Are you guys going through intermittent fasting?

What if I told you there was a diet that gets better fat loss with less muscle loss, improved cardiovascular health, and better glucose control, all with less hunger, and without much risk of disordered eating or body image concerns? Well, to many people, that's exactly what so-called intermittent fasting represents. I call it so-called because in the scientific literature, you don't really see it go by that name. Instead, you have alternate day fasting, where you eat one day and fast the next day, and time-restricted feeding, where you fast for 16 to 20 hours with a 4 to 8 hour eating window.

In practice, many adherents follow the lean gains protocol, popularized by Martin Burkhand, where you fast for 16 hours with an 8 hour eating window centered around weight training. As it turns out, fasting has many benefits, but they've mainly been seen in rats, where intermittent fasting causes better weight loss, improved cardiovascular health, neuroprotective effects, decreased cancer risk, and increased lifespan, and many of these effects are independent of caloric restriction alone. It's not fully understood why fasting has these positive health effects, but one theory is that periodic food deprivation serves as a sort of preconditioning stress, one that allows for resistance to bigger stresses in the future.

It's kind of like exposing yourself to stressful germs can enhance immunity and protect against future stresses down the road. Human studies have fared pretty well too. Two studies showed weight loss, reduced blood pressure, and lowered cholesterol in obese subjects following an alternate day fasting diet for 8 to 10 weeks.

However, two similar studies on lean individuals showed weight maintenance, indicating that alternate day fasting may be a better weight loss strategy for obese folks. And as relatively short duration trials, it's difficult to say how this approach would fare over the long term. Many expressed skepticism over rampant hunger with this approach, but one study in obese patients following a 14 day fast found very impressive weight loss without an increase in hunger.

And this is a recurring theme across this body of research. Fasting can have an appetite blunting effect, and we tend to get hungry when we're used to eating. So while there may be an adjustment period when first switching to intermittent fasting, where you're more hungry than usual, maintaining a regular eating pattern will help control hunger with any diet, regardless of eating frequency.

The biggest systematic review to date, looking at 40 studies, found that while intermittent fasting was better at suppressing hunger than just continuous caloric restriction, this wasn't able to translate into significantly improved body composition or weight loss. The authors conclude that intermittent fasting represents a valid, albeit apparently not superior option to continuous energy restriction for weight loss. As a bodybuilder, one worry is that all this fasting would cause muscle to fall off.

Don't you need to eat every two hours to keep the muscle anabolic? Actually, a 2006 paper showed that even 40 hours of fasting didn't significantly alter negative regulators of muscle mass and didn't cause any significant muscle atrophy. Furthermore, even a 24-hour fast only decreases liver glycogen by less than half, meaning muscle glycogen is completely spared. And the ketone bodies that you typically see in association with alternate day fasting also spare skeletal muscle from breakdown.

Don't you need to eat like six meals a day in order to speed up your metabolism? And won't fasting slow your metabolism down? This myth is based on the correct idea that the thermic effect of food increases following a meal. However, current science indicates that this increase is proportional to the caloric content of the meal, not meal frequency per se. And changes in metabolic rate come from changes in daily caloric intake, not from changes in meal timing.

One good argument against intermittent fasting comes from a 2013 study which showed that anabolic signaling was greater when consuming four 20-gram doses of whey protein compared to two doses of 40 grams or eight doses of 10 grams, implying that from a muscle protein synthetic perspective, protein spaced more evenly throughout the day across roughly four meals may be better for optimizing anabolism. Another consideration is whether intermittent fasting is psychologically healthy. Despite the fact that research from Hadi and colleagues showed that intermittent fasting reduced depression and binge eating, the Canadian Pediatric Society classifies fasting and skipping meals as unhealthy strategies for adolescents.

So for kids and teenagers, this may not be the most suitable approach. To conclude, intermittent fasting has certainly shown itself to be an impressive and effective dieting methodology. In my opinion, it hasn't shown much merit over more standard diets that impose a caloric deficit with sufficient protein intake.

But for those who find it to fit their preferences better and lifestyle better, fasting just may be the way to go. And ultimately, I think the best diet is the one to which you can best adhere.

Instinctual Training

Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the value of instinctual training. Now in this world right now, let's talk a little holistically, we got a lot of insanity going on, a lot of insanity in the world. And this insanity really is when people worship an idea rather than something that actually works.

So they're involved in some sort of fantasy land in their head instead of what's actually going on here in this moment. And this is the value of instinctual training. So you can have a program, you can have a template, and I'm assuming that you have discipline.

I'm assuming that you already have discipline not just give up working out just because you're lazy, right? You're not just basically saying, I'm not going to go to the gym today just because I'm a little bit tired or I feel a little fatigued, you know, basically, you know, all the tricks that sometimes you tell yourself to make sure you don't have to do leg day, right? Now the thing is, the value of instinctual training is that even though you may have a template such as a workout program, and I think this is great, it's good to have an overall recipe or plan or a map in what you're doing. But at the same time, you're also paying attention first and foremost to what's going on in your body in that day. So say you have a plan to go do bench presses, but your shoulder's just killing you, or maybe you're extremely sore, and then maybe it's better to do inclines instead of bench.

Or maybe you want to do another exercise altogether, or maybe you want to concentrate more on your rear delts or your shoulder training instead of your chest training that day. That's okay. Because really, reality, reality has to be the most important foundation on which your entire life sits, not just your training.

Reality should take the forefront of your attention. So whatever's happening in your body, that is the most important thing to pay attention to. And then you may have some input with your training program here and there.

So if you go to squat, but you notice your lower back is just feeling absolutely horrible that day. And you know that if you squat today you might tweak or herniate a disc. Well, guess what? Maybe it's a better day to do some lunges.

Maybe it's a better day to do some leg presses, or maybe it's a better day to avoid legs altogether and do some light arm training or something. So this is okay. Because the thing is, is that your body's saying, here's where I've been stimulated and I've been stimulated enough.

And here's where maybe I need some more stimulation in order to recover. Now, of course, again, if you feel tweaky all over, maybe you decide to take a day off. I'm basking in the sunshine.

But you're making a decision to not train based on the reality, based on what your body's showing you instead of something that you're overlaying or projecting on top of the situation, right? You might be lazy today because you don't want to go to the gym. Then tomorrow you're lazy again. And the next day you're lazy again.

Well, guess what? If you're lazy in every single circumstance, it's you projecting that experience. It's not necessarily the experience that the environment and reality is showing you in this moment, right? So I know you guys most likely know the difference, but in case you don't, that's, that's maybe a way to discern this, right? The thing is with instinctual training, it's great because you can basically make decisions in your training, which are going to assist you with going further in your training instead of just like a bird in a window, always flying right into that window over and over again and not getting anywhere. So don't be afraid to deviate from your plan from time to time.

It may reveal new possibilities or new discoveries to you in your training and may help you make more gains than before. Because so often, like I learned in my training too, you can only be as good as your weakest link. So sometimes say if your rear delts are too weak or your rotator cuff muscles are too weak, perhaps your bench press just can't go up because you have another weak link that needs to be addressed first and foremost.

Sometimes, unfortunately, sometimes the weak link is actually structural and you need surgery in order to take care of that weak link, such as my case where I'm bench pressing kind of sideways just because the way my shoulders sit from the hockey injuries that I got, right? So the thing is sometimes the weak link is structural and there's really nothing you can do about it if you're not willing to get surgery and you have to work around that. So somebody else's template might not be right for you either, right? So somebody might say, hey, this is what you do in your circumstance, but they might not know much about your individual circumstance when it comes down to injury history or a certain type of affliction that your body may have. This is where instinctual training comes in really handy because you may have an individual circumstance that is not necessarily so common.

So a lot of the information out there has to do with all these other circumstances, but not yours. So now you have to use your instincts to find out what is the proper path for you. I'm showing you the path.

It's you who must walk through it. So in the end, you have to find your own path. You start with a template, but you may have individual sort of situations pop up where you have to start your own path or find your own path, find your own recipe to make the most amount of gains and keep your health as intact as possible.

Obviously living up to the expectations of other people can be a very slippery slope. So you don't want to drive yourself into an area which is just causing you damage and not necessarily helping you in the long run with your health and with your fitness level. So yeah, instinctual training might be the thing for you.

Try it out. If you feel like a little bit too sore or too tight in some area, or you feel like, hey, something else just feels flaccid, there's not as much of a pump in that area, or maybe it needs a little bit of work. Try something new, try a new exercise, try a new angle, maybe work on a little bit more, maybe work on something a little bit less.

Mountain. Sometimes by addressing these weak links, you can make more (gains overall, and that's really what you're after. So I hope this helps you out with your training.

Aggressive Mini-cuts protocol in exercise and dieting!

Typical approach to dieting is to take it slow to lose fat at a sustainable pace.

Mini-cuts are quite the opposite of this, and there's two things in particular that make it different. The first thing is speed, which refers to the short period of time you'll be dieting for, typically no more than about four to six weeks. The second thing is aggression.

You might be a little bit more grumpy than usual through it, but aggression in this case relates to how big of a calorie deficit you'll be on and how much weight you'll aim to lose every week. Typically, you'd want to aim for a rate of fat loss of about 0.5 to a maximum of 1% of your body weight per week. With mini-cuts, you aim to lose around 1 to even 1.25% of your body weight per week.

So for most people, this is somewhere between 1.5 to 3 pounds per week. The idea with this fast yet aggressive diet is that you're able to quickly lose fat without the muscle loss and fatigue that would occur if you had extended it any longer. They're most effectively used during a bulk to quickly reduce your body fat percentage before returning back to a bulk or as a way to quickly lean down before an event like a wedding or vacation.

But how effectively does it work? Well, a recent study run by one of our researchers here at Built With Science, Alex, provides some insight. They took a group of resistance-trained males and females and attempted to see the maximum amount of fat they could lose in just two weeks. To do so, the test group reduced their calorie intake by almost 40% while continuing to train and eating a high-protein diet.

After the two weeks, they lost a total of almost 4 pounds. Some of this weight loss was water weight but the rest of it was pure fat with virtually no muscle loss. So at this point, you're probably thinking this sounds great and you're eager to give this a shot.

But the problem with mini-cuts is that they're very hard to stick to. And even if you do manage to stick through it, because of the changes your body experiences during the mini-cut, it makes it very easy to regain all the fat that you lost as soon as you're done. I'm going to show you the exact diet and workout tweaks that I made to make the mini-cut easier to stick to and what I did afterwards to ensure the fat that I lost stayed off so that you can do the same.

Let's start with workouts. I've broken this down into my weight training workouts and cardio since there were important tweaks that I made with both. So for weights, prior to the mini-cut, I was lifting five times a week using the five-day workout split. 

However, an aggressive calorie deficit now means that I have much less fuel to energize my workouts and support my recovery. This can quickly lead to excessive fatigue and strength loss. To avoid this, I made a few tweaks based on the findings of a 2011 study.

The researchers took 70 trained males and had them lift weights three times per week for four months while tracking their gains. After the four months, the researchers then tested to see the minimum amount of workout volume needed for them to maintain their new gains. What they found is that just one workout per week, so a third of the volume they were doing previously, was all that was needed.

Now don't get me wrong, I love lifting weights, but implementing these findings into my routine was game-changing for managing fatigue throughout my mini-cut. To do so, I switched to a four-day workout split and removed one set from every single exercise in the routine. This essentially cut the total workout volume I was doing in half, which was more than enough for me to maintain my gains.

Now as for cardio, prior to the mini-cut, I was on average taking 10,000 steps a day and doing two 20-minute HIIT sessions per week. My approach during the mini-cut was to further increase my overall activity so that I could burn more calories every day rather than have to rely solely on eating less calories to achieve my goal deficit. Those of you who are more sedentary will benefit a lot from doing this.

However, I had to make sure to add in the right type of cardio. Cardio that was easy to recover from and something I could actually stick to throughout the six weeks despite my lower energy levels. I decided to do two things.

First, by taking more walks throughout the day and making frequent use treadmill at my office, I quite easily increased my daily step count to 15,000 steps a day on average. Second, I replaced my two 20-minute HIIT sessions with something much easier to recover from, light cycling for 30 minutes three to four times a week. And I did this either indoor farmers walk and outdoor as a brisk walking depending on how the weather was.

Now my body responded really well to this routine. I recovered quickly, my energy levels during my workouts remained high, and it was something I could fairly easily stick to every day. However, these workout changes would not have been nearly as effective without the specific changes I made with my diet.

The tweaks I made there are what enabled me to maintain my muscle strength, keep my energy levels high during my workouts, and keep my hunger and cravings at bay. All right, so now let's shift focus and talk about those dietary tweaks. So at the time, my body needed about 2,600 calories to maintain its weight.

During the mini cut, I dropped this by 25%. This drastic drop in calories created two problems that I had to solve. First, I had to find a way to save most of my energy for my weight workouts so that I didn't end up losing a ton of strength and muscle.

Second, I had to find a way to manage my hunger levels and cravings. To solve problem one, I was strategic in what specific foods I'd be eating less of. The minimal amount of fat that you should eat per day for your health is around 0.2 grams per pound of your body weight.

So to cut calories from my diet while ensuring I still had enough carbs for energy and enough protein to maintain my muscle, I reduced my fat intake close to that minimum amount rather than considerably dropping my carb and protein intake. In addition to this, I strategically timed the ingestion of my carbs to best fuel my performance and recovery. This was done by saving most of my daily carb intake for my pre-workout meal to give me energy for my workout and my post-workout meal to help with recovery.

The rest of my meals were relatively lower in carbs. Now to solve problem two, hunger and cravings, I made simple food swaps that kept me full and enabled me to pretty much eat the same meals I was before the mini-cut but now with far less calories. For example, before the mini-cut, here's what a typical breakfast would look like.

In comparison, here's what a typical breakfast would look like during my mini-cut. By swapping out some of the whole eggs for egg whites, swapping the bagel with avocado for lower calorie bread instead, and adding more greens, I was able to save several hundreds of calories without decreasing the actual volume of food. Same with lunch, I kept the ingredients pretty much the same but instead of using a 300 calorie tortilla, I used a low calorie wrap.

And again with dinner, I was able to drop the calorie count of this meal by over 300 calories just by swapping some of the white rice for cauliflower rice and reducing the fat content by not including eggs in the rice. Now in addition to these food swaps to help me resist temptations during the day and curb my cravings at night, I always always made sure that I had some kind of tasty yet low calorie dessert.

Banana and cream, apple fritters, frozen yogurt, just something sweet at night that I could look forward to during the day to help me keep on track. We know frequently cravings can totally derail progress. However, although these dietary changes were key to helping me quickly and sustainably lose fat throughout the six weeks, it's what I did afterwards that helped me keep that fat off and is where most people mess up.

So after a mini cut or any dieting there's two factors that cause rapid fat regain. The first has to do with your metabolism. As a result of weighing less and the effects of dieting, my metabolism is slightly lower now than it was previously.

In addition to this, drastically reducing my activity or cutting it out altogether after the mini cut would not only mean that I'm burning even less calories every day, but there's also data to suggest, and I can definitely attest to this, that lower levels of activity make regulating hunger more difficult. This is what causes people to unknowingly overeat after their diet is over.

Now guys, just keep in mind that mini cuts are exactly what their name applies. Mini. They are not a long-term sustainable solution.

It's short and aggressive for a reason, as they quickly become unsustainable if continued for too long. But when used properly, they are effective.

Sleep is a medicine for your muscle building!

Sleep should never be underestimated for your fitness journey. Let's talk about how and why.Here's the thing, of all of the drugs you can take for muscle building, in some certain contexts, and there's much more intellectual ways to explain what I'm going to say, is sleep is the best drug. 

Now, in reality, if you sleep close to the right amount, every other muscle building drug is way more powerful. An hour of extra sleep beyond what you need offers you everything beyond downsides. An hour of extra sleep that brings you powerful and comparable results as anabolic drugs do.

It is foundational. Why? A couple of things. First, much of your growth in muscle actually happens while you sleep.

Number two, why do you gain a lot of muscle when you sleep? One of the reasons is that growth hormone pulses the most when you are sleeping.

There is a reason that little kids physically double in size over the years, grow myocytes and transform. You guys ever been around little kids before?  Little kids, they sleep like 12 hours out of every 24.

And they just keep growing and growing and growing. They're growth hormone producing and consuming machines.

And if you want to be a little bit more like that and get a few more gains, try to treat your sleep as seriously as possible. If you don't treat your sleep very seriously you cannot accomplish anything extra.

For most people, making sure that they're sleeping enough requires seven to nine, but more like eight to nine hours per night. That's that little extra on their old cherry on top. Very few people need, adults need more than nine hours of sleep.

People who say, I'll sleep when I'm dead, don't understand the next link in the causal inference chain is, well, okay, but you're going to be dead a lot sooner if you don't get a lot of sleep, and while you're alive, you're not going to be jacked and lean. In any case, if you want max gains, treating lots of good sleep after a large meal with a ton of slow digesting protein, of course, one to two hours before bed, treat it as seriously as you do your training and your nutrition, because no joke, it can makes a big difference, and if you're already putting in tons of time into the gym and tons of time into meal prep and all that stuff, the least you can do is the easiest thing you can do, which is just go to sleep, and if that is the minimum necessary to super boost your gains, these are literally the easiest gains you'll ever make in your life.

About achieving 3D look in bodybuilding!

3D means three-dimensional. It's the look that everyone chases after in bodybuilding. To create a three-dimensional physique i.e. a perfect or ideal body having all parameters needed as roundness, fullness, separation, definition, and conditioning. 

It depends upon your Training, nutrition, supplementation and recovery. 

You can design your body to give a three-dimensional look by engorging your muscles to get them rounder, fuller, more separated, and not only fuller but also more defined and conditioned. You have to hit your each and every muscle from each and every angle as possible with full intensity and endurance without any compromise to your workout till the end giving your best you can. You should fully enjoy your workout.  You should depict a 3D picture of yourself cognitively and always try to access that each and every time and condition. Wasting time is critical. Your every time aim is clearing out your each and every portions and proportions of your body to keep going resembling to the depicted 3D picture until perfection is achieved. It’s a great goal or milestone. You will definitely look different and outstanding. 

Nutrition. It's really important that you have the right macros and micros as well as the right hydration levels to give your body that three-dimensional look. You never have to eat much or less. It should be perfectly suitable as needed to give that 3D look. You never have to miss your meals and always avoid cheat meals. If you don't have enough carbs or you just haven't been hydrated enough, you're not going to get 3D. 

And the third important factor, supplementation. What you want to do is increase blood flow.

But not only do you want to increase blood flow, you want to be able to keep the blood within the muscle for an extended period of time. So supplementation is extremely important in the four different levels of getting three-dimensional body. 

Lastly, recovery is an immense mediator for taxing how you train, feed and supplement in your program and journey of getting 3D look. If your recovery is compromised rather than getting 3D look you might worsen your body, look, health and fitness. 

14 Mistakes you should not do while muscle building!

Mistake number one, I'm sure there's going to be some people who might disagree, but it's centering your workouts around getting a pump.

Now, yes, the pump feels great. It's motivating. It's satisfying to me as the coming is, but it's not a significant driver of muscle hypertrophy in and of itself.

And you can just logically reason this out without even needing to look at studies or examining the precise biology behind it. If you sat there right now with no resistance whatsoever and just flexed your biceps repeatedly as hard as you could, you could get a huge arm pump off of that alone, or go ahead and grab a pair of pink three pound dumbbells and perform thousands of flies until you're blue in the face, and you'll probably end up with the biggest chest pump of your life. But I think we'd all agree that that wouldn't be the best way to build muscle.

There's, of course, nothing wrong with getting a pump. And if you're truly training hard, then a pump is a completely normal by-product of that. You should be experiencing a pump to some degree, and you can also somewhat use it as a tool for gauging muscle activation to confirm that you are in fact stimulating the muscle that you're trying to target.

But that's primarily what a pump is. It's more so a side effect of your training. It's not the underlying cause for muscle growth or the thing that you should be primarily focused on.

Mistake number two along the same lines, and that's using fatigue as your gauge for training success. Just like the pump, fatigue is also a by-product of intense exercise, but it's not a direct stimulator of muscle hypertrophy on its own. Just because you're tired, sweating, breathing heavily, nauseated, urinating all over yourself uncontrollably, that doesn't necessarily mean that any of that is going to directly lead to muscle growth.

It's perfectly possible to perform a completely ineffective workout as far as building muscle is concerned, yet still feel highly fatigued from it. So don't go into the gym with this mindset that your goal is to just aimlessly beat yourself up and get in a good workout. If the primary goal of your session is to stimulate hypertrophy, then there are specific parameters that need to be in place for that to happen, which we're going to talk about here shortly.

Okay, mistake number three, yet another false gauge for building muscle, and that is relying on muscle soreness. So soreness can be a satisfying thing because it's sort of a reminder of the hard work that you put in, and it does indicate that some level of damage has been done to the tissue. But just like the pump, just like fatigue, muscle damage is not a direct driver of hypertrophy in and of itself.

You could create a ton of muscle damage in your legs by just standing up right now and performing jumping jacks for the next three hours straight, and you'd be ridiculously sore tomorrow, but that wouldn't be an effective way to build lower body muscle over the long term. The adaptations you'd get from something like that would be more endurance related. You'll tend to get the most sore when you expose your muscles to a novel stimulus.

So that applies to beginning lifters in general, or if you're more experienced, but you're coming back from a layoff or you're introducing a new exercise into your program. And you'll also probably find that certain muscle groups tend to be more susceptible to soreness than others. At the end of the day, being sore doesn't necessarily mean you stimulated hypertrophy and not being sore doesn't necessarily mean you didn't.

The one potential use for soreness, just like I talked about with the pump, is that it can be somewhat used as a gauge for muscle activation. For example, if you were trying to train your lats and the next day your biceps felt totally massacred, but you didn't feel anything in your lats at all, then that could be an indication that your technique might need adjusting. Or if you were trying to, let's say, train your quads, but you weren't quite sure whether your glutes were doing most of the work or not, but the next day your quads were very sore, that would help to confirm that you were in fact targeting your quads effectively as far as exercise selection and form goes.

Okay, so muscle pump, fatigue, and muscle soreness, those are not primary drivers of hypertrophy on their own. And if they were, then ultra lightweight, high rep, short rest period, circuit style training would be the absolute best way to get jacked. And marathon runners would have the most massive tree trunk legs out of anyone.

So what is the primary driver of muscle growth? It is mechanical tension. It's applying load to the targeted muscle fibers and training them very close to or all the way to muscular failure, which is the point where you can't do any more reps in proper form despite your best effort. And this leads to mistake number four, dead simple in theory, yet easily the single biggest mistake of all, the number one thing that prevents most people from truly transforming their bodies in the way that they're after.

And that is not training hard enough. More specifically, not going close enough to true muscular failure on your sets. Muscle growth is an evolutionary survival mechanism to adapt your body to the demands of the body and environment.

And if those demands don't cross a certain threshold, your body won't have strong enough incentives to make those adaptations. The stressor needs to be right up close to or all the way to the maximum limit that you're currently capable of if you want to see significant growth. Otherwise your body just says, hey, the current state we're in is already good enough to deal with this.

I'm not exaggerating when I say this, but if you're never making this face on at least some of your sets, if you're not letting out involuntary grunts and yelps here or there, if you never feel nervous before performing a particularly challenging lift, if you can honestly say that you've never straight up soiled yourself in the middle of the gym during a hard leg workout, okay, maybe that's going too far. But if those first three are never happening, then you're almost certainly not training hard enough for maximum gains. And when it comes to effort level per set, you really shouldn't be leaving any more than about three reps in the tank on most sets as an absolute minimum.

One to two reps short of failure is probably the optimal zone to base the majority of your sets around. And then here and there you can really push the limit with those all out failure sets. All right, moving on mistake number five, something I've been talking about like a broken record for the last 15 years, and that's not tracking your workouts.

Tension is the primary stimulus for growth, but in order for the muscle to grow continually bigger over time, that tension needs to consistently increase, You need to progressively overload. That's essentially what your entire training program should be centered around, training close to failure on your sets and slowly increasing the workload over time. And if you want to accomplish that in the most efficient way possible, you need to be recording your workouts.

And you can still make progress by just winging it and improvising things as you go, but it's not going to be anywhere near as effective as taking a more calculated, structured approach to your training. Getting muscle is about very small improvements extrapolated over the longterm. And there's no better way to track those improvements than by knowing exactly what you did in the previous workout and exactly what you need to do during this workout in order to progress further.

It could just be one extra rep with the same weight, next workout, another rep, then another rep, then a small five pound increase, back to training for reps again, rinse and repeat. And there are other methods of progressive overload that can be used beyond just increasing the weight and reps like slower negatives, pauses, more difficult exercise variations. And all it takes is a few quick seconds to jot this stuff down in your notebook or in your phone after each set.

It's an incredibly easy thing to do, but can pay dividends for your training over the longterm. And it's not just about giving you clear targets to aim for during each workout, but also allowing you to see firsthand that your overall program is on the right track. Physical muscle growth is a very slow process that can't be accurately assessed in the short term, yet strength is something you can clearly measure from week to week.

And since size and strength are for the most part directly intertwined, your training logbook is what you use to confirm that you are in fact gaining muscle, even if you can't visually see it yet. If the numbers in the logbook are consistently going up, then you'll know that you're also consistently gaining muscle. The reason you keep coming back to the gym stronger is because the muscle is hypertrophying.

Whereas if the numbers in the logbook have stagnated, that's how you know that your muscle gains have also stagnated and that something in your program is off and needs to be corrected. If you try to rely on visual changes only to determine when your progress has stalled, it could take months before you truly realize it. Whereas with a training logbook, you can identify it very quickly to get yourself right back on track.

Mistake number six is constantly doing the same workouts. With all different training techniques and exercise variations, and if you're always mixing around your training variables in terms of exercise selection, exercise order, volume, rep ranges, rep execution, advanced techniques, et cetera, then muscle confusion can be created. Your muscles don't have a miniature brain of their own but they stop responding if you perform the same exercise.

All they respond to is the degree of mechanical tension that they're being placed under, period. And it's actually far more effective for hypertrophy to keep your training variables constant and focus on maximizing progress within those variables for a consistent cycle of training. Not only because it allows you to track your progress accurately, but it also maximizes the effectiveness of your workouts since it gives you a chance to refine and master your lifting technique on a given set of movements rather than just being mediocre at a very long list of different ones.

Mistake number seven, this one is improper exercise selection. Now you don't need to become some kind of anatomy slash biomechanics Jedi in order to build a solid physique, but if you're looking to get the best results possible, then you do need to put in some time to gain a reasonable understanding of each major muscle group on your body, what its functions are, and then to look over your program to make sure you have a proper range of exercises to target those individual functions.

Don't just blindly pick a bunch of exercises you swipe through online and randomly mash them together. Mechanical tension is the primary driver of hypertrophy, but if you're not directing that tension toward the specific muscle fibers that you want to grow, that's obviously not going to do you any good. For example, if you're trying to target your lats and your main focus is on overhand pull-ups or overhand pull-downs, which many people don't realize are actually more upper back focused exercises, then your lats aren't going to grow optimally.

Or if you're not aware of basic triceps anatomy and you're not including some triceps to work with your shoulders in a more flexed position, to emphasize the long head, which is the biggest portion of the triceps that is most likely to be undertrained, then you'll probably be leaving some upper arm gains on the table. Or if you have the common misconception that squats and leg presses are enough to build your hamstrings, when in reality, those movements hardly train the hamstrings for hypertrophy at all, and you're not incorporating hip extension and knee flexion movements into your program, then your hamstrings are going to lag behind.

Another mistake when it comes to the topic of exercise selection, number eight on the list, is overemphasizing certain muscle groups.

And more specifically, doing what a high percentage of lifters do, especially beginners, which is getting too caught up in training what would be considered the showy muscles, which is usually the chest and the biceps.

Now, in reality, the biceps are actually the smallest major muscle group on your entire body, and they don't require anything fancy in order to build them effectively. And your pecs also don't carry nearly as much total mass as you might think either. The pecs are roughly equal in volume to the triceps, the lats, also the traps.

And so while building a bigger chest and bigger biceps is obviously important for your physique as a whole, there's just no need to treat those areas with such high importance relative that makes you think that you need a million different exercise variations to optimize your biceps peak or build the inner upper 1 18th of your pec fibers. Your shoulders are actually the single largest upper body muscle group and well-developed delts paired up with a muscular upper back. That will probably do more in terms of making you appear strong and muscular overall than your chest or your biceps will.

Mistake number nine, also related to proper exercise selection, which is intentionally creating instability during your lifts. If your goal is to optimize muscle growth, this is literally the complete opposite of what you want. Training on unstable surfaces or performing lifts in an off-balance position doesn't magically cause you to recruit more muscle fibers or shock your body into new gains or whatever other fancy buzzwords certain fitness coaches try to use.

All it does is put you in a weaker position and reduces the total amount of force that you can generate against the weight. To create the highest degree of mechanical tension possible, you want to make your lifts as stable as possible. Mistake number 10, shifting to actual exercise execution.

We can't ignore the all too common tragic sight of an ego lifting gym bro. Yes, your focus needs to be on progressively overloading your exercises and adding load to the bar is the primary way to do that, at least through the beginner to intermediate stages. But if you're trying to move at too quick a pace and you're sacrificing form just for numbers and flailing around all over the place, convulsing like a possessed maniac, trying to heave around weights that you have no business lifting, that is almost certainly going to work against you rather than for you.

That sloppy technique is most likely going to mean less tension on the targeted muscle. And at the very least, you'll be putting a lot more stress on your joints and connective tissues and increasing your eventual chance for injury. 

Mistake number 11 is performing too much high rep work. Now, yes, as long as you're training close to failure, then essentially any rep range will be effective for building muscle.

However, the issue with very high rep sets in that sort of 15 to 20 plus range is that along with training your muscles, they also create a much larger amount of systemic fatigue. There's going to be more overall metabolic stress, muscle burn, nausea, cardiovascular stress, and all of those things can add up and start becoming the limiting factor where you're stopping the set because of that overall total body fatigue and discomfort rather than because the muscle itself is actually getting close to true muscular failure. Now there is some individual variation at play here, and if you feel totally fine with higher up sets and you prefer that style of training for some reason, then that's fine.

But for most people centering their workouts around a more moderate rep range, anywhere between about, I would say five to 12 reps or so, that will usually be the most efficient and the most effective zone to accumulate the majority of your training volume. Mistakes number 12 is not resting long enough in between sets.

So this relates to the previous point as far as creating excessive fatigue, because when you use shorter rest times in between sets, you won't be giving your body a chance to fully systemically recover. And that can then reduce the quality of the upcoming set. If your heart rate and your breathing is still up, you've got lingering cardiovascular fatigue, even mental fatigue.

You don't want to be jumping into an entirely new set in that fatigued state. This is not a cardio slash conditioning workout. If you want to train for those goals separately, then that's fine.

But as we've already discussed, hypertrophy training is about maximizing mechanical tension by getting within a rep or two of true muscular failure. And anything else that interferes with that is going to be counterproductive. So you don't need to follow some set in stone rest time in between sets.

Just perform your set and then rest as long as you need to in order to feel fully recovered and to where you can execute the next set with full muscular effort. And that will vary based on the specific exercise you're doing, your energy levels on any given day, where you are in the workout, how close to failure you're training. But on most sets, most of the time, you're probably looking at anywhere from about two minutes all the way up to five minutes in some cases.

Mistake number 13 is performing pre-workout cardio. So if you want to do a short, say five to 10 minute light cardio warmup, then that's fine. But doing a full blown cardio session immediately pre-workout is definitely not the best idea for all of the reasons that we've talked about so far.

Once again, you're just creating unnecessary systemic fatigue that's going to reduce your ability to train your muscles with true maximum effort. If you want to do post-workout cardio, then that's ultimately okay if you have the energy for but pre-workout is definitely not the time for cardio if building muscle is your primary goal. 

And lastly, mistake number 14 is copying the routines of enhanced bodybuilders. Now, just because someone is on PEDs doesn't necessarily mean they don't know how to train natural lifters, but in a lot of cases, it honestly does. There's a ton of guys out there on YouTube and social media who are on gear with top percentile genetics, who will basically build an awesome physique no matter how they train and who quite honestly have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

And they go ahead and they post these ultra high volume fluff and pump flex magazine-esque routines that are extremely suboptimal for the average natural lifter. Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because someone is huge and shredded, that following their routine is going to get you the same results because without the drugs and the genetics at play, it's just not going to happen.