Working out and calories

Question

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

Answer 1

You are plateauing. This happens, *always* with physical activity.

When you start, it is a new activity. Your muscles and brain need to adapt and grow to accommodate this new activity, but after a few months, they do, that have adapted. You got to think of your body as innately lazy. It will do the least work possible to get the largest results to accommodate a new stress. Once the stress is accommodated for, the body say fuck it, we got here, now we can cruise.

You got to keep your body adapting to something new.

20 minutes? Nope, you need to move to 40 minutes now OR up the resistance/weight more. Replace old exercises with comparable exercises. Bench press with bar before, now bench press with 2 dumbbells. Squats now become walking lunges. Sit-ups become leg lifts and so on. Make your body adapt to a new level of time, resistance, effort, etc.

Come up with a food plan. Diet is like 75% of weight control. Simple diet adjustments can mean you losing pounds a month or not. You should calorie count a few days. Read the label, measure shit out to your normal portions and see what you eat normally. See what the calories are for those portions and then see what you can cut back on or substitute for a lower call option. If you can cut 350 cals a day out of your diet, you will be dropping a pound of fat ***every 10 days***. I just switched from eating normal pasta to that zero pasta stuff. Not really zero calories, but its 90% less. I love pastas, ramen, spaghetti, you name it. Just by swapping that, I have dropped around 15 lbs from this summer *changing nothing else*.