Fail to Body Building

Putting on muscle is easy if you have the know-how and combine it with hard work. But even if you have the right training program and work hard, staying on course can be challenging at times.

There's a pitfall at every corner of the gym, waiting for both the complacent and the overzealous. In this piece, I have outlined what I believe are the ten most dangerous pitfalls to making progress on your physique. Ignore them at your own peril.

1. Not Training Hard Enough: You may think you're training hard enough, but are you really pushing it on each set? If you're not pushing yourself to the point where you cannot perform another repetition on each set, you're not training hard enough.

In order to stimulate muscle growth, you have to push each muscle group to the point that it fails, i.e., where you cannot perform any additional unassisted repetitions. It is at this point that your brain receives a signal from the muscles indicating that it needs to stimulate additional muscle growth in preparation for the next bout of exercise.

Your goal throughout your workout should be to progressively fatigue the target muscle group more and more with each succeeding set, until you reach point where that muscle group is totally fatigued. This is called training to failure.

Unlike other failures in life, this is a good failure to have because it signals growth. In between sets, you should rest only long enough to catch your breath, which will give your body the ability to cancel the oxygen deficit that builds up during each set. Once you have caught your breath, it's time to go on.

This leaves very little time for chatting with friends in the gym or indulging in other distractions. It should be your goal to get into the gym, get the job done and get out. Do not mistake training hard with training for a long time.

It's not the amount of time you spend in the gym that counts, it's the quantity and quality of the work you put in. Keep the intensity high and keep the growth coming.

2. Training Too Long: If you're spending more than an hour in the gym, you're training too long. The time trap is a common pitfall, especially amongst beginners, who often think that if 30 minutes of exercise is good, 60 minutes will double their results. That is absolutely not the case.

There is an inverse relationship between intensity and workout duration. In other words, you can train hard for a brief amount of time, or you can train with sub maximal effort for a long amount of time, but you can't both train hard and train long.

Staying in the gym too long leads to poor results. In the best-case scenario, your workouts will be ineffectual, because you never truly reach the point at which your muscles are fatigued. A workout comprised of a series of less than maximal sets will do little to stimulate further progress.

In the worst-case scenario, you end up over-trained. That means you end up doing much more than your body can recover from, and hence, your progress takes a beating. A good rule of thumb is to train intensely, limiting the work out for each muscle group to 20-30 minutes. Get in the gym, get the job done, and get out.

3. Eating Too Much: In the old days we were told to train hard and then eat as much of meat, potatoes, milk, eggs and other high calorie foods as we could, but in retrospect, this only addressed the caloric part of the nutrition equation.

Focusing solely on calories doesn't address other very important nutritional factors like macronutrient ratios at each meal and meal frequency throughout the day. Yes, you need to consume more calories than you're burning off on any given day.

After all, a small surplus of calories is necessary for growth. But additionally, the macronutrient profile of each your meals needs to stay within a specific range; I prefer a diet that is 50% complex carbohydrates 30% protein and 20% fat by calories when I am trying to put on muscular size.

All too often, the "all you can eat mentality" that is adopted by those eager for muscle size destroys well laid plans. Eating too much at one meal overtaxes your digestive system, making it difficult for you to be hungry when it's time to eat again three hours later.

Meal frequency is more important than pigging out. Every serious bodybuilder needs to consume 5 to 6 small meals during the day. If you act like a human waste disposal at each meal, your appetite is going to be destroyed when it comes time to eat again 3 hours later. So eating indiscriminately can hurt your progress. Eating the right things is important.

I start out every day with Lean Body Breakfast MRP, which supplies me with 40 grams of protein, 35 grams of complex carbs, 7 grams of fiber and EFA's. Then throughout the day I will eat a well rounded diet consisting of 5-6 small meals that contain at least 40 grams of protein, plus lots of complex carbs, fruits and vegetables.

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