I’ve been working out for about 4 months now (HIIT on a spin bike and a bit of weightlifting ~20 mins.) three times a week. I’m seeing good improvement in health and physique despite having no idea what I’m doing.
My motivator was calories, but now when I work out I burn way less calories because my body is getting used to the stress, I think. What’s happening? Is my workout less useful than before? Can I not eat as much or is my body burning more fuel now?
In: 54
Two things could be going on. If weight loss is your goal, you need to eat less calories than you burn, that’s it. There are no tricks that will make weight loss easier (outside of finding what works for you and makes it easier to stick to the formula of calories in – calories out < 0). If getting stronger is your goal then you need to constantly be increasing your workload to get further adaptation.
1: the human body is incredible at adapting to changes and starting a workout regimen will cause you to lose weight as long as you don’t wind up eating more than you burn, but over time (a few months to about a year depending on the person) your body will figure out how to burn less calories throughout the day. Simple example, person a burns about 1500 calories a day just existing and 500 doing whatever they do day to day. They eat let’s say an average of 2100 calories per day. That surplus intake cause weight gain. They start a workout regimen that adds about 500 calories per day and maybe eat an extra 100-200 calories. At the start they are now burning 2500 per day and eating only 2200-2300. That cause weight loss. As this continues the body figures out how to make existing easier and maybe day to day outside of the workout gets easier so you eventually go back to burning about 2000 calories per day (1100 existing + 400 day to day + 500 working out). So you either need to increase workout intensity or cut back on calories. At some point increasing workout load hits a limit and all you can do is cut back on calories.
2: when working out, the goal is to push your muscles to the point where they just start to break down a bit, a good workout will leave your muscles full of small tears that the body will then repair and put back together stronger than before they were broken. When you start out there is less muscle to break and it takes less work to break it. As you get stronger you need to break more muscle fibers, and they take more load and/or reps to break them. Without increasing the weight and/or number of reps/sets you do when lifting (with a HIIT workout you have to increase intensity, interval duration, or number of intervals) then you will eventually reach a point where you aren’t making your muscles do enough work to break, thus there is nothing for your body to make stronger while repairing it.
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