Identifying Your Hurdles
What’s stopping you from achieving everything you could possibly want?
They say the hardest part is getting started and you know what? I tend to agree.
You can set all the lofty and ambitious goals you like. If you don’t even attempt to get going then you’ll never be able to realise them. But once you’ve committed to achieving positive change, where do you go from there?
Everyone’s goals and fitness journey will be unique to them. For the average person who just wants to feel a little bit better about themselves, our goals will all intersect at the brick wall. The slowed progress, the plateaus, the same scale weight and measurements. It’s here where demotivation and inconsistency follows.
Where do we go from here? Where do you go when you reach the brick wall so you can burst through it rather than bounce off it?
In this blog, we’ll identify and analyse the three overarching problems that the recreational gym punter faces when attempting to achieve their goals and how we can potentially overcome them
Trial and Error: You’re unsure of what you’re meant to be doing
In your average commercial gym there is a lot going on. There are dumbbells and barbells. There are squat racks. There are machines. There’s all kinds of cardio equipment. There’s group classes and if your gym is anything like mine, there’s some sort of third rate HIIT class rip off going on smack-bang in the middle.
You feel unsure of where you’re meant to be starting. You want to lose 15kg, so that means you should focus on the cardio section right? But you want to tone also and you’ve heard that low weight and high reps is the go. Your friend raves on about how HIIT training is great for fast fat loss, so maybe you should be doing that.
You want to build muscle in your chest and your arms and the day is Monday which obviously means it’s international chest day right? Chest and triceps go together and you’ve got the evening free, so that means a two and a half hour push day so you can really shock the body and be as sore as possible the following day.
But you also want to get strong. You see all the heavy lifting that’s happening on instagram and you want a slice of that social media pie. Deadlifts are pretty mad, nothing in the gym looks cooler and while you can hit 60kg comfortably for a few sets of 10, you’re feeling really good today so instead of sticking to your 10s, you decide to load the barbell with 170kg to try and send it. To get strong you need to be strong, right?
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around in the fitness space. The industry is saturated and looking to expose your vulnerability at every corner and it can truly be a hard space to navigate.
Plateau City: You feel like you’ve tried everything and still don’t see results
You’ve been training at the gym for a while now and fitness is pretty embedded into your lifestyle. You go to the gym 4 times a week, spend a couple hours training each session and you’re feeling pretty consistent with your habits. The newbie gains came on thick and fast and you’ve been feeling pretty good about your progress.
But after a while, something’s not quite clicking anymore. The pace of the gains you’ve acquired since you started training has slowed down. When you first started training, you were getting stronger each week. You started to feel bumps where there were no bumps before and when you weighed yourself, you kept getting a little bit lighter and then a little bit lighter again.
The scales have stopped moving in the direction you want them to, you’re adding muscle at a slower rate and it feels like none of your lifts have gone up in the last couple months.
What seemed to be working before clearly isn’t happening for you anymore, so you decide to change up your method. You’ve just been following what your friend who trains a lot has told you to do and now that that’s stopped working you’ve started looking at instagram for help. You see people with physiques you aspire to look like and the way that they work out, so you decide to do what they’re doing.
These fitness influencers swear by supplements and accessories too. Fat burners that really help to get them sweaty, to lose weight and tone up. They swear by these “booty bands” as well. They reaaaaally activate the glutes and they get them burning too. A sweat and a burn is supposed to mean that you’re progressing with your training, so why has the progress stopped?
Maybe training is going great. You’re enjoying lifting weights and you can feel that you’ve developed a bit of muscle. But fat loss is your primary goal and the scales just don’t shift like it used to. Your friend has been making tremendous progress though. She’s doing keto, swears by it. Has lost 10kg doing it. So you give it a go. It starts working! You’re down 5kg over 5 weeks, you feel great and you start telling everyone how good you’re feeling.
But you miss carbs. You love bread and potato and you miss it a lot. One night, you get home from a long, stressful day and you cave. Breaking the rules of keto leads to a binge and from there you can’t quite regain your momentum. You put the weight back on and you’re back to where you started and move onto the next diet that catches your eye. The cycle repeats and you’re left wondering why everything you seem to try isn’t getting the outcomes you’re after.
Or maybe you’re a budding strength athlete. You’re wanting to build your lifts and are chasing your first 140kg squat. When you get stronger you might give powerlifting a go. You’ve been working away and can nail your technique for multiple sets and reps with 100kg on your back, but every time you start to go a little bit heavier, you just can’t seem to hit your targets.
The week before you smoked 110kg for 5 reps, but this week you barely make it out of the squat rack alive with 120kg for 4. Now you’ve gone back down to 110kg and it feels harder than 105kg did a couple weeks ago and you’re so confused and at a loss for words. Why is everyone around you getting stronger but your lifts seem to have plateaued?
Work ethic can grind out results and a slow and steady pace. But fitness is a results based business and as recreational gym go’ers we want the fastest solution to our problems and as such, when our plan of attack stops serving us it’s easy to look for the next best thing.
Self-Belief: You don’t know if you’ve got what it takes to get the job done
All the pieces can be laid out in front of you. The perfect program. The best nutrition protocol to exist. A plan to fit your goals into your lifestyle. But sometimes the belief to see it through just isn’t there.
You might have been told that in order to get the body ready for long term, sustainable fat loss that you will need to eat more food to reach maintenance calories. The science makes sense, the logic makes sense, but the fear of eating and the negative attachment to the scales causes you to stay in long term calorie restriction which is detrimental to your overarching goal
Maybe your program requires you to spend a bit of time in the squat rack. You know that in order to develop lower body strength and muscle, squatting and deadlifting are going to be important exercises in your training. You’ve been shown the exercises a couple times and under the watch of a trainer, you’ve managed to troubleshoot them and get your technique reasonably sound.
However, for the days when you’re training by yourself, you have no confidence in your ability to call your depth and don’t know whether or not your spine is neutral.
Sometimes we can have people in our ear. Their intentions might be good, but it can also plant the seeds of doubt to deviate from the plan. Your boyfriend is telling you not to lift too heavy just in case you get “big and bulky”, so you start to second guess the program you’re currently running which has low to moderate reps with heavier loads. The fat loss results your friends are getting doing circuits coupled with intermittent fasting are leaving you dissatisfied with your own progress.
It’s so easy to fall into the train of thought that what you’re doing isn’t good enough and to act emotionally on what is immediately in front of you, even when deep down you know it’s not what you’re meant to be doing.
Where to from here?
We’ve now established our three overarching problems that we need to find solutions for. Knowing what we need to fix is well and good, but
In 5 Reasons You Aren’t Achieving Your Fitness Goals, I identified the most common hurdles enabling these overarching problems and how to overcome them. The Omega Barbell Philosophy is a five pillar system that allows you to identify the areas you most need to focus on and how to troubleshoot them to get the sustainable progress you’re looking for
Turning a corner
Really dialling in on the areas you need to work on is what’s going to help you make progress in the long term. Fad diets and trendy training methods may produce results in the short term but will always have a lower ceiling that is harder to break through.
The fad diets need to be adhered to in order for progress to be sustained, but are often overly restricting and hard to follow. The latest craze in training may encourage output and pushing your boundaries, but more often than not the push to the limits will become a shove past the point of no return where niggles and injuries may cause a bounce backwards.
By taking ownership over our current position, acknowledging our flaws and committing to overcoming our weaknesses, we are more likely to continue achieving, in turn keeping motivation and momentum going while keeping consistency and adherence high. When things are going great, we aren’t going backwards. It’s time to be great.
