5 Mistakes That Don’t Let Muscle Mass Grow

Muscle Mass building requires three main ingredients–discipline, consistency and hard work in the right direction.

If you mess up even any one of these three, no matter how much time and effort you put in, you won’t build muscle mass as best you can. Here are 5 Mistakes that are not letting your muscles grow.

1) Doing Too Many Sets

The idea of ‘the more the better’ is common in the gym wildlife. The harder you work on something, the more successful you will be in it. Sadly though, it doesn’t work that way for building muscle. Muscle growth occurs as a response to the stress provided in the gym (stress adaptation).  If you stress your muscles too much, muscle breakdown will be greater than what the body can recover from. The idea is to touch the maximum recoverable volume (MRV) for an individual but not exceed it. Performing too many sets will only bury your recovery capability being a natural lifter.

2) Training One Muscle Group A Day

Training one muscle group a day is called the bro split. It’s very common, especially in India. Every time you lift weights, you trigger a reaction called protein synthesis. This is what causes your muscle tissues to bind to amino acids and grow bigger in size. Now, protein synthesis is not revved up forever. In fact, the increase in protein synthesis begins to fall back after 36 hours. Training a single muscle group just once a week is not optimal and you are compromising on the gains you can make. This applies the bets to natural lifter again. Hence, for natural lifters, it is a great idea to train every body part 2-3 times a week.

Recommended Workout Splits

1) Upper body, lower body splits

2) Push, Pull, legs split

3) Full body workout splits

3) Blindly Following Elite Bodybuilders

What’s the best way to get big legs or arms like an IFBB Pro? Copy their workouts from their latest article in a bodybuilding magazine, right? Wrong! Elite athletes have years of training under their belt and a lot of anabolic steroids in their system, due to which, they can withstand high training volumes. Most beginners-intermediate lifters cannot. On top of it, they have a near perfect nutrition plan and supplements which further boosts their recovery. If you want to learn something from the pros, study their principles, not their workouts. Else, it’s a recipe for overtraining!

4) Not Tracking Your Loads & Overloading

The most fundamental principle in strength training is of Progressive Overload. No matter what form of training you perform- CrossFit, powerlifting or bodybuilding, lifting weights is simply a stimulus to your body and the increment in strength & size is in response to this stimulus. If you are lifting the same weights over & over again (like the majority of people) your body gets accustomed to the stimulus and has no reason to grow. And the first step to progressively overload is to know where your current strength levels which require you tracking your loads. So, that you don’t lift weights randomly.

5) Not Focusing On Quality Sleep

This is something I have been guilty of myself. All the hard work in the gym and kitchen goes down the drain if you aren’t sleeping well.  Sleep is the period when your body does all the magic. It adapts to the stress you gave it and builds muscle. In a study on individuals going through a fat loss phase, it was found that people who were sleeping 8-9 hours lost more fat and retained more muscle mass. Sleep is vital. Don’t neglect it. Aim to get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep. Well, Arnold Trained 4 hours a day, managed a supplement and construction business, took college lectures and acting classes yet took his 7 hours sleep. Spend less time on Facebook & Instagram and sleep a little more!

Not taking proper protein supplements is also one of the causes that do not allow muscle mass to grow properly. To grow muscle mass switch to an Ayurvedic Muscle building Supplement Body Buildo.

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