Have your stopped growing? Do you feel overtrained or sore? Has your strength gone down? Are your frustrated with your progress? Well, here are three reasons why that may be so…
Not enough sleep. Let’s be honest we all know that deep down, when you really think about it, what’s holding you back… is that deep inside your shoe, your sock is falling off haha just kidding. Very few of us actually get the required amount of sleep. You rea
lly need 8 hours, this is the time when the majority of your testosterone is produced hence why we wake up in the morning…excited! <Borat voice> Hello wife, we have a busy morning today!There’s so many reasons that we all lack sleep. Kids, work, shift patterns, that episode of Game of Thrones that you can’t risk a spoiler being plastered over the internet.
But truth of the matter is, this is when gains are made, they’re not built in the gym, we fuck shit up in the gym, to build back stronger. But this happens when we’re asleep!
Basically firstly get a routine, and stick to it, use your body clock effectively. and prioritise sleep. We all prioritise our nutrition don’t we, we don’t eat anything we shouldn’t do we? Do you!!??! I think that illustrates the issue here, we don’t make these things our priority. We all go to the gym and train but to really see progress in the gym you need to give equal weighting to your sleep.
You don’t track your macros.By macro-nutrients I am referring to your Carbs Fats & Protein. Point 1 brings me nicely onto point two. You don’t track your calories and your macro nutrients. If you’re trying to get bigger for example and by that I mean build muscle mass. To look like a raging hulk. Where nobody even dares glance in your direction in case you get agitated, rip off your shirt to unveil your beastly muscles, and pummel them to the floor.Here’s me when some twat is walking in front of me at the pace of a sloth.
eed to track it, so we can make amendments as we go along. It’s never going to be perfect and you’ll always have to make amendments. So if in week 1 you gain 0 weight and lost 0 weight you know you’re going to have to increase your calories, but if you’re not tracking them how do you know how to do that and how can you objectively increase them. The answer is that you can’t. Track them and you can.I advise everyone to download My fitness pal. It is literally the easiest thing to track your macros, it’s a ball ache at first but believe me after a few days you’ll soon think nothing of demanding to see the packaging of everything you eat so you can scan it in. You’ll also avoid food that you can’t track. It’s also make you much more aware of which foods are detrimental to your gains in terms of calories. Remember to track calories from liquids too! They can be a substantial amount in these.
Lack of goal setting.One of the keys to building muscle is to continuously put more and more strain on your muscles. The technical term is called progressive overload. It’s a simple concept. Lift more, or do more than you did the week before. You’ve had
a week to recover and grow before hitting the same muscle group again, so in theory should be stronger right? This is the area where making sure your form is perfect is so key. Read my other informative blog ‘Form and why it’s so important’ if you have any questions regarding this. Then set your goals.Set a long term goal – say to lose 30lbs or to add 10lbs of muscle. These are lengthy goals and they can seem very daunting. What we need to do is take our longterm goal and break it down into smaller ones. All added together to give us an end result which we wanted in the first place.
So there is my 3 reasons you’re not getting the gains you deserve, you’re nailing your training, hitting it harder than your peers but you ain’t seeing the gains like your friends are try making adjustments to these and see what benefits it brings.
