If you’re reading this chances are you probably aren’t where you want to be right now.
Whether it’s the last few kilo’s of body fat that you just can’t quite crack or your new years resolution for 2018 to lose 20kg and change your life, we all have the same thing in common.
We’re not there yet!
We can put it down to a bunch of reasons why; willpower, motivation, laziness or being time poor. But to put it simply, chances are we are making a mistake or two that could be the keylog to making the breakthrough towards your goals.
It’s time to break free of the ball and chain that’s holding you back, which can be pretty hard when you don’t know exactly what it is.
We’re here to help you find out what that might be. We’ve found 10 different mistakes that come up pretty common with the people we have worked with in the past and want to share them with you so you can stop making the same mistakes.
-
You’re eating way too many carbs
Now this might seem a little odd coming from us as alot of our content in the past has emphasised how carbs aren’t the bad guy when it comes to fat loss. Which is true but, the reality is some people don’t function as well with super high carb diets and can have some degree of insulin resistance that can lead to storing and holding onto body fat.
A good indication of this may be if you are fairly lean and hold onto body fat around your hips mainly. If you are one of these people you may find that eating a more moderate carbohydrate intake more effective for optimising your body composition. Try somewhere between 1.5-2.5 grams per kilo of bodyweight for someone training hard and fairly active and 1-2 grams per kilo if your a little more sedentary.
-
Eating way too much fats
Yep we’re flipping this right upside down, as we said some people don’t lose weight super well eating higher carbs but others can need a lower fat, higher carb approach to get to their leanest and healthiest bodyweight. This has worked for a long time and is the primary approach of most physique athletes who basically walk around leaner than most of us ever get to year round. Just because low fat diets have lost a lot of media attention doesn’t mean they aren’t effective.
If you’ve been low carb for a long time and it just doesn’t seem to be working for you. Try dropping your fats and bringing back up your carbs a little bit. A good aim for most people is to start between 0.7 and 0.9 grams per kilo of bodyweight in fats and work from there to find what works for you.
-
You don’t eat enough protein
Protein intake is key when trying to promote weight loss and preserve muscle mass while dropping the body fat. Part of the reason why we end up low on protein tends to be the way we have grown up focused around carbohydrate based meals. Cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, things that work out of convenience rather than function.
A good starting point is to aim for between 1.5-2.25 grams per kilo of bodyweight. To give you a simpler way of figuring that out, 100g of most lean meats contains around 25-30g of protein so if you were aiming for 150g of protein for the day you could have 3 servings of 200g of lean meats.
-
You don’t eat your greens
One of the biggest problems we have now is our laziness towards preparing foods. Some people’s idea of vegetables in a meal is the deep fried chips on the side of their steak. We need to consume a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to ensure we have enough micronutrients to keep our bodies functioning at their optimal rate. Nutrient deficiencies on a small scale can lead to imbalanced hormones or a slowing of your metabolism that can slow your progress and hold you back from your goals.
Make this one nice and simple and just focus on having at least one fist sized portion of fruit or veggies with each meal.
-
Sleep is not for the weak
In fact sleep is for the STRONG, lacking sleep will mess with your hormones drive up your insulin resistance, increase cortisol and for guys decrease your testosterone to the equivalent of a teenage girl. We tell ourselves we can get away with less sleep but im still yet to see someone prove that.
Focus on just adding in half hour at a time and maximising our time in direct sunlight during the day to help promote our melatonin levels to rise and fall with the sun. For more on this check out “Sleep Smarter” by Shawn Stevenson for a simple and effective guide to improved sleep.
-
You’re a HIT Cardio Bunny
Getting sweaty and pushing yourself is fun, we get it. But more and more high intensity work isn’t always the solution. There’s only so much your body will take before the high intensity work becomes too stressful for your body to recover from. This tends to drive up cortisol levels, decrease thyroid hormone in women and testosterone in men, clearly things we want to avoid.
Aim for at most 2-3 high intensity conditioning sessions. You can use some high intensity finishers at the end of strength based workouts as well if you want to do more but make sure you’re taking a balanced approach to your training.
-
You don’t focus on building your strength
This one always ruffles a few feathers when we begin to talk about it but once we explain it, most people begin to understand why we continue to emphasise strength through fat loss phases. So one of the big things we all talk about when we trying to lose body fat is looking for a defined look. This obviously requires maintaining muscle while losing fat and the best way to know you are maintaining your muscle is to be focusing on improving your strength. Your weight won’t change linearly through a weight cut but it doesn’t mean your not making progress.
Yes strength is a function of neurological and muscular factors however, most neurological change occurs fairly quickly in a training program and the rest of it takes a significant time to develop (I’m talking years to reach your maximum potential). So if you are making progress in your strength while in a weight loss phase it would be very hard to be losing muscle in that same time.
We don’t suggest doing heavy singles all the time but you can’t just be lifting the same weights over and over again with less and less rest each week and expect to see yourself get in better shape. Aim to slowly improve your high rep maxes while also improving on your max rep sets of bodyweight movements like pull-ups and dips and you will be heading in the right direction.
-
Getting stuck just putting in the miles
Somewhere along the lines we saw that runners are generally skinny and we thought that must be the solution to getting lean. The problem is most of us don’t actually want to look like runners, if you do that’s cool go for it (you should probably do some strength and mixed modal conditioning anyway to keep some longevity in your running career but that’s for another post).
Most of us look at athletes like Sonny Bill Williams or Michelle Jenneke as our ideal look we are chasing. Guess what, they don’t spend hours and hours jogging. They spread their training between strength and power work, some conditioning and plenty of sport practice. This looks much more like how we train people here at Newstrength.
If you do enjoy your running and want to make it part of your training, awesome just make sure to mix up your distances, use different intervals, running surfaces and don’t forget to still hit your strength and conditioning pieces as well.
-
You Lack Discipline (The Real Truth)
I don’t know how many times we have heard the story:
“I was super motivated, started going to the gym, changed my diet began to see results but then XYZ happened and I just couldn’t make it to the gym anymore.”
I get it, things get in the way. But plenty of people out there are still getting up early to go and train even though work is busy or the kids were keeping them up all night or they just wanted to eat pizza. Often we get super motivated but once that subsides we don’t have the discipline to see it through. Now there’s plenty of ways to get around this but often it comes down to stacking the cards in your favour and making it harder for you to fail.
Go to the gym with a friend, hire a coach, find a gym close to work, set more than one alarm or the Tim Ferriss favourite: write a cheque to an organisation that goes against what you believe in and make a friend hold onto it. If you give up then they send the cheque and you just funded something you wouldn’t ever do normally. If you make it to your goal, they give you the cheque back and you shred it.
-
Training in a bad environment
Ever been to the gym and once you get there you do a few sets and then just turn around and leave? You didn’t like the people there, the music sucked, the overall experience just didn’t make you enthused to train.
The sad thing is we are a result of the environments we place ourselves in, and most of us just try to grind our way through bad environments and think we’ll just get through it. Ever wondered why certain sporting teams just have a knack for winning even when they are against all odds or why companies like apple just seem to always change the game every time they move into a new market?
It comes down to the environment and the company the people involved keep. How that applies to you is if you work with people who don’t live a healthy lifestyle, come up with excuses as why they aren’t reaching their goals or simply aren’t positive to be around you often will have a much harder time doing it yourself whether it’s the negative comments you get from people or the afternoon beers after work.
This is why community based gyms get significantly better results than most people trying to go to your typical globo gym. You join a tribe of people committed to achieving their goals, whose idea of fun doesn’t just involve junk food and alcohol. They keep you accountable and help guide you through your journey as most of them have been there themselves before.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully you’ve found something that stands out for you and why you may be stuck not reaching your goals. Maybe there’s a few things standing in the way.
If you feel you need a little help with getting yourself on track, we are still currently taking applicants in both our Men’s Newstrength Athlete and Women’s Newstrength Way 6 week programs.
If you’re interested just click the links above and book in for a call with us and we can discuss how we can help you break through your plateaus and reach your goals.