SPRINGER: Fitness: Fight the body's plateau

After you start a program of eating right and exercising regularly, you start to feel great. You are on the right track and you are finally starting to see some changes in how your clothes fit.

Life is good and then you hit the wall. The pounds are no longer coming off and yet you have not strayed from your regimen. If this has ever happened to you then you know how it feels to plateau.

The human body is equipped with a mechanism thar works to keep energy intake and output in balance. In other words, your body does not like to lose weight.

After your initial weight loss, you'll notice your progress slowing down and eventually, it will stop completely even if you are still exercising and maintaining your food intake. This is your body's way of regulating its metabolism by devising ways to establish a balance of calories in and out.

The very efforts you are making to burn more calories might be sabotaging your metabolism. Let's examine reasons why you might have hit an exercise plateau.

• Lowering your calories too much.

It takes calories to burn calories. When you decrease your food intake, your body simply lowers its metabolic rate in response. This allows the body to function but creates hunger and prevents you from losing fat.

The solution is to keep your calories slightly below your maintenance calories to keep the metabolism high. To figure out your calorie needs, multiply your weight in kilograms by 24 for men or for women by 23. This will give you a rough estimate. Remember to get your weight in kilograms, divide your weight in pounds by 2.2.

• Loss of lean body mass.

Muscle helps to burn fat and fuel the metabolism. Lean body mass uses five times the calories as fat mass so, if you lose it, your metabolism drops and your weight loss stops.

The solution to this problem is to make sure your exercise program is combined with a fully nourished body. Strength training will play a vital part in maintaining your current muscle and helping to build more.

• Weight loss.

Although this is most individuals ultimate goal, by losing weight you are naturally lowering your metabolism. The lighter you are, the less calories your body needs to maintain that weight. A loss of any amount of weight will lead to reduced energy requirement.

The solution is to continue to weight train to help increase lean body mass, which can help compensate for the loss of calories. The scale might not indicate near the weight loss but you will be more dense (smaller).

• The "Adaptation" phase ends.

When you start a new exercise program, your body responds because it is required to make numerous changes to different workloads. At this point, you are using calories like crazy for tissue repair. Eventually, your body will stop adapting and will burn fewer calories for the same activities.

The solution: do not let your body get used to one exercise. By changing the intensity, mode and duration of your exercise, you will challenge your body to make new adaptations and therefore keep burning calories. Over-training.

Just like not eating enough can lower the amount of calories you burn so can over-training. When you exercise too much, there is a point of diminishing returns when an increase in exercise energy expenditure is negated by an equal decrease in non-exercise energy expenditure.

In other words, when you increase the intensity, your body responds by decreasing the amount of calories burned during the rest of the day. The solution to this problem is allowing proper time for recovery and rest. Take a break from exercise for a couple days or engage in less intense activities like yoga or stretching.

Kim Springer and her husband, Mike, are Certified Personal Trainers and owners of Springer Training. They can be reached at 233-9442 or at their Web site www.springertraining.com.