Are You Hitting The Fitness Plateau aka The Great Wall?

How do you know WHEN you have hit the WALL?

Let's assume if you've kept to the same nutritional plan and the same exercise regime and at the end of a full week/month, there is no change in your weight or body fat? Is it best to stick with it for one more week or even longer to confirm that it's really a plateau in fat loss or is it safe to say you've definitely "hit the wall" after just a single week with no progress?

 

One of the most important and powerful concepts in ActivFit's Program is the idea of the feedback loop system. We wanna assure all members know exactly what they are doing at all times, be good or bad, it somehow influences the results. Like the saying goes "Let your results dictate your approach."

I always encourage members to be active in the feedback loop system so that the coaches are well informed your status and keep you stay motivated.

That's what makes this such a good question, because the feedback we use - body composition testing - is so open to human error and also because water weight alone can produce an output that is easily misinterpreted. For example, increased body water shows up as increased lean body mass and decreased water shows up as decreased lean body mass, but body water fluctuations - aka hydration - can and do swing wildly and often, producing misleading feedback all the time. That's also why we try to standardize the timing to get a better body composition readings.

So solution number one is to realize that one week's results (and especially one day's results) don't mean so much by themselves unless viewed inside a larger trend - the trend over time always tells you more than a single week's fluctuation.

A huge "gain" in LBM one week could just be a day with a few pounds of water retention right? You could get all excited over that result, only to have it go "poof" and (literally) evaporate before your eyes in the next day or two, but it wasn't muscle - just a normal body water fluctuation. In the other direction, "no loss of fat" in a week could make you frustrated and upset, but what if it turned out that it was due to a gain in LBM (Lean Body Mass)? If that were true, would you still be upset that the scale didn't drop or would you be celebrating? 

 

Over time, these kinds of fluctuations smooth out and a trend begins to emerge on your progress chart. Put more stock into the trend than any short term fluctuation. Don't invest much emotional energy in short term results. Let calm and cool heads prevail. Panic often produces very poor decisions.

But the way I see it, the fact that you shouldn't read too much into a single week's measurement (don't get overly upset or overly excited - whichever the case may be) doesn't mean you should wait weeks to see a trend before you change anything.

I like to get frequent feedback and make course corrections or tweaks the instant I know I'm not going in the direction I want to go. Otherwise you could deviate further and further off course or at the very least, waste a lot of time treading water.

So, "How do you REALLY know when you're not going in the right direction?" "How do you know you're really at a true plateau in body comp improvement progress?"

If you had 100% confidence in your weight and body fat measurement, that would be info enough. But given all the fluctuations that are possible in water weight, glycogen, LBM, GI tract contents, etc, not to mention human testing error, that makes you wonder whether you made progress and it's simply not registering on the scale or the body fat test results yet. That happens a lot.

 

Well, here's something to ask yourself: HOW DO YOU LOOK?

If you can't answer that definitively, then another path to exploit is to increase your sensory acuity so you can better notice how you look and better notice tiny little changes in your physique. Sensory acuity - the ability to notice details and little changes - is a skill - one you can acquire and enhance with practice. All physique pros have this in spades.

I always say that you need objective measurement. The famous quote from rear admiral Grace Hopper comes to mind: "A single measurement is worth a thousand opinions." That is true. However, when you get skilled at both: accurately measuring body fat /weight data and subjective self-assessment, that's more valuable than one or the other alone.

If I feel there is no change, I don't wait around - there is no time to waste - I tweak something.

Now, some people in my own discussion forums have mentioned how important it is to have faith in your plan. Naturally, that is true. What I'm saying is not contradicting that. I'm not talking about abandoning your plan - giving up your entire diet approach or entire training approach for something new - I'm simply talking about tweaking something within your existing plan and doing it immediately instead of waiting for weeks.

If you don't make the tweaks continuously when needed, this explains the phenomenon of a person who has been stuck at a plateau for a year. I mean, how does that even happen? Remember Einstein's definition of insanity: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result...