When you are in the pursuit of adding slabs of muscle to your frame, there’s no worse feeling than seeing no change in weight on the scale or lack of progress in the mirror. What are you to do? You’re still training hard and eating enough food for a small family, surely that’s the winning combo to muscle gain?
Maybe you haven’t built that much muscle yet and you are struggling to get the ball rolling? What do you do then?
To help, I have listed some of the most common muscle building mistakes. Whether you are a beginner or advanced, these points can influence everyone’s ability to build muscle.
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You aren’t eating enough calories
‘’ But I eat loads’’. I have heard it said so many times. Oh really, how many is that then, give me a number? If you say you eat a lot, but you have no data to support that, how can you really know you’re in a surplus? I assume you wouldn’t guess how much money you’re bringing in if you didn’t know your wage? You would want to find out what you are on in order to budget and buy the things you like, wouldn’t you? The importance of eating in a surplus for muscle growth cannot be stressed enough. You can be doing everything else right but if you don’t have your nutrition sorted out, you won’t build any muscle.
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You aren’t getting stronger anymore
Getting as strong as possible isn’t just for strongmen and powerlifters. It plays a pivotal role in building muscle as well. The body is a smart piece of kit, it needs constant new levels of stress placed on it in the weight room to build new muscle. If you keep doing the same 3 sets of 10 at the same weight then you are giving it no reason to grow, it's done that weight before, it doesn’t have to adapt to anything new. Every session you should be looking to get stronger. Use a logbook to ensure you know where you are at.
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You can’t feel your muscle working
When building muscle, you shouldn’t just be thinking about moving weight from point A to B as fast as possible. For hypertrophy, you must place your muscles under enough tension to cause the microtears in them that allows the body to grow and repair. Doing ten reps in three seconds might make you look strong (or like an idiot) but it will do little in terms of growing muscle
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Your recovery sucks
Recovery is a huge piece when it comes to building muscle and there isn’t just one aspect to it either. However, there is one element to it that most people neglect; sleep. Sleep is incredibly important when it comes to growing. You may have heard the saying we grow when we rest. Do you know when the body does its best resting? When we are sleeping! It processes all the nutrients we have given ourselves, regulates our hormones and allows all the stresses placed on the body during the day to be eliminated. All this so you wake up feeling fresh, energised and, if you’re lucky, with some new muscles.
The theory of building muscle is simple. However, there are a few factors that you need to remain on top if in order to maximise the amount of muscle you can build naturally. If you let even one slip, you are limiting your potential for growth.
