1. Not eating enough food
This one is painfully simple. If you’re a hard gainer, you know what I’m talking about. Surprising though it might sound, eating more food isn’t as easy as people assume. It takes a good amount of planning and structuring to make sure you’re able to fit all the calories in the day, especially if you have a full-time job.
People who haven’t experienced the stress of a committed bulk tend to look at growth phases through rose-tinted glasses.
“I get to eat what I want.”
“I’m going to be able to be more flexible with my diet.”
“There’s no way I’m not going to be able to eat what I need to.”
Yeah, that might be the case in the beginning, especially if you’re lean, and you can “get away” with being more flexible, but pretty quickly that period is done. Being too flexible with bulking is like paying for things on credit, the bill comes due, and that bill involves a lot of effort stripping body fat off for a long time.
You’re going to have to get pretty damn disciplined with making sure you’ve got enough food each day, and some days you’ll be forcing it down you even though you’ve got no appetite to speak of.
Oh, and btw, protein farts? Yeah, they’re legit.
My high (or low depending on how you look at it) points during past bulking phases involved eating 600g meat per day, setting the alarm for 3am to chug a mass gainer shake I’d prepared the night before, and put on my bedside table, and eating 5000 uncomfortable calories for 3 weeks before I had to throw in the towel.
In hindsight, all those things were ridiculous. But it’s to illustrate that just as with achieving the kind of before and after fat loss result you see so often on social media these days, putting on size takes dedication. If you’re not ready to eat, you better drum up an appetite if getting big is a goal.
2. Not tracking your training
I’m almost annoyed at having to write about this because I feel like a broken record. Every PT always harps on the importance of tracking their lifts and it’s a topic that’s been rinsed to death, and yet, people are STILL not tracking their training.
PSA: working out and training are 2 DIFFERENT things.
Training is something you track because it’s purposeful to a specific goal.
You want to buy a house? You do your accounts and check your incomings and outgoings. You see how much you can put aside each month and what you can afford.
You want to build muscle? You track the number of sets, weight lifted, and food you eat to see if it’s enough to build muscle aka buy the house. If you’re not eating enough, or lifting more consistently, you’re not going to build muscle, period.
Let’s leave the genetically gifted freaks where they belong. They don’t need to track. But us regular Joes, we do. We need to track something, anything because for us, new muscle isn’t going to magically be slapped on when we look at a dumbbell. It’s going to take months, years of hard work, and tracking if you want to be more muscular than average.
3. You’re not paying attention to the quality of the movement
To make this even more effort, it’s not just about knowing how much you lift, you also have to pay attention to how you lift it. Muscles respond to tension. You can lift weights without creating much tension if you’re not paying attention to things like tempo and technique.
You don’t have to be a form police, human beings aren’t fragile little ice sculptures that will shatter when dropped, but you do have to pay attention to how you execute exercises in the gym. You want to try and make all your reps look the same - we call this standardisation - as much as that’s possible because that means that what you’re tracking is actually consistent.
There’s no continuity if one set has 2-second reps and a bounce at the bottom, and another set has 4-second reps with a 2-second pause at the bottom.
“Yeah but you gotta confuse the muscle!”
Nah. The only thing you’re confusing is yourself and the sorry fools who are listening to your advice about keeping the muscles guessing every single rep.
Get focused and pay attention to the finer details. As they say, that’s where the devil is.
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