3. If your nutrition ain’t broken, don’t fix it
Even though rest times heal your muscle the best, proper nutrition is the top factor in adding new muscle tissue. The food you eat basically represents the raw materials your body uses to make your muscles grow.
People always overcomplicate things when it comes to nutrition and keep wasting their time to find the new “best” diet that will give them the “best” results, often being lied by certain people with unrealistic weight gain or weight loss goals. It’s quite simple actually, eat ehough of the right food, at the right time. It shouldn’t and it’s not that complicated.
Solution: There have been many studies partially denying the benefits of using the “anabolic window” one hour after your workout, it still wouldn’t hurt to replenish your body’s needs with fast digesting whey protein and carbs. Plan your meals carefully and consume lots of quality nutrients. A general recommendation for muscle growth is 1.5 protein per pound of lean body weight daily.
4. Change your training routine every 6-8 weeks
As we said previously, muscles remember and will adapt to new stress pretty fast.You can follow the first rule, and change the little training variables quickly, but after 6-8 weeks the muscles will adapt. This is where the point of diminishing returns comes, but too many people keep on doing the same workouts thinking they’ll get better results.
This is the reason why you should make a big change in your training routine approximately every 6-8 weeks. The change will not be easy, but it will teach you new things and it is the best way.
Solution: Keep alternating between muscle-growth phases, strength-oriented phases, cutting phases, cross-training phases or start doing something new altogether. The point you need to take away from this is changing your routine every 6-8 weeks.
5. Train with free-weights first
You should always start your workout with a free weight compound exercise which stimulate different muscle groups at the same time. Your aim should be not only to lift the weight by any means necessary, thus sacrificing form, but to stabilize it with your stabilizing muscles, other than the main muscles involved. Stabilizer are often tiny muscles that keep your joints healthy and strong and prevent damage to occur to ligaments and tendons. Training with machines, takes the stress off of the stabilizer muscles, leaving them weak and untrained.
Solution: After you finish warming-up, start the workout with a free-weight exercise. It should be the centerpiece to your workout. Everything else is secondary and should be used as assistance to the main free-weight compound movement. This assistance work includes machine training which you can use to add volume and address a specific body part that is lagging behind.
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