You have the goal of increasing your muscle mass, but you have stuck in the process and you are wondering where you can be failing to not progress what you would like.
Muscle hypertrophy, as the muscle growth process is formally known, is a slow process that requires time and a correct approach to lifestyle, both in terms of nutrition and training, but on many occasions, a plateau is reached where your progress stagnates. Know how to get out of it.
5 reasons why you don’t gain muscle mass
1. You always use the same weights
You have reached a moderate weight in your exercises and have settled down to execute them every week with the same weight. At the beginning, the progression of our strength increases rapidly , so the increase in weight in the exercises is continuous, but there comes a time when the advance is not so fast and add one more disk to the bar It is difficult for us, so we prefer to carry out the exercise with the weight that we had been doing last week, the previous one and if you think about it, even the same weight as a month ago.
Muscle needs to be stimulated to grow. If you always walk with the same weight, what is the point of growing the muscle? Your body doesn’t grow if it doesn’t have the need to.
This stimulus is applied with weight gain, in this way, we will be demanding from our body that it needs to make a change, because we will be demanding that it work with a weight that is currently compromising it.
For this reason, we advise you to carry the weights of the main exercises listed, and gradually try to improve yourself.
2. You always work in the same rep range
As with weight gain, another factor to increase training intensity is the number of repetitions.
Most gym routines show sets that are around ten reps and don’t go out of there. Any exercise, on any day, in whatever position you are in, has a 3 × 10 execution. This rep range, although it is true that it can be considered the standard when we talk about hypertrophy, it is also true that it is not the Holy Grail.
We must play with the range of repetitions and vary them in our exercises and training days. If your routines have always been based on that number of repetitions, you will be wasting the advantages of performing exercises at six repetitions or even, why not, sometimes working at higher repetitions.
Try adding a different range of repetitions in your exercises, you will notice how your training that you have been with for months, will seem totally different, and it is that just by varying this, your workouts will be different.
3. You dedicate most of the session to abdominal work
Core training is important, but excessive training in this area, unlike helping us on our way to the perfect body, is holding us back on the goal.
This area is worked with compound and multi-joint exercises, so you only have to review those muscles with a couple of exercises. The time that many spend on abs work is time wasted on the rest of the workout. How many people do you know who skip squats, because they have done quads and are going to abs work? This is a serious mistake, since for example with squats, in addition to working the leg they also involve the abdomen, so you would be killing two birds with one stone.
4. You obsess over cardiovascular work
There is a very common mistake that is made in some of the workouts to gain muscle mass, which is to perform cardiovascular work first , and then perform hypertrophy work.
If you do cardio in the first place, you will be wasting your glycogen reserves, which are responsible for providing the necessary energy to perform weightlifting, so your strength training, which is what will give you muscle development , you will be losing effectiveness.
It is advisable to warm up for about 10 minutes on a treadmill or elliptical to help us warm up, but not exceed that time barrier, since the only thing we will achieve is fatigue for the subsequent work.
Therefore, it would be advisable to do weight training first and then aerobic training , but here comes another of the big mistakes_ if we go over the second part of the training (aerobic), we will be spending calories, something not recommended if our goal is to increase muscle mass. So you should not go overboard with the treadmill sessions, neither before, nor after training.
5. You do not vary the intensity of your workouts
Training intensity is a variable that must be modified in training sessions. If you always work at 70 or 80% of your maximum repetition, the body will get used to that stimulus. You should increase the intensities of your workouts throughout the week.
A good idea would be to combine a high intensity day, followed by another with much lower work intensity. This will cause spikes of stimulus that our body will take advantage of to evolve.
Conclution
Some time ago I heard a pretty clear message that stuck in my head and that I think is quite right in the world: to get different results, you will have to do different things. Modify, vary, experiment and discover what makes you feel different, there is no one better than you to know what adapts to your body and what it needs.
Reference
- Migala, J. 6 Surprising Reasons You’re Not Building Muscle. For Dailyburn. ⌊Revised December 2017⌋.
