THE TOP 5 MUSCLE BUILDING MISTAKES

The following are what I feel are the most commonly repeated mistakes when it comes to adding mass. From forgetting how to turn on the treadmill, to being afraid of adding a bit of fat during a time when you have to overeat. We will cover all of these here.

1) Stop “bulking” and start improving

That word has to leave your mind now! Simply put, it identifies the situation the wrong way and can influence your approach be it consciously or subconsciously. The famous term “bulk” screams the old cliché “get huge or die trying” and encourages a mindset of making the scale move at all costs. 

A recipe for disaster, especially in the minds of most young men looking to gain muscle. The truth is that after the first year or two of optimal training and nutrition (mind you most folks take a few years to get these down) most of the muscle that you build that affects the scale will have been built.

 After the beginning things really slow down, and while you can still create some huge strides in your development they won’t change the scale nearly as much as you think. You do want some weight gain, but that is only to ensure that you are eating enough to gain new muscle, not to be confused with the notion that you are actually gaining that much dry muscle. The amount of muscle you will be gaining after the “honeymoon” phase ends is hardly even worth weighing or trying to quantify.

 Instead it will be something that will be more visually obvious for the most part.

Let’s not bulk, let’s improve instead and aim for a slow, steady weight gain rather than a 20 pound gain in three months and a pair of “fatceps.” A general rule of thumb is that for as hard as you work in the gym, and outside the gym with your nutrition, you should therefore be able and comfortable playing on the “skins' ' team in a game of football.

Aim for a 1-3 pound a month rate and where to fall within those ranges has plenty to do with your starting frame and bodyweight. For example a guy that is 6’2”180 lbs lean, should be gaining closer to 3 lbs a month compared to a guy that is 5’7” 160lbs at the start of a gaining phase. Another thing is how advanced you are in terms of development, as someone who is in their second year of training should be gaining a bit quicker compared to a guy who has been at it for over five years.

2) Being too flexible

Some guys will go from making sure their scale reads 40 grams of oats and not 41 grams of oats, to making sure they are “just getting enough protein” when they finish with a cut. 

With all my clients I use their offseason to play around with ratios, and caloric amounts etc. It’s a great time to gather data that will make us that much more efficient at making improvements (notice I didn’t say bulk) in our physiques, and once again this data will be of great use when it comes time to lose some fat. 

It’s a great time to see what works best for you in terms of training, as maybe you come to realise you progress better when you only train three times per week compared to four. The same can be said about nutrition, as perhaps you do better with your fats closer to 15% of total caloric intake instead of 30% etc.

I do preach balance and straying a bit off from the precision and attention to detail that a fat loss phase requires, but one should still strive to maintain some sort of order. There is a difference between tracking your intake in say 30 of your 36 weekly meals, to “just making sure you get enough protein.” It’s much easier to be flexible during these phases, but there is a middle ground here that really goes unvisited. 

Surely there are a few who perhaps are too anal retentive about accounting for every nook and cranny that they consume during this time, but they are few and far between. Much more common are the guys that once dieting is over, go from meticulous to overly passive.

3) Dude where is my cardio?

While you will surely not be doing as much cardio as you were while striving to lose fat, it still is an important tool when it comes to muscle gaining phases. Its purpose will no longer be to help push fat loss along, but for health and efficiency. A solid weight training program combined with moderate doses of cardiovascular exercise will go a long way in keeping us healthy. Not much is needed since weight training indeed does more for our cardiovascular fitness than most assume. 

So you don’t need much and if anything it can be brief and intense when you are up for it. I actually recommend about one higher intensity, shorter duration session for most clients as a part of their schedule. Something like trying to get a new one mile run record, basketball games, barbell complexes etc. I like to make these fun, something to look forward to and avoid playing hamster if possible. Aside from health benefits, cardio can help aid recovery as a healthier circulatory system will be more efficient at getting nutrients to all the right places. Personally, my lower body days (even more so in my offseason) can really tear me up.

The next day I am not very motivated to train at all, a 15 pound dumbbell feels like 50 pounds, and I pretty much feel like I was hit by a big rig. Getting some slow to moderate paced cardio really helps me shake this feeling, so I like to get my less intense cardio on the days following some really intense lifting sessions. Simply walking on a treadmill on an incline for 25-35 minutes does wonders for speeding up nutrient delivery, and helping you recover for your next big workout.

4) Patience

This point really ties in to my first point, because how much muscle we can gain if we eat and train optimally is pretty much set in stone. Considering this, gaining 25 pounds over the holidays in an effort to bulk up is not going to do you any better than gaining 7 pounds over that same time frame. 

On the contrary it will just give you more to diet off, so you will likely keep less when it comes time to drop fat. Great physiques are not built over a summer, or even a year in most cases. Most anyone you will ever see with an admirable amount of development has a story that dates back years, and in some cases even decades. If you enjoy this ongoing push, putting your head down and enjoying the process will be easy and time flies. Slowly, but surely the tortoise makes it to the finish line first in most cases. 

While this kind of relates back to the first point I made, this also touches upon weight room progress. From personal experience dating back to my younger years, every time I have tried to rush progress in the weight room and add weight to the bar too quickly, I’ve either ended up hurt, having to go back and correct form, or I simply wasted time. 

Same goes with trying to add muscle overnight, it usually ended up with me getting fat and looking less impressive than the sleeker version of myself I was trying to improve on. While I am sure you have a great idea of what you want your physique to look like when it is all said and done, it’s equally if not more important to have smaller goals along the way. This will help you stay motivated and gain confidence.

5) Gain some fat

With most guys the main issue is they want to go from a wiry 145lbs to a 200 plus pound Johnny Bravo by year’s end. Then we have the other demographic which nowadays is almost just as prevalent as the “bulkers”. 

This demographic is of course those guys that are “addicted to being lean” for the lack of a better way of putting it. For this group, seeing a bicep vein start to become less prominent causes a panic attack, carbohydrates are cut, and maybe a 7th weekly cardio session is added to the mix. Building muscle is a metabolically expensive process, translation: your body will not invest in the process unless some kind of caloric surplus is looming. So you will need to eat more than your body requires and you will surely have to put on some body fat in the process. 

Ideally, this is only as much as we need to grow, and yes this will differ from person to person. Some guys can seemingly gain muscle with only having to give up the vascularity on their abs, while others will have to go from a six pack to just the outline of an ab-cage when they flex really hard. Again this will vary, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot by trying to stay leaner than your body wants to during these phases. 

You want to be in a state where your body is hormonally and metabolically running on all cylinders. This is where the best growth occurs and remember, compared to muscle gain, fat loss is a relatively quick process. Gaining 1-2 pounds of muscle for an advanced level physique might be a one year process or even longer, but losing 5-6 pounds of fat can be done in a few weeks.

Summing it up

In a nutshell, plan for the long term, and all those good decisions will accumulate over the long run. “Fast food solutions” are never really solutions.