subject: Are You Making These Two Crucial Mistakes In Your Muscle Building Program? [print this page] Are You Making These Two Crucial Mistakes In Your Muscle Building Program?
The vast majority of recreational bodybuilders make next to no progress year on year.
In this article I'm going to explain two major faults in program design that cause this lack of progress. If you have these faults in your own bodybuilding program, I can almost guarantee that you will never make any meaningful progress in your muscle building, regardless of whether you train at home or in a commercial gym.
The first fault is training too often.
The second fault is not training hard enough.
At first glance the two statements seem to contradict each other, so let's clarify this;
If you train more than three times a week, then you are almost certainly training too often to make decent progress.
And if you are capable of training more than three times a week then I can almost guarantee that you're not training hard enough to progress.
Golden rule number one of bodybuilding is that you need to train hard enough to cause the growth stimulus to occur in the muscles, and golden rule number two is that muscles don't grow in the gym, they grow at rest.
So looked at from this perspective, muscle building is a simple matter of working hard enough to force the muscles to grow, and then eating and resting long enough for the growth to be able to take place.
Three truly hard workouts a week if you're not drug assisted (and I hope you're not) is too much work for most of us. (Part of the problem lies in the fact that one person's idea of hard work can be radically different from another's.)
I'd suggest for most of us, two really hard workouts a week is about right. When I referred earlier to recreational bodybuilders, I meant amateurs, and professional bodybuilders have a number of key advantages over us amateurs that need to be taken into account;
First, most of the top pro's are in the elite genetic top 1% which makes them more responsive to training, and also allows them to train more often without slipping into overtraining, at which point all progress would stop.
Next, a lot of them are drug assisted. (I'm not recommending drugs here.) Again, this allows them to train harder and more often and still progress.
Third, pro bodybuilders don't have the stresses of a 9-5 job, which eats away at their recovery.
The mainstream bodybuilding press interview these pro bodybuilders (and I suspect sometimes just ghost write articles about them) and then publish the routine that the pro used, without taking into account the advantages listed above.
Us amateurs then follow the "advice" given by that pro bodybuilder, and wonder why we don't progress! it's because a champions routine is totally unsuitable for an amateur bodybuilder.
So if you are one of these amateurs not progressing, what should you do?
First, cut training days to three at most, two is even better.
Next, cut all unnecessary exercises out of your routines, and concentrate on major compound exercises that exercise all the large muscle groups.
Then, learn how to do those compound exercises the right way, and train them really hard.
If you do this then in a few months you could see an entirely new body when you look in your mirror.
