Don’t Panic if the Scales Stop Moving

How to Identify and Overcome a Body Composition Plateau

Body composition plateaus are frustrating — no one likes to be putting in work without seeing results. However, plateaus are a good problem because they demonstrate you are making progress from your starting point.

To overcome a plateau, we need to take time to:

• Determine whether it’s a legitimate plateau
• Identify the type of plateau
• Develop a strategy to overcome it.

I’m going to run you through each step so you can use them next time your body composition progress halts.

Has your body composition plateaued?

Once you’ve got through the initial stages of understanding your fitness and nutrition and beginning to make some changes, body composition can move quite quickly.

It’s common to see reductions in body fat of around 1.5–2.5kg per month in the early stages with strong adherence. Eventually, this has to slow down because if you lost at this rate indefinitely, you would disappear.

So when we suspect a body composition plateau, we need to dig a little deeper to confirm whether this is the case.