The Gift of Being Stuck
“I only lost 1 pound.”
As a coach, you hear variations of this phrase quite often. Whether it be weight loss, lifting a certain amount of weight or just feeling a lack of motivation to continue to work towards whatever your goals may be, the dreaded plateau is an inevitable part of every fitness journey.
If you find yourself feeling stuck in a plateau, here are some questions to ask yourself that can help you break free of those feelings and get you back to a growth mindset.
WHERE IS YOUR MIND?
While plateaus can be frustrating as hell, they can teach us a lot more about how to maintain long-term success than the times where we are progressing at a pace we might find acceptable.
Plateaus offer us a chance to take a breath and assess. They offer us a chance to evaluate ourselves and the things we are doing (or not doing). Think of yourself as a scientist and your journey as the experiment.
With our fat loss plateaus:
-Am I aware of and/or logging EVERYTHING I consume?
-Am I being totally honest, but also compassionate with myself about my nutrition?
With our physical plateaus:
-Where are my movement weaknesses and limitations?
-Am I overtraining?
-Am I getting enough rest?
With our mental plateaus:
-Am I actively practicing behavior change I need to or just ruminating on doing it?
-Am I embracing the process or am I berating and beating myself up?
With all of these plateaus:
-Am I being realistic?
-Am I being patient?
-Am I actually doing the necessary work?
As I am writing this, I have been dealing with a knot in my upper back that has caused neck stiffness and pain on and off for several months now. I feel outbursts of anger and frustration about why it keeps coming back, but in my head I know exactly why.
Because also, as I am writing this, I become aware that my torso is constantly caving into a rounded posture because the keyboard is too far away. My laptop screen is too low, making my neck round down to see the screen, even though I keep saying to myself that I need to change my set up to raise it to my eye-line as my sports physical therapist has recommended.
This mini-assessment lessens the frustration a little and helps me feel somewhat more empowered. I know that there is still more I can do to take control of my own physical well being. I just have to do the damn thing.
AM I EVEN IN A PLATEAU?
Plateaus often aren’t even plateaus - they are often conjured up by a myopic and skewed view of one’s own progress. Before you mire yourself in those swampy waters of negativity, ask yourself:
-What am I basing the rate at which I should be reaching my goals on?
-Is the pace even realistic or based on any science?
-Am I comparing myself to someone who has been working on a thing for months, years, possibly decades where I am only just beginning?
-AM I BEING PATIENT ENOUGH?
Brian St. Pierre of Precision Nutrition states that reasonable fat loss per week is equal to 0.5 to 1.0% of body weight lost per week (with extreme fat loss peaking at 1.5% of body weight loss per week, requiring 90-100% consistency with nutrition).
Long-term success requires the development of both physical and mental muscles, and the weakest of these is typically patience.
Everyone knows the saying that ‘patience is a virtue’, but more importantly, patience is a SKILL. And like all other skills, it requires repetitions upon repetitions to become good at it.
Practice awareness in moments where you can exercise your patience. Are you prone to road rage behind the wheel? Try Box Breathing (4-second inhale, 4-second breath hold, 4-second exhale, 4-second breath hold, repeat) when you feel it coming on and work to let the moment of frustration and anger pass during these breaths. Feeling self-loathing for not reaching a weight loss goal by your birthday, wedding or other special event? Ask yourself: Did the number you wanted to reach and the time you gave yourself to reach it have anything to do with reality or were they just arbitrary?
Patience generates perseverance. Perseverance generates not only results, but develops mental fortitude to outlast the next mental and physical plateaus that will inevitably come in your journey forward.
CAN YOU WORK SMARTER INSTEAD OF HARDER?
Everyone - EVERYONE - experiences plateaus in their progress. This is very important to let sink in, because once you understand that it’s natural, you know it’s not an indictment of you or a sign of your failure.
Responding emotionally to a perceived plateau can cause us to grind harder without assessing whether or not we will be working harder in the correct direction.
Dr. Thomas Rutledge of the University of California San Diego created the summary below of the traditional, self-limiting perspective on plateaus versus the empowering, growth-minded perspective “practiced by the successful minority” of people:
If you are convinced you are in a plateau, ask yourself:
-“What information is this plateau trying to tell me?”
-”How long should reaching my goals actually take?”
-”How do I keep going in an intelligent direction?”
Perspective, Patience and Perseverance.
If you want to succeed and break through a plateau, it doesn’t require superhuman abilities or godlike willpower. It requires that you keep your head up and keep going!
Take the sage advice from the great American philosophers WIlson Phillips:
“If you hold on for one more day,
Things will go your way.”
Strength & Wellness to you!
Sources:
-Rutledge Ph.D, Thomas, 2019, A New Psychology for Weight Loss Plateaus, Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-healthy-journey/201906/new-psychology-weight-loss-plateaus#:~:text=A%20common%20reason%20for%20weight,weight%20to%20merely%20maintaining%20weight.
-St. Pierre, Brian, Fat Loss and Muscle Gain: What Does Realistic Progress Look Like, PrecisionNutrition.com, https://www.precisionnutrition.com/rates-of-fat-loss-and-muscle-gain#fatloss.