Good morning and happy Saturday! 🙂
Quick note before we dive in: Ivy and I are starting something new. Live workshops every two weeks, starting Tuesday, October 13. Details at the end :)
Additionally before we get into it today, I want to share something personal.
Every month, I pick one cancer patient on GoFundMe and donate. I have been doing this for years. This month was my 77th donation.
This month, God put it on my heart to give $500 to a woman named Nina. She is a single mom of three girls who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She is spending about $500 every treatment trying to keep her hair, and trying to give her girls a Christmas through all of it.
Honestly, it was a stretch this month. But some things you do not do because they are comfortable. You do them because they are right.
Thank you for being part of this community. It is because of you that I get to do things like this.
If you feel moved to stand with Nina too, here is her fundraiser:
Now let’s get into today’s newsletter:
Whenever someone reaches out to our team because their weight loss or strength gains have stalled, they usually ask the exact same question: “Maxime, why has my body stopped changing?”
Most people assume a plateau means their body is broken or that they need to jump on a drastic crash diet. But in reality, a plateau usually comes down to one simple truth: your body is an absolute adaptation machine.
If you give your body the exact same workout stimulus three times a week for more than four to six weeks, it becomes exceptionally efficient at executing those movements. In endurance sports like triathlons or marathons, efficiency is the ultimate goal. You want your body to run like a hybrid car, burning as little fuel as possible so you don’t bonk before the finish line. But when your goal is body recomposition, building lean muscle, and losing fat, efficiency is actually the enemy. To keep making progress, you must systematically create inefficiency.
To keep your body adapting, building muscle, and burning fat without destroying your joints or leaving you too sore to live your life, you need to introduce progressive overload every four weeks. I always tell our Mavy Wellness members that when you start a brand-new 4-week workout phase, week one you swear at your coach under your breath because the new exercises feel surprisingly challenging. Week two it is still tough, but you swear a little bit less as your nervous system learns the movements. Week three you start getting the hang of the routine, your form feels solid, and your strength increases. And by week four, you feel confident, capable, and totally in control of the workout.
Right on cue for week five, we change the stimulus again! You go right back to week one, making your body just 5% fitter to handle the new demand. You don’t need to completely reinvent your workouts to create progressive overload. Every four weeks, you can simply tweak one single variable: add one extra set to your existing exercises, drop your repetition range slightly (for example, moving from 15 reps down to 10-12 reps) so you can safely lift a heavier weight, shorten your rest periods between sets by 15 seconds, or swap the exercise angle (for example, switching from a flat dumbbell press to an incline press).
On the fat loss side of the equation, people often rush to cut 500 calories out of their diet or add hours of extra cardio the second the scale stops moving. Before you remove food or add more stress to your body, you must run through what I call the compliance checklist. Are you completing 100% of your assigned strength sessions each week? Are you executing all of your scheduled cardiovascular sessions? Are you respecting your target calorie intake 7 days a week, rather than just 4 days a week? Are you hitting your daily protein target consistently? And are you getting your baseline 7,000 to 10,000 steps every single day?
In over six and a half years of coaching, I have found that 90% of the time, a “plateau” isn’t a flaw in the plan. It is simply a temporary drop in compliance across one or two of these basics. There is zero reason to cut your food or force yourself to do extra cardio if you aren’t currently following the foundational plan. Focus on mastering the basics first.
At the end of the day, no one is entitled to be fit, healthy, or lean. We don’t deserve a vibrant body over 50 just because we had good intentions, or because we ate one healthy meal earlier in the week. We only earn the results we are willing to put consistent effort towards. If you are willing to show up on the days you don’t feel like it, make minor adjustments every four weeks, and stay consistent with your whole-food plant-based nutrition, your body will transform. It isn’t about perfection; it is simply about showing up far more often than you make mistakes.
I hope this helps and …
One more thing. Ivy and I are kicking off a brand new live workshop series, and the first one is Tuesday, October 13 at 4pm Pacific: How to Lose Your Next 10 lbs. After 50 with plant based foods.
It’s live and there is no replay. Every two weeks we will cover a new topic, so bring your questions and get them answered in real time.
Save your seat here:
👉 Save your free seat here: https://mavywellness.com/live
There is no replay, so make sure you show up live.
Have a fantastic weekend,
Sincerely,
Maxime Sigouin
Co-Founder of Mavy Wellness
Ps. I just released a new podcast episode on that exact topic, you can listen to it down below 👇
