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.
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