Navigating Plateaus, Setbacks, and Injuries In Your Health & Fitness Journey

When embarking on a new health and fitness journey, it’s not uncommon to encounter challenges like plateaus, setbacks, nagging pain, and injuries.

These obstacles can be disheartening, but understanding how to navigate them is key to achieving long-term success and maintaining healthy habits.

To navigate through any of these challenges, we need to look at the 3 pillars of health and wellness: EXERCISE, NUTRITION, & SLEEP. But first, let’s understand plateaus and they can affect us.

Understanding Plateaus

A plateau occurs when you stop seeing progress after a period of improvement. This can present in many ways:

  • stalled weight loss

  • decreased or stagnant strength gains, or

  • a lack of improvement in metabolic or aerobic fitness and endurance.

While frustrating, plateaus are a normal part of any health and fitness journey and signal that changes need to be made. When facing a plateau, it’s time to step back and reassess your approach.

Here are a few key strategies to consider in each of the 3 pillars of health & wellness:

Exercise
Your body may have adapted to the current stimulus of your exercise routine. Look at the FITT principle of exercise: Frequency (how often are you exercising? 5-7 days? 3-4?) Intensity (how hard are you pushing? Think max heart rate. 65-75% = moderate intensity and 76%-99% = highest intensity) Time (how long are you exercising during each session? 30-60 mins/session, 150mins/week or moderate intensity or 75-90 mins of high intensity) Type (what exercises are you doing? Cardio & resistance) Considering this information, play with new variables that still align with your goal.

Nutrition
This pillar is often typically overlooked. With increased exercise, metabolic demands increase and this means that you might not be eating enough to sustain or build your fitness gains.

Think of a premium luxury car. It requires specialized care and attention, including different fluids (oil, premium gas, etc). You wouldn’t fill it with the cheapest, low-grade gas. You’d choose the highest quality to ensure that that engine is in tip top condition so it can run as smooth as possible. YOU are that luxury car.

To make sure you are in tip top condition and running as smooth as possible, ensure you are eating the right types of food to match your metabolism. One quick tip is to prioritize protein when active.

Sleep
Simply put - are you getting enough quality sleep?

Exercise is what creates the adaptations and changes in our bodies to make them healthier and stronger. And these changes, including tissue growth and repair, only happen when we sleep & recover.

Compromised sleep quantity & quality can result in:

  • Exercise performance: the quality & quantity of sleep can make exercise feel more difficult, impair endurance, coordination, reaction time, and accuracy, and even muscle strength

  • Injury risk: your risk of injury increases when your body doesn't have enough time to repair itself.

  • Energy: low energy makes it harder to exercise

Understanding Injuries and Setbacks

Setbacks can take many forms—injuries, illness, or even life’s unpredictability like work or personal stresses.

These moments can derail your progress and test your motivation. However, how you respond to setbacks is what truly matters.

Injuries
There are two broad categories of sports injuries:

  • Acute - a fall, receive a blow, or twist a joint

  • Chronic - a result from overuse of one area of the body (repetitive overload) and develop gradually over time

Either type of injury is your body’s way of telling you to stop and seek medical support. Always consult your doctor before continuing with any sort of physical activity.

Illness
We all get sick at some point. Whether it’s just the sniffles, the flu, or something more serious. That’s our body sending a message to slow down, and take a step back. If we keep pushing through (as our culture often promotes) and don’t rest and recover, we inevitably set ourselves up for setbacks. Answer? Rest and recover. Repeat.

Stress
We all have stress and what it looks and feels like is as different as each of us. But there’s one secret to managing it: exercise. And the type of exercise can and should take many forms, from aerobic (running, swimming, hiking, dancing), to resistance training (weightlifting, body weight), to yoga, mobility work, and even stretching.

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