn every minute, making it much easier to achieve a calorie deficit and subsequent body fat loss! So get yourself a resistance program, you could look to do a 30-minute workout at home prior to a run or alternate weight training days and running days.

2) Variety - with the way you train. Quite simply, make your body do things it's not accustomed to and it has to work hard and use lots of calories. Vary the type of exercise you do, exercise DVD's, classes, cardiovascular, weight training, circuit training combinations etc. If you give your body the same type of training you will only achieve the same result and the training becomes less effective, so spice things up!