subject: Three Reasons Why Most Amateur Bodybuilders Are Making Zero Progress [print this page] Its a crying shame that so many amateur or recreational bodybuilders are treading water in the gym year after year - and these are the ones left, because the others who were treading water gave up after months or even worse years of frustration.
Dont let yourself become one of these people - weight training is a great sport, with all manner of health benefits attached to it - and it is possible to make great progress in the gym if you know a few basics.
Here are some common pitfalls to look out for;
1/ Unrealistic Expectations
I think the bodybuilding press and the companies that sell bodybuilding supplements are mostly to blame for this. Youre shown a photo of a competition bodybuilder and told that this could be you in a year.
Please dont fall for this nonsense - youre just setting yourself up for disappointment. The vast majority of us, and by that I mean 95% plus, have no chance of becoming competition standard bodybuilders (and come to that, who wants to be competition standard anyway?)
Having said all that, if you plan a sensible routine, and stick to it, you can build a body that is way, way ahead of most folks of your age and sex - and probably way ahead of most folks ten or more years younger than you as well.
2/ Poor Exercise Selection
Again, the bodybuilding press is at least partly to blame here. By poor exercise selection I mean that so many folks are concentrating on small isolation exercises like the bicep curl, the pec deck fly, the lateral raise, the leg extension.
These are all shaping and toning movements - they dont build real muscle mass. The fastest way to shape a muscle is to build a muscle.
That means you need to be sticking to squats, dead lifts, leg presses, dips, shrugs and so on.
If you do these movements consistently, building the weight up as you go, you can build some serious muscle - and this is part of the problem. Commercial gyms know that if people are training hard on big exercises, they will need more instruction, because there is more potential for getting injured, as more weight is being used.
A lot of gym instructors dont know how to properly teach these movements, and / or they dont have the time or inclination to teach them - therefore they teach the small exercises which dont need much supervising.
3/ Working Out Too Often
Again, gyms and the bodybuilding press are at fault. If you train in a commercial gym, it may be that you have to pay each time you go - could that be the reason why youre told that you should train four or more times a week?
Theres a connection to my second point here - if youre being told that you need to train on isolation exercises, then it may well take you four or more workouts a week to train all the major muscle groups.
But if you focus on major compound exercises, you will only need two workouts a week. Not only that, but Id suggest that if youre training hard in those two workouts, then you wont want to train more than twice a week anyway - and you most likely wont be able to either!
