The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make When It Comes to Muscle Gains

by John Esposito
thin man doing single bicep curl
Before you go putting in all that hard work at the gym, you should know little bit about how your body goes about repairing and rebuilding your muscle. Just because someone spends a lot of time at the gym doesn’t necessarily mean that their physique is going to reflect that and requires a little bit of knowledge before jumping right in. Here are some of the biggest mistakes that people make during their training which can negatively affect their muscle growth, and potentially stop this growth altogether.

How Can You Reverse Slow or No Muscle Growth?

Wrong Diet

skinny man flexing with muscular shadowNot eating the right diet tops out our list and for good reason. Ask anyone in the fitness industry worth their salt how important nutrition is to muscle gains and they’ll tell you that if you don’t eat right you might as well skip the gym altogether. This is not only true when it comes to gaining fat but is also true when it comes to gaining muscle as well. Just because you’re lifting weights doesn’t necessarily mean your muscles are going to grow if you’re not providing your body with the right fuel to do so. Most people make the mistake here and not eating enough protein, where if you’re looking to put on muscle mass you should be eating about a gram of protein per pound of body weight. This is arguably the most difficult step for people, as modifying the diet involves plenty of willpower.

Avoiding the Difficult Exercises

skinny man exerting effort in lifting dumbbellWe’ve all fallen victim to this at one point or another during our fitness careers. You may avoid doing the deadlift for example because the bar scrapes your legs, or are you may not enjoy a doing bench press because you’ll like focusing on your chest. Whenever the exercise may be most of us are guilty of avoiding at least one or two exercises that we should be doing. The problem with this is that inevitably an area of our body becomes weaker due to this neglect. Instead of avoiding these exercises which we don’t like doing the should be the ones which we are focusing on. If you’re someone who has a huge chest and huge shoulders and lifts a lot of weight doing press exercises, you may want to focus more so on your back to counter a potential imbalance down the line. Not doing so is not only going to lead to an balance and strength but can lead to further asymmetry in the body and posture problems as well. If

Overtraining

Over training is a very common problem that has seen among weightlifters and people who are serious about their overall fitness. The first concept need to get out of your mind when it comes to training is that more is better. Training more doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to progress further as you should be much more concerned about quality of your training than the quantity. What many people don’t know about weight training going in is that recovery time is of the utmost importance. The body can all only cover from exercise so quickly, and if you continue to train before your body has fully recovered from the previous exercise your condition is going to continue to deteriorate. This means that it is possible to see a worse physique as you increase your training frequency as time goes on if you’re not allowing your body to recover properly. If you’re able to train at that frequency, then you really aren’t doing an intense enough exercise.

Undertraining

Conversely, another major problem that people have when it comes to changing their physique is that they’re undertraining. Many of us fall victim to only going to the gym when it’s convenient for us, or when we have someone to go with, or when the weather’s nice. Whenever the reason may be many of us find reasons find excuses to avoid going to the gym, which can lead to undertraining. The main misconception here is that people think just because they put in the time that they’re going to see a results. The fact of the matter is that you if you don’t put in the effort in doing so your body is going to reflect that. Someone who invests just 45 minutes to an hour in their weightlifting training can optimize their results if they do so at the proper intensity. On the other hand someone who spends hours of their day at the gym that exercising at a lower intensity will not get the same positive results.

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