9 Reason Why You Aren’t Getting Results
At one point or another every person who walks into a gym is going to experience a moment in time where their results start to slow down or halt altogether. Yes, it will happen to you because it happens to everyone. However, it doesn’t have to completely derail your fitness journey. If you’ve experienced some plateaus in your fitness journey then read on. I’m going to share some common issues that we see and how to fix them. If you haven’t experienced any plateaus then read on anyway because at some point you will. By implementing these strategies you can avoid the burnout and keep progressing towards those fitness goals.
LACK OF CONSISTENCY
“Consistent hard work leads to success”.
When we talk about lack of consistency it can be applied to either your nutrition or your workouts… or both. No one ever became fit after one workout or one meal. It takes multiple workouts and multiple days of eating right to start to see results. The more consistent you are, and the closer you follow a process, the faster your results will come. This is especially important when you aren’t happy with where you are at and you have a goal that you would like to move closer towards.
One strategy we find that helps clients stay consistent is the “One Day Rule”. At some point or another you’re going to experience a day where everything falls apart. Your kid gets sick or you get stuck in an emergency work meeting and you miss the gym. No matter how well you plan, that day will come. The important thing is that you don’t let it continue to slide. One day off track is not a pattern, however, two days is. When you’re thrown off your routine, the best thing to do is get right back on. This act will build self-confidence, minimize any negative impact it has on your progress, and help you avoid those feelings of guilt and shame that inevitably pop up when you fall off your plan.
EXERCISE IS NOT A HABIT
“People don’t decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures”
F.M. Alexander
Consistency and habits really go hand in hand. Afterall, it’s what we do consistently that becomes our habits. If you struggle with results or consistency, chances are you have not made exercise a habit. While some people think that habits are boring and restrict your freedom, it’s actually the opposite. Habits create freedom. We’ve always found that those that lack good habits are the most restricted.
If you have bad spending habits then you may never experience the freedom of a dream vacation. If you have poor health habits, you may lack the freedom and energy to climb a flight of stairs or play with your kids. However, if you create good healthy habits early, then chances are you’ll experience the freedom of moving freely well into your golden years.
Additionally, creating habits helps us avoid conflict. It’s estimated that the average adult makes more than 35,000 decisions a day. Creating a habit of exercising takes one of them off your plate. This means that you aren’t getting off work and debating between going to the gym or heading home and pounding a bag of cheetos on the couch. If exercise isn’t a habit, and you allow yourself the option, you’ll only choose the gym when you feel like it, and more often than not, you'll find yourself at home on the couch, elbow deep in a bag of regret.
However, if you make a habit of going to the gym every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after work (for example), you won’t be burdened with the conflict of choice every day at 5pm. You’ll workout on your scheduled days and have guilt free days away from the gym on your scheduled off-days. Once the habit is set, the act is predetermined and it’s easier to just stick to the schedule rather than thinking about how you’re going to deviate from it.
LACK OF SLEEP
You could be doing everything perfectly. Eating your fruits and vegetables, passing on the soda, and drinking lots of water. However, if you’re not sleeping well, your fitness will grind to a halt. The body just can’t operate without it. Chances are, if you’re not sleeping, you’re not making progress in the gym.
Proper sleep allows the body to repair itself from daily stress, boosts your natural immune system, increases brain function, and lowers your risk of certain health problems such as diabetes and heart disease. Whereas, lack of sleep has been shown to increase inflammation and body fat.
Exercise is amazing for the body, however, what a lot of people don’t realize is that exercise is actually stress on the body. When we exercise or lift weights, we break our bodies down. This is not a problem if you allow the body to go through its entire recovery process. You may wake up a little sore the next day, but your body will rebuild itself stronger and better after each restful night’s sleep. When you don’t get enough sleep, you don’t allow the body to complete this process and it doesn’t fully recover. In fact, this repeated process over time could lead to a state of chronic stress, which has been known to wreck our immune system and make us more susceptible to disease.
Studies also show that sleep deprivation can cause you to overeat by altering your hormonal balance, more specifically, your leptin and ghrelin levels. Lack of sleep has been shown to lower leptin levels which are responsible for regulating hunger, and increase ghrelin levels, which triggers you to eat. What this means is that if you sleep less than eight hours a day, you’re more likely to overeat the following day. In fact, sleep deprived people overeat by an average of 300 calories after under-sleeping. If continued over time, this will certainly halt your progress and potentially send you backwards.
So how do you get more sleep? There is a little bit more here than just going to bed earlier but if the only thing that’s keeping you from getting eight hours of sleep each night is that you like to watch TV too late, then turn it off and go to bed. Another strategy is keeping a consistent bedtime. This goes back to the section about habits. The body likes to be in a routine. By going to bed at the same time each night, the body will begin to anticipate sleep time and automatically start shutting things down as you get closer to your scheduled time and provide a more restful, restorative sleep. Other strategies include, cutting out the alcohol or caffeine later in the day, not watching TV or being on your laptop in bed, and keeping your room dark and quiet. If you remember nothing from this section, get eight hours of sleep and do it consistently. It will make your fitness journey much easier.
CHERRY PICKING WORKOUTS
You may have heard this term at the gym but if not: Cherry picking workouts means that you only decide to show up or train on the days that have exercises or movements that you’re good at- and skipping the workouts that you don’t like.
This may sound fun, we all like to do things that we are good at, but it will slow your results. Chances are, if you're good at something, this means that your body has adapted to that stimulus. Oftentimes it’s doing something new, or the thing that you’re not good at, that will challenge your body with a new stimulus and help you break through that plateau. If you want something that you haven’t got, you just might have to do something that you haven’t done. By implementing the schedule from the “habit” section, this issue would solve itself by removing the conflict of deciding whether to go or not to go. You go on your scheduled days and do whatever the class has in store. Soon you’ll be back to making big progress and you just might find that you’re pretty good at something else.
MAKING EXCUSES
“He who makes excuses is seldom good for anything else”- Benjamin Franklin
As much as we hate to admit it, we’ve all made excuses. Whether it be to get out of doing something we don’t feel like doing or to justify some failure, at some point or another we’ve all made one.
As innocent as excuses may seem, they have zero place in your fitness journey because excuses will always hold you back. When we make excuses we attempt to convince ourselves that we could not have changed the outcome, and therefore have no ability or need to change ourselves in the future. This is a self-sabotaging belief because it holds us in our current state, and for most of us, that’s not why we go to the gym.
Being in the fitness industry, you can believe that we’ve heard our share of excuses, however, they can usually be boiled down to two different categories. The first type is some form of negative self-talk such as “I’m just not good at rowing” or “I’m not the type of person who can lose weight”. Each seems innocent enough, however, by claiming this, you’re reinforcing your belief that you can’t do whatever it is that you’re trying to do, and even worse, that you don’t have the ability to change it. This belief will increase the likelihood that you’ll underperform or quit when it gets hard because you’ve already given yourself the excuse. Plus, why would you struggle to change something that you don’t have the ability to change?
For this type of excuse the solution can be as simple as adding the word “yet” to the end of it. By adding the word “yet” you are instilling the belief that you can change and that you are on your way to accomplishing it. The truth is, we all have the ability to change and it’s only our beliefs that have the ability to empower or destroy us.
The second category of excuses that we see is blaming other people or circumstances. We tend to do this in an attempt to guard our ego or self-esteem. However, when we do this, all we’re really doing is creating the illusion of security- which actually creates more insecurities.
When we make excuses it strips us of our power and control. Blaming some other person or circumstances may seem to save our ego, however, this places things outside of your control. If it’s someone or something else’s fault then you are a victim of it, and powerless to change it. Once things are outside of your control, then it really doesn’t matter how hard you work at something, the success is not up to you, so why even try? This belief is extremely disempowering and over time will create feelings of anger, fear, and also the tendency to underperform or quit when things get hard.
The reality is, many of us use excuses to justify staying in our comfort zone, because anything outside of that is the unknown and the unknown is scary. It’s easier just to make excuses to keep us in our box and justify to yourself and others why we should stay there. However, it’s usually when we step just outside of our comfort zone that the magic and the change that we are searching for happens.
No matter which type of excuse you use, you can’t fool yourself. Deep down inside an excuse won’t change the way you feel or what you know you could have done differently, leading to a damaged sense of self worth and confidence. Using these types of excuses will always limit your growth, stand in the way of your happiness, and keep you from discovering your true potential.
In order to stop making excuses, you first must become aware of when you are making them. Usually the excuse is masking the real reason you can’t or you won’t. Ask yourself:
What excuse am I currently making in my life?
Why am I making it? (What is it masking?)
How is it holding me back?
What would happen if I didn’t make it and instead overcame it?
Once you work through these questions you’ll have a greater understanding of how you are the only one responsible for yourself, and that the success or failure of every pursuit is up to you and you alone. There is great power in that and you’ll live a much better and more fulfilled life.
NO PATIENCE
“The path to any worthwhile achievement will be a long one, but those with the patience to walk it will see it pay off. “
Despite your best efforts, sometimes plateaus happen. Sometimes your body just needs a little time before things start to happen. Fitness is not a straight line from your starting point to your end goal. It can be a series of ups and downs, struggles and successes. The best thing we can do is create a great plan, work that plan, and have the patience to see it pay off.
Patience is the ability to remain steadfast despite opposition, difficulty, or adversity- and believe us, you will experience plenty of adversity in the pursuit of your fitness journey. The very nature of fitness is exposing your body to some form of adversity, and then recovering from it so you can grow. Doing it once won’t change anything. It’s only through this repeated process that we will experience change and this repeated process will take time.
If you lack patience, you’ll constantly be looking for the newer, sexier product, diet, or fitness program and typically jump to the next thing before you see your hard work payoff.
The truth is, nothing worth having comes easy. If you’re jumping from one thing to the next trying to minimize your effort, the only thing you’re really doing is minimizing your results. Have patience in your nutritional and fitness strategies and give them time to work.
CONTINUALLY CHANGING YOUR GOALS
One common mistake people make when pursuing a goal is to continually change it. It’s not uncommon for us to hear someone say that they want to have a six pack one week and the next week that they want to perform better. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, however, typically achieving a six pack abs requires a different diet than a performance goal would, and as we discussed earlier, one week just isn’t enough time to make progress in either direction. Continually bouncing back and forth will leave you stuck in the middle with zero progress.
If you are striving for something that you don’t have (in this case, six pack abs), it’s best to narrow your focus on the attainment of that one goal, which will shorten your pursuit and provide some quick wins. It’s always rewarding to see progress. Once you achieve one goal then you can change your focus to the other.
DIET IS OFF
This statement can be rather ambiguous so let’s define what we mean when we say “diet is off''. When your diet is off, we don't necessarily mean that you are overeating. We’ve seen just as many people under-eat as we see overeat. We mean that you aren’t eating in a way that is consistent with your goals.
Knowing that, you’ll first need to be clear about what your goals are. Are you eating to lose weight, gain weight, perform better at the gym, or just be more healthy? Each goal will have a different path and will require a different plan. If you don’t know how to create that plan then we suggest you hire a coach to help you because there are very few people in this world that guess and get it right. “Diet guessing” is where most clients fail and it’s no wonder with all of the conflicting information out there. Even worse, we’ve seen a lot of people who have spent a tremendous amount of time, money, and energy thinking they are doing the right thing, but in reality doing exactly the wrong thing for their goals.
Eating is something that you’ll have to do for life so it’s well worth the money spent to get some coaching on what is right for you and your goals. You’ll be able to use that information for the rest of your life and it will greatly reduce the amount of time and effort it takes you to reach your goals.
Once you have your plan, as mentioned before, you’ll need to be consistent. You can have the best diet in the world but if you’re not doing it consistently then it really won’t provide much in terms of results.
NEGATIVE MINDSET
Mindset isn't usually something that we think of when we are troubleshooting results. However, studies show that how you perceive what you're doing, does play a role in your results.
In a recent study on mindset, 84 female attendants from seven different hotels were examined. One group was told that the work that they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. The other group was told nothing.
After 4 weeks, the group that was informed that they were exercising when cleaning, perceived that they were getting significantly more exercise than before, although behavior did not change. As a result, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist to hip ratio, and body mass index. The uninformed group showed no change.
This is essentially the placebo effect, which is when a person receives a beneficial effect just from the belief in something. Put simply, if you believe in what you are doing and have a positive mindset about it, then statistically there is a much greater chance that it’s going to work.
Conversely, people with a negative mindset have been shown to get much less benefit from whatever it is that they are attempting to do. Additionally, negative people have a tendency to quit when things get hard. Ironically, it's in doing hard things that we find the greatest results and fulfillment.
We know exercising isn't easy. It requires hard work and time. So give yourself the best possible chance at it by cultivating a positive mindset. Walk into the gym each day with a positive mindset and believe that you will get better from the work that you are about to put in today. Studies show that in doing so, you’ll get much better results.
THE TAKEAWAY
Hopefully the topics discussed will help you avoid some common pitfalls and keep you progressing. Nutrition, exercising, and everything in between is extremely personal. No path is going to be the same for every person. If you need help with any of these items don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a free consultation. A little guidance may be just what you need.