Time to Scrap Your Program or Do You Just Need a Foundation Fix?

So, you’ve been training diligently for quite a while now…you went through that period of “newbie gains” where PRs were flying every time you touched a barbell and the pounds of fat seemed to melt away with the bat of an eyelash. Though things didn’t accelerate quite as quickly as when you were a beginner, you still made steady progress while first entering into the intermediate level.

Now, however, you can’t seem to get anywhere with your training. You toil away, probably even harder than before, and now the ever-flowing personal bests seem to be a distant memory. Forget PRs, some days you can even muster up the ability to hit an average day’s numbers, and suddenly the scale seems to be heading in the wrong direction.

Might as well toss your current program in the trash, right? After all, it just doesn’t seem to work for you anymore, does it? Not so fast, before you throw the baby out with the bath water (terrible metaphor but I couldn’t resist), you need to take a good hard look at your foundation before you call it quits with your program.

What do I mean by “foundation?” Well, it’s all the stuff that goes on outside of the time spent in the gym bangin’ plates and movin’ weights. You know – sleep, nutrition, stress management, meditation – all that super exciting stuff that you’ve been neglecting.

Truth be told, addressing these key areas can often be more difficult than training hard at the gym. After all, it’s far more fun to go move some iron with friends than to make sure you have your meals all prepped and ready-to-go for the next day.

If you continue to neglect your foundation, however, your training, and therefore your results, will ultimately suffer, and this could very well be the reason you are stuck at a plateau. Now, you might be thinking, “but so-in-so eats like absolute garbage and was just bragging about pulling an all-nighter…he/she still makes progress, why can’t I?” Well, unfortunately, you are not this person, and who knows how much better this negligent individual could be doing if he or she was able to clean up these bad habits.

I know that getting adequate sleep each night, eating the right foods, properly hydrating, managing life’s stressors, and finding some quite time to rest your brain can sounds like an overwhelming list of items to address, but I want you to start taking an honest look at where you stand in these categories.

While we will discuss more specific strategies for conquering each domain in a later post, for now, choose one area to focus on and work toward making some positive changes in your habits.

Not getting enough sleep at night? Start scheduling your day a little more efficiently so that you can get to bed at a reasonable hour. Ordering out every night? Plan some home cooked meals throughout the week so that you can start to make some better choices and fuel your body for optimal performance.

Once you start to gain some momentum in one area and the positive changes have become habit, you can begin addressing other foundational areas. Soon enough, you will find yourself busting through that plateau and back on the path to success.