How to beat the weight loss plateau? These routines will help you

The effects of weight loss show up rapidly in the initial period because the body makes up for the calorie deficit by releasing its stores of glycogen, the carbs it stores in muscles and liver, for energy. Now glycogen contains water, so burning it means the water volume goes down. The initial weight loss is much about this water that you shed.

In any weight loss plan, you tend to lose some muscle along with fat. Muscle maintains the rate at which you burn calories, what we call metabolism. So if muscles waste away, your metabolism dips, you burn fewer calories and the weight doesn’t go down as rapidly. This will happen even if you have the same number of calories that helped you lose weight. Then you will need to either increase your physical activity or decrease the calories you eat. Most importantly build lean muscle mass.

WHAT ARE ROUTINES TO BEAT THE WEIGHT LOSS PLATEAU?

If you want a steady decline of excessive weight, one must do various combinations of exercises in which you engage your entire body every day. Following are some combinations:

1) Swimming, jogging, running and yoga pack quite a punch. Keep stretching exercises for both morning and evening.

2) Strength training with body weight can be helpful. Although slow jogging and cycling are good aerobic exercises that burn calories, adding strength training to your routine with body weight can help you get past a weight loss stasis. You can burn more calories even when you’re at rest when you increase your metabolism by gaining lean muscle mass. Strength training with body weight activities like squats, lunges, push-ups, planks — all of which focus on all main muscle groups — can be done twice a week. After that, sprinting and jumping jacks as per one’s capacity can be helpful.

3) Sometimes, just changing the sequence of workouts every day can add strength, stamina, agility and resilience.

4) The body gets used to certain workouts. So, try out new workouts in a graded manner. Vary your walking and running routines like doing them backwards or running sideways. Run clockwise, then anti-clockwise and loop into a figure of eight.

5) Focus on progressive overload, which means gradually challenge your body by upping the intensity or difficulty of your workouts. The duration and intensity of your cardio workouts helps your body adapt and burn calories effectively.

OTHER INTERVENTIONS

Scale readings might not always fairly represent your progress, especially if your body composition has changed. Your objective is actually fat loss rather than weight loss. Regular exercise can lead to the development of muscle, which is denser than fat and occupies less space in the body.

Therefore, you may be keeping a stable weight while gaining muscle and decreasing fat if the scale weight isn’t changing.

Diet and sleep play a vital role in losing weight. These two pillars will together support the third pillar called fitness. All three need to be sustainable.