If you read health oriented magazines or keep up to date on fitness-related material at all, you’ve probably read your fair number of articles about plateaus. I’m of course not talking about mountain scenery, but the frustrating lack of progress in personal workouts. Anytime I experienced plateaus in the past, I sneakily attributed them to this or that particular midterm that I had coming up – time constraints that prevented me from going further than I did. However, with summer in full swing and a lighter workload, I have run out of excuses for my most recent plateau.
I thought I had overcome it by starting to run outside in the lovely Baltimore neighborhoods, but then that got boring. Then I started to run on the treadmill, excited to keep tabs on my pace and time. But then that got boring. Finally, I realized what the problem was: I didn’t have a goal. My goal was to workout. That’s it. Period. No wonder I was getting bored!
Soooooooo….introducing, my goal:
Every week, I will up my running duration by an extra ten minutes. Therefore, if I run 25 minutes max on a day one week, that maximum duration has to be upped by ten minutes one day the following week. The best part of this goal is that it doesn’t mandate that I run every day, or perform at my maximum every day. It simply means that on one day, I completely beast my best.
And it worked! Two weeks ago, I ran a maximum of 30 minutes on the treadmill. A few days afterwards, I upped that by running for 45 minutes on the track! Not only did setting a casual and open-ended goal like this help, it motivated me to do more than my goal. #winning? #winning.
Here are some great tips from another fitness blogger about breaking through a plateau. I’m curious to see how this new plateau-buster works out in the long run. If you have any tips and tricks for pushing further in your workouts – shoot me an email or write a comment below and if I use it, I’ll write about it in my next blog!
Catch ya later!
Eating Happily 