“I feel like I’m working hard and not seeing any results. What am I doing wrong?”
I’m asked some version of this question on a regular basis. It’s heartbreaking to hear stories of people who’ve been riding a never ending roller coaster of progress without getting much farther along than where they started.
I can also relate because for a long time, this was me. Before I got really serious about losing weight, I made a lot of half-hearted attempts to change my eating and start exercising. None of these attempts were ever successful. I either tried to do way too much at once and burnt myself out or I didn’t work very hard and ultimately gave up because I was impatient and expected more dramatic results. It took a serious health scare for me to take an honest look at what I was doing and make the necessary changes to actually move forward.
If you’ve been working hard for a long time with little to show for it, you may be sabotaging your progress like I was. Keep reading to learn the top four mistakes I see people make that interfere with achieving positive results.
Lack of Consistency
I put together an entire email course on consistency because it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see people making in and out of the gym. Losing weight, building muscle, getting stronger, or performing better don’t happen on accident. It takes months and years of repeated efforts to take you from point A to points B, C, D, and beyond. You don’t have to be perfect, but if you aren’t consistently exercising, eating well, and managing sleep and stress, you will have a very hard time achieving any health or fitness goal.
How consistent do you have to be to see results? This depends on your goals and experience. As a general rule of thumb, I recommend everyone do some type of exercise at least 2 to 3 days per week. Certain goals, like building muscle and strength or training for an event, may require more frequent training. If you’re trying to lose weight, you likely need to watch what you’re eating beyond just Monday through Friday. It’s depressingly easy to wipe out a hard-earned caloric deficit with just a few cheat meals on the weekend. In my experience, if you can consistently eat well 6 or 7 days per week, you’ll start to see much faster progress.
In order to become more consistent, it helps to have some semblance of routine. You don’t need to map out every hour of every day; if you’re like me, this level of planning is suffocating. However, you should have some idea of how you’re going to spend your time and energy. Schedule in the most important obligations including your training sessions. Decide when you’re going to go to the grocery store or place your online grocery delivery order. Make sure you get enough sleep, preferably getting up and going to bed at the same time every day. When you have daily routines, it’s much easier to build in time for exercise, cooking, and stress management.
Lack of Patience
Another big mistake people frequently make is giving up too soon because they aren’t seeing results as fast as they’d like. Everyone wants immediate, dramatic results. I know I’ve been guilty of this myself on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, most fitness goals take a loooooong time to achieve. The sooner you accept that you’re in it for the long haul and learn to embrace the process of change, the more likely you are to see real results.
One thing I’ve learned in my own fitness journey is the power of riding out plateaus. It can be super frustrating to step on the scale day after day and see little to no progress, especially when you think you’re doing everything right. This is when we are most vulnerable to quitting because it seems like our hard work isn’t paying off. However, if you are patient and ride out the plateau, you often make dramatic progress very quickly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve held the same weight for 5 to 7 days and then dropped 3 or 4 lbs seemingly all of a sudden. If your progress seems to have stalled, wait it out and keep doing what you’re doing. You will often see a similar leap forward. If you go a few weeks and still haven’t made any progress, then you should consider changing some part of your approach.
Constantly stopping and restarting leads to slow progress at best. As mentioned in the previous point, if you can try to keep exercising and eating well on the weekends, you’ll be less prone to weekend binges and the accompanying setbacks, guilt, and frustration. Do your best to keep moving forward in some small way. If you’re working with a coach or following a program (which you should be), be patient and work through your entire program before looking for something else to do. Jumping from program to program is a surefire way to waste time in the gym.
Exercising too much
This seems counterintuitive, but hear me out. Some people are simply doing way too much work in and out of the gym. Our bodies need time to recover and adapt to the stresses placed on them during exercise. If you’re constantly training, you can run yourself into the ground and actually end up worse off than when you started. More is not always better; sometimes more is just more.
To avoid reaching a point of diminishing returns with your training, make sure everything you’re doing has a purpose. This is especially true of taxing activities like heavy strength training, high intensity interval training, and long cardio sessions. You don’t need to do these activities every single day to see results. If you’re feeling burnt out, beat up, overwhelmed by how much exercise you think you need to do each week, or frustrated by your lack of progress despite tons of effort, scale back your training. Do the most important things, take some days off of training, and cut everything else out for a while. Give your body time to rest and recover.
As a member of Strength Faction, I’ve seen the value of organizing my training week along the neurometabolic continuum. This is a fancy term that basically means you perform your most neurologically taxing activities at the start of the week and your most metabolically taxing activities at the end of the week. The first half of the week is a great time to lift really heavy weights, perform sprints, and do high intensity interval training. During the latter half of the week, get your pump on, perform higher rep sets, and do some low intensity recovery cardio. Since I started organizing my weeks like this, I’ve felt less burnt out and more capable of really pushing myself at appropriate times. Try this out to help you recover better and get more out of your training.
Not working hard enough
On the flip side of the previous point, many people aren’t seeing results because they aren’t working very hard. I’m not big on “tough love,” but I do think some people could benefit from taking an honest look at how much they’re truly pushing themselves. If you want to disrupt your current equilibrium and achieve a health and fitness goal, you need to test your limits and get out of your comfort zone.
There are many types of discomfort you can expect as you chase different goals. Building muscle requires enduring burning pain to eek out a few more good reps beyond what you thought you could do. Getting strong requires a similar kind of discomfort and focus to crush a new PR with great form. If you want to lose weight, you will certainly have to get comfortable with being a little bit hungry much of the time. The opposite is true if you want to gain weight; you’ll need to eat past the point of fullness to give your body the fuel it needs to build new tissue.
Few people want to experience these feelings for their own sake. But if you’re serious about your goals, you have to learn to embrace them. If you never feel uncomfortable, you likely need to kick your efforts up a notch. An absence of any of these feelings is a clue that you’re probably not doing the things you need to do to make progress.
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