Reached A Sticking Point? - Don’t Let It Get You Down
Understanding Our Sticking Points
We all know how hard it is once we’ve hit a sticking point. It can crush us emotionally and cause us to quit striving toward our fitness goals if we don’t know how to ward it off or move through and around it. This is a crucial point to be aware of, well in advanced, and to understand what to do when it happens. There are many that fall prey to its discouragement, but it is a part of any growth no matter what the arena. Trust me, I have been there, in the dumps, enough times until I finally learned what to do about it, and therefore, I will share with you some important tips to apply in order to have continued success in all your fitness goals.
Why The Sticking Points?
First of all, you must understand the body and how it works, and once you do, you will learn to appreciate the body’s operative mechanism even more. You must first realize that the body always wants to heal itself; it doesn’t want to be sickly, and believe it or not, it is not acting out against you - it merely does what it is told to do. The body is designed, and most happy, to be a fast mean running machine. It’s instincts are for the well being and to its survival based on the principles of our cave man era. Therefore, the body knows by instinct how to protect itself, to preserve itself, and how to heal itself. But the body also knows how to adjust itself to whatever demands, or lack thereof, it is placed under. The body gets use to these shifts very quickly, and thank God! If we were ill, and lay to rest, our body would immediately take over by instinct and begin to repair itself. Likewise, if we exercise or attempt to lose weight, the body will automatically adjust to its new demand and this is GREAT! But here is where the sticking points occur once the body has adjusted itself to this shift, and this is where you come in and use the mind to trick the body into doing whatever you want it to do. So next time you are upset with your body, or discouraged with its performance or outcome, look inside your mind for the answers on how to make the body respond to your demands once again. The body is the most fascinating machine to have ever walked the planet, but it’s the mind that houses its control. Simply put, the body hasn’t a mind and it only works on survival instinct or auto-pilot, if you will.
Don’t Let Sticking Points Rain On Your Parade
Have you ever noticed that when you start working out and making healthful shifts to your diet that your body responds amazingly quick, but then after about a month or so, all of a sudden, everything seems to come to a screeching halt? The scale may change a little or may even go up a pound (water retention) and you may just feel completely out of sync. Whatever you do, DO NOT STOP!! It’s like a child that doesn’t seem to be growing and then over night, literally, he springs up from nowhere. At that very moment, you can just hear their grandparents with such exclamation in their voices, “Oh my Goodness! Charlie’s grown like a weed since the last time I saw him a mere month ago!” What is happening is your body may not appear to be changing on the outside, but it is definitely making the changes inside, and this too is part of the necessary process in order to continue to make outward shifts appear. But what can we do to minimize and speed up these sticking points? A whole lot! So let’s get to it.
Tips On How To Work Through Our Sticking Points
As I have emphasized in the past, it is crucial to log everything in your daily journal. Write down the weights you chose, the reps, sets, rests, and the routine you are following. What you ate and drank etc.
After a month, completely change your entire routine. I could write a hundred ways in how to change a routine while still exercising the exact same body parts. It is endless, but crucial. But one must also understand the importance of what to do during that month on a particular routine: You must change each week using some form of ”progression” technique. This would include, as stated before, a heavier weight load, another set, perhaps more reps, or less rest periods. This is vital to your success, and including one or two of these techniques per week is optimal. Once the month is over and after having used progressive techniques each week during that month’s routine, it is time to change the program entirely, while always remembering, that with any routine, to apply one or all of the progressive techniques each week.
As far as weight loss goes, you also must do the same by
-written by Angela Doss