Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast.

If you've been going to the gym consistently, eating your vegetables, and still can't get your body to change—this episode is for you. Hitting a plateau doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. In fact, it usually means you've already built the foundation most people struggle to establish. In this episode, I break down exactly why plateaus happen and what to do about them, drawing on over a decade of personal training experience and my own frustrating journey with stubborn fat, overtraining, and injury in my early 20s.

I walk through the three most common tweaks that get my clients moving again: adding structured strength training, tracking calories, and getting coaching support so you can stay consistent. I also get into the science of realistic timelines—what a sustainable rate of fat loss and muscle growth actually looks like.

If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right and getting nothing for it, this episode will give you a clear picture of what's actually going on in your body—and a practical path forward.

Links:

• Watch on Youtube
• Episode Blog
• Apply to Work With Me!
• Livestreams on Twitch

If you are going to the gym consistently at least two, three times a week and you're hitting a lot of cardio and you're also eating healthy, like making sure you're eating vegetables, you're eating protein and you've been doing all of this and yet your body isn't changing, you are not broken, you are not alone. In fact, you're actually ahead of where most people start with me when they sign up to work with me as their personal fitness coach because you have built a solid foundation and you're actually the ideal type of person that I like to work with because you've already done the groundwork of getting into a routine of focusing on exercising and you're already paying attention to what you're eating. So at this point it really is just a matter of making little tweaks to get you moving in the right direction. But hitting plateaus where you feel like your body isn't changing very much or maybe you're looking at the scale and the number has not changed at all for a while, this is totally normal.

It is a natural part of the lifestyle of the life cycle of getting in shape. Everyone and I do mean everyone hits a plateau from time to time regardless of whether they're beginners, intermediate or advanced exercisers. Plateaus happen for a number of reasons and usually it's not because you're doing anything wrong or there's something wrong with you. Most of the time it's because your body has adapted to whatever exercise and nutrition routine you've been on for a while. A lot of people think, "Oh, I want to get in shape, so I need to go for runs. I need to do a ton of cardio." That's where I was when I was in my early 20s. I thought the key to achieving my dream physique of looking tone was to just go to the gym, take a bunch of group fitness classes every week and spend hours and hours and hours with my heart rate up because I thought that I was burning fat and that did work initially because I was doing more than what my body was used to.

So for the first couple of months, I did see significant changes and then I hit that dreaded plateau. And I was like, "Oh no, maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I need to exercise more." So I started adding in higher intensity exercise and I started going to the gym even more. And before I knew it, I was working out six days a week, sometimes seven days a week with very little rest. And what ended up happening is that I got injured. I ended up with these nagging aches and pains and tendonitis in my calves from all of the running, all of the cardio that I was doing. And I ended up having to spend hundreds of dollars in physical therapy to deal with that. At the same time, I was a group fitness instructor, so I was also teaching classes and looking back now as a personal trainer, having gone through so much more education on what the body needs in order to build muscle and burn fat and what is the appropriate amount of exercise for a body to do every week, I just want to shake my past self and say, "Girl, you are doing way too much.

You need to calm down." I was doing way more than what my body could actually realistically keep up with, which is why I was getting injured and which was also why I wasn't burning fat.

Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner Podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for over 10 years and I've created this podcast to share with you some tips and strategies that you can use to build a body that you love without shame and without burnout. In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing some of the things that I wish I could go back and tell my younger self when I was first starting on my fitness journey and I hit my first plateau because if you are like me, you probably are already doing all the right things. You're going to the gym, you're eating healthy and yet your body is not changing. And before we get into the episode, make sure that you like this video if you're watching on YouTube and subscribe to the channel and hit the bell to get notified whenever I drop new videos.

If you are listening to this podcast, thank you so much. Make sure that you follow the show so you always get notified whenever new episodes drop. Now, if you are looking for an online fitness coach who can help you to break past your plateaus and start making progress, apply to work with me in the link that is below in the description of this video or in the show notes. And without further ado, let's get into the episode.

So on the one hand, your body is going to adapt to whatever level of exercise you get if you don't change anything after a certain point. Now people will hit plateaus anywhere between six weeks to two months of training and doing the same thing. This is especially true if all you're doing is cardio. And by cardio, I mean any kind of exercise that keeps you moving for an extended period of time where you don't rest, you keep your heart rate elevated the whole time. I was doing a lot of cardio, so I was getting my body moving a ton. My body was burning a lot of calories. But after a few months of this level of activity, my body adapted and it no longer was burning the same number of calories that it was burning before. Now part of what happened was that I also wasn't doing resistance training, which is the number one tweak that I usually have to make with new clients when they first start to work with me is we need to add in a structured strength training routine because especially if you have burned a lot of fat, remember that when you're in a calorie deficit, your body is going to break down whatever tissue it can to access the energy there that you're not getting through your food.

And that includes your muscle, especially if you want a really steep calorie deficit. If you're eating a very small amount of calories for an extended period of time, your body's going to break down your muscle and your muscle is one of the main drivers of your metabolism. So as you lose muscle, your metabolism slows down, which means that you are burning fewer calories every day, even when you exercise. But the best way that you can combat this loss of muscle tissue is by doing strength training. So that's the first tweak that I would have my younger self make. I would have her add in a structured strength training program where specifically we're working on building muscle to help boost the metabolism and also to give her that defined and toned look that she's after. So if that's the case with your fitness routine, if you are doing a lot of cardio-based exercise but you're not doing strength training, I would suggest getting into a strength training routine.

Now, if you're attending group fitness classes, it's likely that you are familiar with strength training movements and a lot of group fitness classes will use strength training movements, but one thing you need to keep in mind is that group fitness classes often are designed with cardio in mind. Their goal is to keep you moving consistently for the duration of the class, whereas traditional strength training that yields the best muscle growth is structured completely differently, especially if you are at that intermediate level and you've hit a plateau, you need to do traditional structured strength training where you're doing a consistent routine doing two to three or four different workouts every week, keeping it consistent and using the same exercises. And every time you go to repeat a workout, you try to do more repetitions or use more weight progressively each week as you continue to go on.

And within the structure of a strength training workout, you should be alternating between periods of intense effort where you are doing bicep curls or squats trying to get the muscles burning to the point where they're really close to failing and then you rest. You rest for 30 to 60, maybe even 90 seconds depending on the exercise. Sometimes you might do super sets where you alternate between two different exercises, but there will be rest periods and there aren't always necessarily rest periods within a group fitness class. So if you think about the group fitness classes that you've been to or that you've been going to and you know that you are moving more or less the entire time, even if you're doing squats, even if you're doing pushups, then the most benefit that your body is getting from that class is likely just cardiovascular. You might be burning a lot of calories as well more than what you would in a traditional strength training workout, but in terms of helping your muscles to grow stronger or helping them to build, there's very limited amount of that type of growth that you're going to get within the context of a group fitness class.

So my younger self, I was doing a ton of classes and I was working with dumbbells and I thought I was building strength, but I hit a plateau because I wasn't doing a consistent routine where I was systematically adding more reps or adding more weight to the same exercises over a progressive period of six to 12 weeks. Now this is super important because if you do a ton of cardio and especially when you're in a calorie deficit, your body breaks down muscle in addition to the fat that you burn. So it's really important that you're doing resistance training at least two or three times a week. This tweak alone helped me to really start seeing major differences in my body. Building muscle also helped to address a lot of the nagging aches and pains that I was experiencing because for the level of activity that I was doing with all of the boxing and teaching classes and running, I just didn't have the muscle and the connective tissue strength to be able to support that level of activity.

But once I started doing consistent strength training, I was able to actually do my normal level of activity, which was a lot without getting injured as much or without experiencing so much tendonitis. I just wish that I had started doing consistent resistance training sooner. Maybe I could have avoided those injuries and maybe I could have achieved my physique goals faster. So if you've never followed a structured resistance training program, I would highly recommend getting into some kind of program. When I start working with new clients, that is the first thing that I build for them is their weekly workout routine. You don't necessarily need a whole gym to start building muscle. So you can do body weight exercises like wall sits or pushups and planks, build up your core strength. And then if you have access to weights, start to incorporate resistance training using weights or resistance bands.

Another mistake that I was making when I was younger, and maybe you're making this too, is that I thought I was eating healthy and that that would be enough for me to reach my physicals, but eating healthy is not the same as eating in a way that supports a specific fitness goal. When you have a specific fitnes goal like losing 15 pounds of fat or building founds of muscle, you need to really be dialed in to how much energy and how much protein in particular you are eating every day because that'll give you a sense of what might be going on and causing your plateau. A lot of times when people come to me and they want to work on fat loss and I have them track their calories, one of two things is usually going on. One is that they are not eating enough calories to get their body burning fat.

Yes, when we want to burn fat, usually that means that we want to be in a calorie deficit, but you can be in too low of a calorie deficit or you can be in a calorie deficit for so long to the point where your body slows down its functions so that it's not burning as many calories as it was before. And it's doing this to keep you alive because if you just continue to burn a ton and ton of calories more than what you're eating every day, eventually you burn through your fat stores and you die. So your body is trying to fight that. So if you've been in a steep calorie deficit for a long period of time, your body has likely slowed down and gotten to the point where it's not burning as many calories as it used to. So with these people, I usually will do what's called a reverse diet and I will have them gradually bring up their calories by adding about 50 to 100 calories per day over the course of a week by having them add between 50 and a hundred calories at a time over the course of a week and letting their body get used to increasing calories.

And what this often does is surprisingly people will find that, "Oh my gosh, I'm eating more, but the scale is suddenly going down or my clothes are fitting looser and it's because they've revved up their metabolism." Once you start reintroducing more energy into your diet, your body will respond by revving up all of its systems so that you get back to burning an appropriate amount of calories every day. Now, if your goal is to build muscle and you're not eating enough calories, then yeah, that's likely why you've hit your plateau and you're not seeing more muscle growth. Muscle is calorie expensive. It's expensive. It takes a lot of energy to build. It takes a lot of energy to maintain and it takes a lot of more energy to exercise with big muscle. So if you haven't been giving your body a sufficient amount of calories, then yeah, your muscle growth is going to be slow.

And this is one reason why intermediate to advanced exercisers often cycle between periods where they focus on muscle building and then they focus on fat loss because it's very slow and difficult to do both at the same time when you're not a beginner. Now sometimes what happens though is especially with people who are trying to burn fat and they are doing a ton of cardio, they're working out a bunch, they don't realize that they're actually eating more than they thought because this is what happens. When you start doing workouts and you start exercising, especially if you're doing a lot of cardio, especially if you're doing like high intensity cardio as well, you are going to be hungry. You're going to feel like you need to eat more. Sometimes you might even have intense cravings for sugary or high calorie foods because your body is reading, "Oh, we are burning calories.

We're spending a lot of energy." So subconsciously it's going to be like, "Well, we need to take in more energy." And so sometimes even though your calorie burn is higher and you're really active, you don't realize that you also are eating more. So you may be eating right at your maintenance level where you need to be is actually eating less than what your body is burning to burn fat. So sometimes that happens as well. Now you don't know which is the case if you're not tracking what you eat or if you're not following a meal plan. And so that's why the tweak number two that I would tell my younger self and I would tell you if you were one of my clients is start tracking your calories. Start tracking your calories, figure out how much energy you're taking in every day and then weigh that against a calculation of what your total daily energy expenditure is, how many calories is your body actually burning and you might find that you may be undershooting how many calories your body needs or you may be eating more than what your body needs in order to reach your specific fitness goal.

Now number three, another thing I wish I could tell my past self is to start working with a coach sooner. I put this off and resisted it for such a long time because I'm really a very frugal person and I didn't want to spend the money on a coach. However, by doing it on my own, what I ended up doing was making it so I didn't reach my goals for a really long time, much longer than it would have taken me if I had just worked with a coach. And then especially because I ended up with these nagging injuries and aches and pains, I ended up spending that money anyway on physical therapy and going to the doctor for all of the things that my body ended up having as a result of me overdoing it because I didn't have the guidance of an expert on how much exercise was appropriate for my body and effective for reaching my goals.

Once I did start working with a coach, then I started making progress and I wasn't working out as much as I had been before, but my body was actually moving in the direction that I wanted it to, which was kind of crazy for me to experience at the time. I really struggled with the concept of I have to exercise less and at that point I also needed to eat more, which I would never have steered myself towards if I hadn't been working with a coach. So that was the solution for me and I wouldn't have done that on my own. So if I could, I would go back and tell my past self, go ahead and start working with that coach now because it's going to help prevent you from getting injury. It's actually going to save you money and you're going to reach your goals a lot faster than you will on your own.

And then one more thing that I think is important for us to acknowledge when we're talking about plateaus is sometimes when we feel like we've hit a plateau, it may be that we are making progress, but we have an unrealistic timeline for how long it actually takes to achieve a transformation. Changing your body composition takes time, but one of the reasons why people tend to abandon a plan that's actually working is because they think that it should be working faster and that they should reach their goal a lot sooner than what is actually feasible or practical. And I think that this is due in large part to the way that fitness is marketed and also social media. So when you see transformation programs that are sold in 30 day packages, it can give you this sense that you should be able to reach your fitness goal and have your dream physique within a month and that is really unrealistic for most people.

If you want to burn 20 pounds of fat and you want to do it in a way that's sustainable that you're going to be able to keep for long term, you need to plan for months of working towards that goal. For fat loss, a sustainable and healthy rate to expect is to burn between half a pound to a pound of fat per week. This is the rate of fat loss that's recommended by the Mayo Clinic in alignment with the NHS guidelines and supported by a metaanalysis that was done by the British Journal of Nutrition. When you aim to go at a rate of between a half a pound and a pound of fat loss per week, this is slow enough that you are less likely to break down muscle tissue and especially when you are doing resistance training and you're on a structured training program, you are more likely to be able to combat muscle loss that usually happens when you're in a calorie deficit.

It's also not too steep of a calorie deficit where you're burning fat really, really quickly and in danger of burning out or having all of that weight come back once you stop your calorie deficit. So with this nice slow steady rate of burning a half a pound to a pound of fat per week, then you can expect to lose between 12 and 25 pounds of fat over the course of six months without necessarily losing muscle or slowing down your metabolism. Now muscle building happens a lot slower. For people who are beginners, if you are doing a structured resistance training program and you are eating enough protein and calories and you're getting enough effective rest, you can expect to build between one and two pounds of muscle per month, which is pretty rapid muscle gains, but it gets slower the longer you go on and the more advanced that you get as an exerciser.

Intermediate exercisers and advanced exercisers can expect at most a half a pound of muscle build per month. As you get closer and closer to your genetic potential of being super well trained and what your body is built for, then your muscle gains get even slower. So if your goal is to put on a lot of muscle, just know that it's going to be a long journey. It's going to be months not weeks, certainly not 30 days. So whether your goal is fat loss or muscle gains or maybe you want to do both, just keep in mind that it is a long journey and you get there by being consistent over the long haul, doing really intense bouts where you're doing tons and tons of cardio, doing tons of group fitness classes and then you get burned out or injured and you fall off the wagon and then you're out for weeks or months and then you try again.

This cycle of yo-yo on and off again fitness is not going to help you to move forward and that may be one reason why you're at a plateau. If you're on again, off again with your fitness, that's what your body's going to reflect. But if you get into a routine that you can stay consistent on where you're not in too drastic of a calorie deficit that you lose your metabolism essentially and lose muscle and if you're able to stay consistent on your resistance training and you're watching what you eat, specifically how many calories and how many grams of protein you're eating, then you are much more likely to reach your goals and you're likely to reach them a lot faster than you would if you were to do that hardcore five, six days a week of cardio. Now that's not to say that you shouldn't do cardio or that you need to necessarily reduce the amount of exercise that you're already getting, but you do need to know that after a certain point, more is not more, your body needs time to recover and rest days are important.

As hard as you train, as long as you train in the gym or whether you're working out at home, you need to balance that out with enough effective rest because it's when you're resting that your body actually recovers and builds muscle. Let me know if any of this applies to you and if you have any questions on how to tweak your routine, you can leave your questions or your comments in the comments below this video if you're watching on YouTube. If you're listening to the podcast, you can follow the link that is in the show notes to leave comments on the YouTube video as well. And keep in mind that I am accepting new clients into my online coaching program. So if you would like a little bit more specific and personal guidance on how to tweak your exercise routine or how to tweak your nutrition, let me know.

You can apply to work with me in the link that is below this video or in the show notes if you're listening.

And that's it for today's episode. I hope that you found this helpful. Thank you so much for watching or listening. If you did find it helpful, make sure to leave a like on the video and maybe share it with a friend who might need to hear it as well. If you'd like to interact with me online, I'm @Jaydigains everywhere. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N-S. And if you would like more information on the products and services that I offer, you can go to my website, which is jaydigains.com. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you're taking good care of yourself. Stay hydrated, get up and active, do your resistance training and I will see you soon.