When someone is feeling less than wonderful it’s common to try something and after a while it’s amazing. They start to feel better. Feel better to the point where yoga, Pilates, weight training whatever it happens to be becomes a passion. They want to tell everyone how fricking amazing Pilates is, how they felt awful beforehand, but now they feel pretty good.
But then it stops working, but that’s ok they try something new. Maybe going plant based or paleo and that becomes the new magic pathway. Then that stops working and so on.
So what gives? Possibly a few things. Firstly there is a very reductionist and polarising attitude towards life at the moment and it’s prevalent in the health and fitness space particularly. People are in particular camps, they are yogis, or weight lifters or runners. You can see fitness folk arguing in the comment sections of social media about which is better and why. Each of the adherents arguing their case as to why they are right, why weight lifting is better for far loss, or runners have the best VO2 max and that’s more important. How yoga reduces cortisol which does xyz.
Reality is we need a bit of all of them. We need some cardio for heart and lungs, strength training to prevent sarcopenia and frailty in later years and yes mobility too. Because what’s the point of the first two if you can’t get off the floor due to zero mobility?
So that’s a possibility, you had a piece of the movement puzzle but not the whole thing which meant that for example if someone was dealing with POTs they made progress through running but needed strength work also to improve blood flow.
Perhaps someone started a program but haven’t progressed. In other words still doing the same exercises again and again without any progressive overload. Without making them harder. When that happens the body responds to the stimulus but then gets to that stimulus, unless it’s made more challenging in order to again introduce stimulus detraining can even occur.
Or maybe once someone has an exercise routine sorted their body starts to change and needs better nutrition, more sleep. Other pieces of the puzzle.
If this has happened to you think of the following
What is the quality of your sleep like?
How much daylight do you get each day?
How many steps do you take a day?
How much blue light are you exposed to?
Do you have time away from blue light before sleep?
How much of your diet is real food? Doesn’t matter what your preference is but looks at how much is something that would have existed before processed food.
Do you have time to relax? Are you genuinely de-stressing?
Are you too comfortable all the time? Do you ever deliberately get out of breath, too hot, too cold or hungry?
Weirdly the body responds to adversity the rule of hormesis. In other words the biological phenomenon where a low exposure to a potentially harmful agent, like a toxin or stressor, can have beneficial effects on an organism. At a low dose of course.
Obviously I’m not saying try and do all these things at once, a total life overhaul is unsustainable BUT if you found an exercise routine that is working or a dietary pattern that helps you but you feel you are no longer getting results. Don’t stop what was working and do something entirely different, maybe tweak it. Make the exercise tougher or add in cardio/strength and then look at sleep or steps. Then after a few months add something else.
The reality is for optimal health we eventually need to look at all of it. Rather than expecting a magic bullet we need to accept that the human animal needs to eat well, move regularly, get daylight and sleep effectively. Any single piece of the puzzle missing can leave you feeling less than awesome.
If you would like to have a personal trainer with a holistic approach working out of a private home gym in Alnwick Northumberland get in touch!
Sam Kelly Fitness 