You've hit you're goal, now what?

When you start on a fitness plan, you make specific goals for yourself. Your plan is based around those goals and you base your workouts and diet on those specific goals. Once you reach them, you need to decide if you want to make new goals or just focus on maintaining what you have accomplished.

So what do you do when you’re completely satisfied with your results and no longer wish to make any additional progress beyond where you’re currently at? And your new goal is to just maintain this state from that point on? You’re going to have to keep doing some version of whatever you did to get the results you got to maintain them… with a few minor adjustments.

Adjusting For Long-Term Maintenance

Let’s break this up into three parts:

1 Diet

2 Weight Training

3 Cardio

Diet:

There’s really only one adjustment that needs to be made. And that is to your calorie intake. It needs to be set to maintenance.

Meaning, no more surplus because you have no interest in building additional muscle (or gaining additional weight), and no more deficit because you have no interest in getting any leaner (or losing additional weight). To ensure neither of these things happen, all it takes is setting your calorie intake to maintenance and eating that amount from this point on.

Remember you still need to eat the way you've currently eating. You will just be eating at maintenance calories. Healthy foods should always be a staple. You should also pay attention to when you're eating what. Keeping your carbs around your workouts and making sure you're getting enough protein and fat in your diet. You don't want to let your diet go and lose all your hard work.

Weight Training:

In terms of weight training adjustments, the biggest change is simply that instead of continuing to push yourself for progression and getting stronger on every exercise as often as possible, your new goal is to just maintain your current levels of strength on every exercise.

Specifically, the frequency of your workouts can be reduced if needed or preferred. This is because the amount of volume/frequency required for maintenance is less than the amount of volume/frequency that is ideal for progression. If you're wanting to maintain, you will still need to lift at your current level. Dropping down the weight you lift might cause you to lose muscle mass.

Cardio:

Looking at cardio strictly from the perspective of fat loss/preventing fat gain, you will need to do enough to put you at your maintenance level. Simple as that. Slowly cut back on the cardio and see how your body responds. You will soon find your maintenance level.

You should always challenge yourself physically in new ways (endurance, strength, performance, etc.) There are so many new fitness goals you can make.

Consistently making new goals is a way to stay motived and on track. Your focus may had been on weight loss and now that your weight is where you wanted it to be, focusing on endurance or strength will allow you to keep moving forward and help you maintain. It’s all up to you on how you want to move forward. The important thing is to not fall back into old habits and lose all the progress you have worked so hard for.