5 Reasons You’re Not Seeing Results At The Gym

You’ve been hitting up the gym four times a week for ages now, and you’ve been working out like a total demon too. Yet you’re still not seeing any definition or a change on the scales. What gives?

We asked fitness blogger and personal trainer Amanda Moroney from Recalibrated Bodies why you aren’t seeing a difference just yet.

1. You’re using the same weights

“Your muscles need to be stimulated in order to grow and using the same weights each week causes your body to adapt to the stimulus very quickly,” Amanda explains.

So what should you do instead? “Use the progressive overload principle,” she instructs. That means increasing the weights you lift in a controlled manner. “This will ensure that micro-tears occur in the muscle fibres, resulting in an increased metabolism and visible definition to the muscle.”

Metabolic damage is a term becoming more widely common in the gym scene

2. You’re not eating enough

Have you been cutting your calories while upping your exercise? “Metabolic damage is a term becoming more widely common in the gym scene,” explains Amanda. “It’s a cycle of under-eating and over-training in an attempt to drop body fat and weight.” The problem? This will work in the short term, but will effect your metabolism in the long run.

Amanda spells it out: “Your body goes into protective mode, storing fat, as you are essentially fueling your body inadequately. In order to see results at the gym, you need to eat enough to keep your metabolism firing and your body in fat-burning capacity.”

3. You’re eliminating food groups

“Carbs have gotten a bad rep and most people think that in order to get results, you must drop or eliminate them,” says Amanda. “This is going to hinder progress in two ways: firstly, you won’t have the energy to perform optimally at the gym, and secondly you need carbs for recovery; without them the body struggles to synthesis protein properly. A combination of both is ideal for that reason.”

We have a tendency to over-estimate the amount of exercise we actually do and how hard we actually worked.

4. You’re following the same program week in, week out

Got your exercise routine down-pat? You’ll need to switch it up if you want to see changes.” If you follow the same sequence of exercises each session or do the same classes each week, your body will naturally adapt,” Amanda clarifies. “Every four to six weeks change the exercises you complete. This will ensure you are sufficiently stimulating the muscles to develop. Our bodies are almost too efficient at conserving energy so if you do not challenge it by mixing it up, you will see minimal results initially but will plateau very shortly after your newbie gains.”

5. You aren’t working hard enough (Soz.)

Reckon you’re slaying it during your session? “We have a tendency to over-estimate the amount of exercise we actually do and how hard we actually worked,” Amanda warns. “When lifting weights your muscles will begin to burn or during a run you’ll gasp for air; your muscles and lungs send protective signals to your brain to stop, but it’s at this stage you need to learn to push past your point of comfort and keep going; this is where the greatest results are yielded.”

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