Regular training and lack of progress
In any gym you can see skinny guys who train with great fanaticism. Even a professional bodybuilder could envy their perseverance and hard work. But unlike the pros, these guys don’t have a mountain of muscles.
This is a typical picture for many halls. There are even old-timers with 10 years of experience with very weak muscle development.
Their standard argument for the lack of progress in gaining muscle mass is genetics.
But bodybuilding techniques these days have achieved scientific accuracy and a 200% guarantee of results, regardless of your goals.
The reason for the lack of progress lies elsewhere. Let's figure out what exactly it is.
Mistake 5: Using too much weight on the leg press
This error can look like one of two things. There is the athlete who loads the leg press like a dump truck to squeeze out a few measly partial reps. And there is an athlete who has heard enough of “maximum range - better height” and lowers the weight in the leg press or squats so low that his lower back, and maybe his heels, come off the surface of the machine.
In both cases, we are talking about serious injuries that are just waiting to happen. In addition to the risk of being crushed, both athletes place unnecessary stress on the fragile spinal discs in the lower back. It may not seem dangerous until one day you fail.
Best way: Stop doing leg presses with huge weights. Do at least 15-20 reps per set and stop before your lower back starts to lift off the pad of the machine.
Reasons for lack of muscle growth
The main factors for lack of muscle growth include:
- Insufficient or improper stimulation of muscle growth during training
This could be low-intensity training with light weights, building a program exclusively from exercises on blocks and machines, or performing only isolation movements.
- Wrong balance between stress and recovery
Many amateurs “plow” in the gym - they train often and for a long time. At the same time, there is no minimum adherence to the basics of a sports regime - sleep, nutrition, recovery.
- Diet errors
Not taking your nutrition seriously also slows down your progress.
Food is not a secondary factor in muscle growth. It is as important as training.
The correct total calorie content of the daily diet, the ratio of dietary fat and the intake of sports supplements are taken into account.
- No periodization of loads
Constant progress in increasing mass and strength is possible only by using the principle of periodization, that is, correct load distribution, taking into account the micro and macro cycles of the training process.
Neglect of this rule is the main reason why people of intermediate and advanced levels of training do not achieve results.
- Presence of chronic injuries and diseases
Often observed in older athletes.
Negative life baggage in the form of injuries and chronic diseases does not allow you to exercise to your full potential or use effective exercises to stimulate muscle growth.
- Neglect of sports nutritional supplements or, conversely, excessive belief in their omnipotence
In both the first and second cases, these are two sides of the same coin.
When used correctly, sports nutrition helps accelerate muscle growth. But no nutritional supplements can compensate for mistakes made in training and nutrition.
As you can see, there is no such thing as bad genetics in this list.
Unfavorable genetic data for bodybuilding is not a death sentence or a reason for excuses. It's just slower progress in results.
If a person with average genetics takes 1.5-2 years to build a toned figure, then for less gifted people this process will take another year or two. But the goal of gaining muscle mass will still be achieved.
Next point
It doesn't matter how well you started the set, if you finished it poorly, then you did a terrible set. Learn to complete the approach! How to achieve this in chest exercises? Change your mental attitude. Forget the word press or push and replace it with the word squeeze.
That is:
- Instead of just doing push-ups, think about doing push-ups;
- Instead of doing bench presses, think about doing bench presses.
The main thing is that this helps you understand what should happen during execution, namely, you should not just push the weight away from you, you need to press the dumbbells against each other. Imagine that you are trying to squeeze your biceps together, this is what should happen. And this doesn't just apply to free weight exercises.
We do the same on uneven bars. I don’t just rise up, I push as hard as possible at the top point. That is, during the movement, I seem to be trying to shorten the distance between the biceps, bring them together in order to obtain maximum muscle contraction. This mental attitude will help you get much more mileage out of every rep of every chest exercise.
What you need to do to make muscles grow
Stimulating muscle growth is like putting together a puzzle. The more details you can find and place, the more complete the picture will be.
Same with muscle mass. The more growth factors you take into account and apply, the faster you will build muscle.
Remember:
Strength training is a trigger for muscle biosynthesis.
The essence of training in the gym is to use the right actions to create conditions for growth, which will take place outside the gym, during rest.
Training rules:
- Short, high-intensity strength sessions using more than 70% compound exercises with free weights
- Number of exercises per workout – 6-8
- Working approaches in one exercise – 2-3
- Rep range for upper body: 6-12, legs: 6-20
- Intensity zone of working weights – 70-85% of one repetition maximum
- Duration of training – 60 minutes
- Frequency of weight training – 3-4 times a week
If you are not using anabolic steroids, training more frequently will lead to overtraining and stagnation.
Don't forget that muscles grow during periods of rest.
It turns out that by training too often, you slow down or completely stop your progress with excessive enthusiasm.
Nutrition that is correct in terms of calories and balanced according to BZHU comes first.
During this period, it is necessary to provide the body with plastic and energy materials, such as proteins, carbohydrates and fats, in the required quantity.
In addition to nutrition, it is mandatory to adhere to a sleep schedule of 8-10 hours a day.
During sleep, a number of anabolic hormones (testosterone, growth hormone) are produced, and disruption of the regime reduces their production. At the same time, the production of catabolic hormones (cortisol - a stress hormone) increases, which contribute to the breakdown of muscle tissue.
Often very fun weekends
During the working days, those who want to achieve results train more or less correctly, eat and try to sleep a lot, but then the long-awaited weekend has arrived, on which you need to let off steam, the work is boring, the monotonous life is exhausting and then a drunken stupor begins, which leads to no all efforts.
If you are trying to lose weight, alcohol is not a help; it blocks the breakdown of fats. If you drink in moderation, nothing bad will happen, but if you are in a stable state of “drinking a little too much”, it will keep you firmly in place.
What to do if muscle growth stops
For beginners everything is clear. Here, the lack of muscle growth is elementary mistakes made in training and nutrition. Once the training process and recovery are normalized, stable and predictable muscle growth begins.
But with intermediate and advanced levels everything is a little more complicated. As a rule, they no longer make serious mistakes and their training and nutrition comply with all the rules.
The reason for the lack of muscle growth in trained people most often lies in adaptation mechanisms.
Our body is designed in such a way that it adapts to constantly recurring stress, and regular strength training is one of its types.
Until the body has adapted to the force, muscles and strength grow. But as soon as he gets used to the load (adaptation has occurred), growth stops!
This moment occurs for absolutely every student, and it is called stagnation or plateau.
You will learn in detail how to deal with adaptation and continue to progress in gaining muscle mass from the article “Periodization in bodybuilding.”
Ignoring basic exercises
And this is understandable, after all, these are hard exercises that make you sweat and drag your feet from the gym, why overwork yourself if you can do isolated exercises, it’s easier and more convenient.
Only in reality it’s not like that, it’s the same thing as when you’re preparing to run forward, but you jump on the spot and wonder what I’m doing wrong and why my muscles are growing slowly.
Deadlift will give good growth to all the muscles of the body, I know a person who diligently did shrugs to develop trapezius, but somehow it didn’t work out, but as soon as I started doing deadlift, they began to grow.
The squat is a huge boost to the legs and butt, and the stronger the core muscles, the more they help the additional muscles handle heavier weights, opening the door to the land of big muscles.
pull-ups are much better than lat pull-downs, as they provide a powerful push to broaden your back and are a good way to get into the famous rear view triangle.
What to do if only fat grows
It also happens that weight increases, but solely due to fat. Obviously, this is a complex problem that requires the same solution.
A complete stop in muscle growth during strength training indicates methodological errors (frequency of exercise, lack of basic exercises, etc.), as well as errors in nutrition.
An increase in body fat indicates, first of all, an excess of total daily calories and carbohydrates.
In this case, it is necessary to adjust your workouts towards greater energy consumption in order to stimulate muscle biosynthesis and burn more calories.
And also reduce the total calorie content and the amount of carbohydrates, perhaps slightly increasing the amount of protein.
Results
If there are genetic problems, solving the problem with muscle growth is possible by organizing shortened training. Its general principles are as follows:
- Training is infrequent.
- The duration of classes is minimal and is no more than 40-60 minutes.
- The main emphasis is on basic exercises.
- During the lesson, you work with heavy weights.
- The number of approaches for each exercise is no more than three.
- Pauses between sets have been increased to 3-4 minutes.
At the same time, you should not despair - it is important to identify the problem, build the training process correctly, adjust your diet, eliminate malfunctions in the gastrointestinal tract and do the exercises correctly.
Life hacks for fast muscle growth
We all want quick, or even better, instant results from training.
The Internet is full of recommendations on how to build large biceps, chest and abs in two weeks (maximum a month).
People far from sports naively believe in these life hacks for rapid muscle growth.
But just think logically:
If everything were so quick and simple, then the planet would long ago have been inhabited by men and women with the figures of ancient Greek gods and goddesses.
The truth of life is that it takes a long period of time to gain weight. And here no life hacks will help.
The exception is taking anabolic steroids. But they won’t work a miracle either, since they accelerate muscle growth by 2-3 times, but no more.
You do a bunch of exercises, but they're not squats or deadlifts
Many guys love to read glossy fitness magazines.
There, the authors proceed more from the entertainment aspect than from efficiency. So we get a leg workout consisting of some kind of jumping and a thousand versions of lunges. If all this action is not preceded by a good heavy squat, or the same deadlift, perhaps the legs will not grow. Complex coordination work does not help us gain more stimulation for hypertrophy when performed with light or moderate weights. And this is exactly how it is performed, because there are no other options, otherwise the client will not cope with the coordination aspect of the training.
