If you’re ever began a new fitness program, you’ve probably found great results (and the associated soreness ;)) in the first few weeks. The amount of weight you can lift jumps up and up. The time it takes you to run 400m drops by large margins. But after a few months, you seem to stall out. It can feel like you’re hitting a glass ceiling. Where you used to gain 30 pounds per week on your deadlift, you now strain to add 5. What’s going on??
To avoid these frustrating plateaus, it is essential that your fitness regimen be varied. As Arnold Schwarzenegger explains in Pumping Iron, “you have to keep zee muscles guessing!” If you repeat the same program week after week, your body will adapt to the stress, and what challenged you last week won’t stress your body this week. This is good in one sense, because it means that you’re making progress. But it’s bad if you don’t vary your program at this point. You’ll find yourself stalling out, leading you to frustration and tempting you to drop your fitness program altogether.
In order to provide you with the best long-term results, our ThriveFit program includes dynamic and varied programming. We use a plethora of different functional movements, training your whole body as an integrated system. This keeps your body perpetually “on its toes” so that your muscles are always adapting to new stresses–thereby avoiding plateaus and promoting a high rate of improvement.
As you progress through each workout posted in the ThriveFit section of the site, feel free to be creative with the exercises involved and rep and set schemes. And don’t forget to post those scores to build the ThriveFit community–as we compete with each other, everyone is motivated to push their limits and we all win!