12 Ways You May Be Sabotaging Your Muscle Growth

1. Not performing exercises correctly: In order to get the results you’re looking for you need to learn how to use your muscles properly in the context of working out with weights. It’s not enough to simply go through the motions, you need to be able to effectively “target” the muscles you are intending to work. For example, let’s say you’re doing a bench press to work the chest muscles, you should understand the biomechanics that allow you to fully recruit these muscles and feel the most tension there. This requires practice and, in many cases, professional guidance.

2. Not drinking enough water: Your muscles are about 70% water. You need to provide your body with the raw materials it needs to create new healthy cells. Water plays a key role in metabolism, and serves to keep the muscles properly nourished. It is also essential to the health and proper function of your joints and organs. Not to mention, keeping yourself well hydrated will lead to improved workout performance. Strive for something in the range of 3 litres per day, or just always keep water with you and sip it throughout the day.

3. Drinking alcohol: Sorry to dissapoint you, but if you’re serious about adding muscle, you’ll want to either cut down or cut out the drinking altogether. Alcohol dehydrates you, making you less able to recover from those killer workouts. It is also known to lower testosterone and enable estrogen production, which is the opposite of what you’re looking for if the goal is muscle growth.

4. Doing cardio: While doing cardio definitely has some health benefits, it is “catabolic” in nature, which means it burns muscle tissue. So by adding cardio workouts to your routine, you’ll be limiting your body’s ability to recover and grow from your weight workouts. This extends to playing sports as well. If you’re thinking you wanna burn some fat while adding muscle, then remember your body has limited adaptive energy, so it’s better to decide which is the most pressing goal and focus on that. Besides, if you eat the right way, the amount of fat you gain on your muscle-building program should be minimal.

5. Not systematically varying your training program: Look, you can’t do the same routine indefinitely and expect to keep seeing results. For ongoing change, you must continually ask the body to adapt to a new stimulus. One of the most common problems I see is trainees try a program then eventually, when it stops working, look to try something else. There’s no real plan or structure to it. Rather than deciding these things completely at random, you need to vary the program in a systematic way, such that each new stage represents a greater challenge. Here again, a professional with experience designing comprehensive training plans would be invaluable.

6. Not challenging yourself: If you just do what your body is already comfortable with, what reason does it have to change? You have to get outside your comfort zone if you want to see results. Just “going through the motions” will get you absolutely nowhere! Focus! It’s not only about working hard, it’s about consistently finding new ways to challenge yourself.

7. Not trying to set PR’s each session: If you’re not trying to set a personal best of some kind, every time you step in the gym, you’re wasting your time. You should be attempting to get stronger, either by using more weight or by doing more reps with the same weight, in every single workout. Just make sure that you don’t increase the weight so much that correct exercise form is sacrificed.

8. Not getting enough sleep: What you do in your workouts is the impetus, or the reason for your body to grow, and sleep is the opportunity for this to happen. Recovery and growth happens during periods of rest, and especially during sleep. If you’re not sleeping enough you are compromising your body’s ability to recover and grow from those hard workouts. If you are serious about putting on a decent amount of lean muscle mass, you need to organize yourself to sleep 8-9 hours a day.

9. Not focusing on basic movements first: I see far to many trainees trying to do the typical pro-bodybuilder workout they read about in a magazine, with like five different exercises per muscle group. WAKE UP! These guys are (a) extremely genetically gifted, and (b) so chemically enhanced that they can build muscle if they blow their nose hard enough! The rest of us need of us need to focus on basic, compound movements like squats, rows and presses. While isolation movements such as pec flyes or leg extensions have a role to play in a mass building program, on their own they are not mass-builders.

10. Not eating enough or often enough: I’m sorry, but your body can’t build muscle out of thin air. Assuming your workouts are productive and you’re giving your body a reason to grow, if you don’t provide the raw materials it needs, how do you expect this to happen? You need to take in enough calories to meet your body’s energy requirements AND have a surplus that can go towards recovery and growth. In other words, you need to eat a lot! Also, if you don’t eat often enough, you slow down your metabolism, which means that any excess calories are much more likely to be stored as bodyfat than go towards muscle production.

11. Performing excessively long workouts: There is a limited window of opportunity for a workout to be effective. The typical 1 ½ to 2 hour workouts I see are not conducive to muscle growth. That is because they reduce the body’s anabolic hormones and compromise your ability to recover and grow from your workouts. More is not necessarily better. If you are training with the appropriate intensity, 45 minutes to an hour should be all you need, and will keep your body in a state where it is hormonally willing to produce muscle. Longer workouts are likely to be counter-productive.

12. Not training with the right intensity: You have to create tension in the muscle if you want it to grow. The more tension you can create, and the more you can overload the muscle, the faster it will respond. Just doing straight sets to failure is a good start, but you’ll nee to look at incorporating “intensity techniques” like drop sets, forced reps, and negatives to take that a step further. Bottom line, it’s going to take brutally intense, gut-busting workouts to produce a significant amount of muscle. So unless you wanna be a “girly man”, STOP MAKING EXCUSES, and get out there and crush some weights!

More resources visit www.personaltrainerstoronto.com

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