Boost Your Metabolism and Bounce Past Plateaus

No matter what your health and fitness goals are we all hit plateaus that frustrate us and if we let them, they can play major havoc on our all important mindset. I have found that the more highly trained my body becomes the more in tune I have become on knowing what to look for as I hit one of these dreaded plateaus.

If you goal is burning fat and getting leaner you have certainly worked on cleaning up your diet, you’re already lifting free weights (with primarily compound exercises – hello squats and deadlifts) and adding in the correct level of cardio. Now while you may have made some good progress you will inevitably find yourself flattening out as you hit that flat line area of no progress.

I am constantly adjusting my various cycles (weights, cardio and fuel) and have found that for weight lifting I need to change up my cycles – exercises, body part order, rep range, heavy/ light weights, etc every four weeks. For cardio I like to do a variety of intervals (especially inclines) for short bursts. For cardio no two workouts are ever the same. With my current cardio cycle I am at just under two hours per week spread out over 5 days.

But the area where I have found the biggest single benefit is in bouncing around my calories. Now depending on if you are just working on being in the best shape possible or you are a crazy Type A personality…. (do you notice a theme here) you can either have a rough idea or keep a detailed record of your calories consumed.

A little background – as I have gotten older and can no longer compete athletically like I was once able to (my passion was basketball – playing in multiple leagues and/ or highly competitive pick up games 3 to 4 days per week) I have had to find a way to still compete but now that competition is against myself. So now I lift and run.

My score board is in getting as lean as possible while maintaining a good level of lean muscle. So while I always ate fairly clean it was purely instinctive and then about the time that I started SpicesInc.com I got even more into seeing how far I could take this.

I keep very specific records of what I fuel my body with and I am continuously playing around with my calories. My average for the last six months or so is 3500 – 3800 calories a day (I have worked on having a highly tuned metabolism) then I pick one day a week where I go crazy low (for me), one day crazy high, one day medium high and then the other four days are somewhere around the middle.

Here is my rough calorie count with a comparison to another week from early last year.

Now don’t mistake this post on a big push towards counting calories but more to make you think about manipulating your current calories and shocking your body into boosting your metabolism.

As you can see in my comparisons my daily average this year is actually up more than 300 calories per day and I am certainly leaner than last year. But instead of the spread between my low days and my high days being 1700 or so calories they are now a little more than 2300.

I have found that by doing this calorie cycling through each week has allowed me to eat more while spending less (but much more productive) time in the gym.

I started testing this theory after some research showed that by having high calorie and low calorie days within the same week your body has a harder time adjusting to the starvation mode (from continuous low calorie days) and the high calorie days actually boost your metabolism because the body feels that is has plenty of fuel coming in. I also use the high calorie day for my cheat meal so I receive a double reward in my brain on that day (more food and something you are really craving).

This has been one of the most profound discoveries that I have found that works for me. So while you may be faithfully working out and really watching what you eat you are probably subconsciously eating roughly the same calories each day. Your body will adapt quickly and your metabolism will natural slow and settle into a less efficient grove.

Give this approach a shot – I would bet that it will blow your mind and super charge your metabolism the same way that it did for me.

Tagged as: calorie cycling, metabolism, plateaus