5 muscle-building mistakes that keep you from reaching your goals

On social media and at your local gym, share effective motivational quotes that link success to extremes, such as “work hard or go home,” “work until your muscles hurt,” and “without pain you get nothing.” If you’ve seen the poster and you’re weight training, you’re clearly looking at the wrong poster. There are so many cases where users claim that they have been going to the gym for a long time but did not get the results they expected. To avoid the same fate, we are sharing this article on muscle building mistakes!

Common Muscle Building Mistakes to Avoid

1. Prioritize quantity over quality
We live in an age where we believe more is better. If you look around the gym, it may seem that your sets are set back by mindlessly adding reps and stacking an unreasonably large number of plates (mostly leg press machines, if not 1/100 I rarely use a squat rack).th partial rep squat). Most people looking to gain muscle might think that training seven days a week must definitely be better than three. It means that the foundation of quality muscle building relies on what it was nearly 100 years ago. Your central nervous system demands the rest it needs before it’s ready to take on new challenges in your next workout. In the words of bodybuilding legend Lee Haney: “Stimulate rather than exterminate!”

Pro tip: Build quality of movement with lifts before gradually adding volume (sets and reps) before gradually adding weight.

2. Chasing the Pump
If you’re a true meathead, you remember the first time you curled that lonely barbell at the gym. The immediate next thing I did was bend my arms in front of a nearby mirror. It’s okay if you do. The pursuit of metabolic fluid “pumps” or accumulations as a result of muscle mass resistance training has lured millions of people into building muscle. The degree to which the pump helps increase muscle size wears off just as fast as the pump itself a few hours after training. But in order to feel a temporary pump instead of really getting stronger, I do all the exercises in the program with high reps per set (see point 1 above). That would be a big mistake.

Pro tip: Focus more on documented progress in the weight lifted and how much it lifts, rather than arbitrary goals like “feel the pump.”

3. Pain is (the only way to get)
Most people who wear the “Pain is Gain” T-shirt have a very short-sighted vision of their training period. Most of them belong in their late teens to late 20s. Fast forward 10 years and they might soon start laughing at the idea of ​​”bumping the ball against the wall” intensity of their weekly, weekly workout. focuses on recovery rather than endless progress. Really serious lifting takes a toll on your joints and connective tissue. So making every workout a masochistic fiesta can greatly hinder your joints’ ability to outperform them later on.

Pro tip: As long as you don’t get hurt or devastated in training, you’ll be fine. Trying to keep most of your workouts energized for the majority of the year can add years to your training longevity.

4. Taking supplements is like flipping a switch
We all know those who swear by shelves full of powders and pills claiming they turned them into machines. However, replacing natural real foods with meal replacement beverages is a strategy that may fail to deliver true robust and healthy changes to your physique. Fresh nutritional foods are always better than single supplements.

Pro tip: Make select supplements like whey and creatine monohydrate a tool to fill nutritional gaps anytime, anywhere, rather than a staple in your diet.

5. You need to train like a pro
In pursuit of the “big guns,” amateurs may search the Internet for training splits of eight-time Mr. Olympia winners and begin mimicking them in training. Efforts quickly begin to be outweighed by cessation of gains due to injury or inadequate load parameters, and trainees may quickly become severely frustrated before switching to a completely new program. winner.

A lot of people don’t understand that it takes 10+ years of continuous, solid and consistent effort in the big lifts to be called a pro. Is not.

Pro tip: When developing a training strategy or designing a muscle-building program, aim to get fit first, get stronger second, and look better second.