The 11 Most Common Muscle-building Mistakes
Starting out on your muscle-building journey can be a tough endeavor. From questionable training techniques to sketchy recovery protocol, potential progress-stunting errors are lurking around every corner. Get acquainted with them, and you'll avoid taking the scenic route to swole. We’re here to make it easy for you. Here are 11 mistakes you should avoid if you want to build muscle faster and without sacrificing your health.
1. You Don't Follow a Programme
Your time in the gym is precious. Don't waste it on the wrong exercises. Whichever goal you choose, find a training approach that lets you train hard while still maximizing recovery.
During the workout itself, you stretch and work your muscles and break down muscle tissue. Then, when you rest afterwards, a biochemical repair and synthesis process allows the muscles to rebuild themselves, and thus become both larger and stronger. Your body needs this recovery period. The truth is that if you exercised every day, with no rest between workouts, it wouldn’t work as well, and you would actually make less progress than by resting between workouts.
2. You Eat Junk Food Often
Even if you're armed with the world's best programme, it's futile if you fail to eat junk food, Spend at least as much time sorting out your diet as you do planning your workout. Basically you could have fast food on occasions when you really need to add calories but it's not a viable option to get all of your calories from. Everything requires balance.
3. You Don't Drink Enough Water
Any form of exercise increases sweat, which means your body will lose water – up to two litres every hour – and if you aren't proactive about staying hydrated, it can impact your gains. Dehydration reduces the production of anabolic hormones after strength training and stimulates the production of catabolic hormones.
4. You Leave out Compound Moves
Keep away from simple and ineffective isolation movements, focus on training your biggest muscle groups. If you want to build serious muscle, you need to make compound movements that work across more than one joint – such as the Parallel dips, Pull ups, Barbell hip raises, Squats, Dead-lifts, Incline bench press, ...
5. You Overtrain
A lot of people try to copy the routines of professional bodybuilders, doing 15-20 sets for each muscle group. The truth is you can't take a programme used by a heavily drug-assisted and genetically gifted bodybuilder and assume that someone who trains without the same level of pharmaceutical assistance will get the same results. Your physique is affected by 5 things, and they are: Training , Diet, Genetics, Age and Mind. If you want to make a short term goals in fitness, you have to train hard, eat right, and put your mind to it. This is called the mind muscle connection.
6. You Don't Get Enough Sleep
The effects of poor nigt's kip are three-fold. Not only will you feel lethargic – and therefore less likely to put 100 % into your workout – but getting insufficient sleep tanks your levels of testosterone, growth hormone and IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor One), the key hormones for muscle-building, and cranks up cortisol, which breaks down muscle mass.
7. You Don't Squat Deep Enough
This valuable muscle-builder can be rendered near-useless with poor technique. Squatting with a good depth requires a balance and hip, ankle and thoracic spine flexibility and mobility and a lot of people struggle with at least 1 of these. Being able to get below parallel on your squat produces greater muscular activation (quad and glute building) as you drop below 90 degrees; In fact the glute muscles are at their most active in a squat when they are fully stretched so it pays to go deep if you want to to build both size and power.
8. You Lift Too Fast
Many make judgment errors when lifting weights. You should lift not too fast nor too slow, no matter what your goal. Practice your sport if you need to build your speed. If you lift more weight in any style, you will get bigger and stronger. Though lifting fast can build muscle, it harms your safety and results.
9. You Don't Train Your Back
Training your back does a lot more than build muscle. All the muscles on the back side of your body, from your glutes to your lats to your hamstrings and rhomboids, help balance out the muscles on the front side of your body. There are several reasons to make having strong back muscles a priority. Strengthening the back can : improve posture, help prevent back pain and secure stability of the spine.
10. You Skip Leg Day Repeatedly
Leg workouts are often neglected by gym-goers, who focus more on upper body work. A large upper body means nothing if the lower half can’t keep up. All of your workouts should be engaging and you should get something out of each and every one. Training your legs is essential if you want to achieve a balanced fitness routine, with the right approach, you will see huge gains and won’t have to worry about a lopsided physique again.
11. You're Not Eating Enough Protein
Your body needs sufficient protein to build muscle effectively. That's nothing new. But if you've only been upping your intake on training days, it's time to reassess your macros. Your body can't store amino acids for future use, so you need to keep your levels topped up between workouts. According to research published in the Journal of Nutrition, you should aim for a minimum of 1.7g protein per kg body-weight on the days you don't hit the gym (2.2g per kg body-weight was found to be the optimum amount).
The Takeaway
Patience is key in any fitness regime and strength training shouldn't be rushed. Muscle building doesn’t happen overnight, it takes smart, hard work, planning, and dedication. You will want to make sure you’re not making the above muscle building mistakes that can delay your progress, just take your time, train your body properly and you'll see the benefits to your whole athletic performance.
Source :
https://www.lifehack.org/827405/muscle-building
https://www.menshealth.com/uk/building-muscle/a746807/10-muscle-building-mistakes-438524/
https://regymenfitness.com/12-common-muscle-building-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/
