I am going to list the main reasons why people are not making muscle gains. The best program in the world is useless without these essential elements in check.
1. Variety – Make sure that your workout is not redundant and perfunctory. Your body is an adapting machine, so your job is to keep it guessing, otherwise it will cease growing. Doing the same lift, in the same way, with the same weight will not be productive after about two weeks. Good ways to keep this from happening is to increase the weight every workout, do different exercises first, change up your rep scheme, modify your rest time between sets, and change up your repetitions that you perform for each exercise.
2. Overtraining – Make sure that you are getting enough sleep and are eating enough calories to support muscle growth. If you want to get bigger, you have to eat more than you burn. There is no other way to build muscle other than injected hormones. A good way to prevent overtraining is to take a week off of training every 8 weeks of working out.
3. Not enough compound exercises – Make sure that you are doing more compound lifts than isolations. These are your mass builders. To build muscle the fastest, stick to those exercises.
4. Squat and Deadlift – These exercises are critical to building muscle the fastest. Why? Because they require your body to use 70-80% of its muscles to complete these lifts. They are also the hardest to perform for these reasons. Curls use maybe 5% of your body’s muscles. To adapt to this intense stress, our bodies will release natural Growth Hormone and will also synthesize protein faster. Your body grows as a unit, like a tree, so make sure that you are not neglecting these vital lifts.
5. Stick to Free Weights – Unless you have some injury preventing you from using free weights, utilize them. These exercises build up your stabilizer muscles. You don’t get stronger by getting your bigger muscles stronger; it is by getting your smaller muscles stronger. Build these stabilizers and you will notice a more complete build in the mirror and weight stacks.
6. Your Micronutrients are Out of Whack – Read my article about vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants to discover how important these things are.
7. You train as hard as my grandma – Turn your phone off, leave your cohorts alone, do what you need to do and get out. Get in the zone when you workout, you are only cheating yourself if you decide to lag around.
8. You have no goals – I understand that you want to get bigger, but set a measurable goal. You could say that I want my arms to increase by ½” or even I want to bench 30lb more. There is a strong correlation between strength and size. Get stronger on your big lifts on a constant basis by setting both short and long term goals and you are sure to see results in the mirror.
9. Inconsistency – Stick to your plan. Don’t go for a few weeks, burn out, and then stop going for a while. Stay consistent and don’t give up. I understand that life can sometimes be busy and time is an important resource that you cannot waste. But you have to prioritize. If you cannot commit then maybe you should wait to another time.
10. You have no plan – Go to workout knowing what you are going to do. I always write down what I am going to lift and how many times I will lift it. I record all of my workouts, so if I ever do a similar one that I did a few weeks back, I make sure and do more weight or more reps. Don’t make up a routine when you make it in there. Plan and execute.
Now you are almost ready to hit the gym. However, we need a plan.
Related posts:
- Bodybuilders and Power Lifters
- The Basics of Building Muscle
- Chest Workout 3-9-08
- Links
- Rotator Cuff Exercises
