Are you eating your prescribed six bodybuilding meals a day
and not gaining muscle?
Have you been blowing your hard-earned cash on body
building supplements with techie names like "Nitric-this"
and "Cell-Max-that", yet still fall short of getting the
size gains you're after?
You're not alone. Thousands of muscle building enthusiasts
are needlessly struggling – grunting and sweating for
painfully little progress – and mislabeling themselves
"hard-gainer".
Building muscle, like accomplishing anything, requires some
rational thinking and a well-executed strategy. It doesn't
just happen because you made it to the gym and finished
your workout. It won't occur simply because you're using a
product that was purportedly created by a "genius" wearing
a lab coat. Successful natural muscle growth takes place as
a result of adherence to laws of nature – just like success
with any endeavor in life.
To back my point, let's look at what many muscle building
aficionados counter-productively do in gyms around the
world. This is a simplistic example, but some variation of
this scenario is the cause for much unneeded frustration
for too many natural bodybuilders.
Let's say Bill and Joe are training partners. They arrive
at the gym to perform their much-anticipated biceps
workout. Bill likes to start out with standing barbell
curls and he's glad he has Joe there to spot him. Bill just
knows that if he can get Joe to assist him with the heavy
sets, some "forced reps" will really get his arms growing.
He's decided to use the ever-popular 'pyramid technique' to
work his way up to those heavy sets.
Bill ends up doing six sets. His sets are as follows: 50
pounds/8 reps, 55 pounds/8 reps, 60 pounds/6 reps, 70
pounds/6 reps, 55 pounds/7 reps, 50 pounds/6 reps.
Bill feels proud of himself. It was a grueling biceps
workout. His first three sets were moderately challenging.
However, the 70 pounds he piled on the bar for his fourth
set of 6 reps represented a respectable stretch for him.
Although he didn't ask for any help from Joe, he definitely
had to dig deep within himself to find that extra
pride-inducing push that allowed him to achieve the set of
six reps. This fatigued his biceps enough to make the final
three sets sufficiently challenging, even though they were
performed with descending amounts of weight.
Five days later, Bill and Joe are back again for another
biceps workout. Why? Because their schedule says it's time
to work those muscles again. Of course, muscles only grow
from recovery between workouts – not directly from the
tissue-ravaging training sessions themselves. But Bill and
Joe have apparently worked out some kind of deal with their
biceps in which the muscles have agreed to recover and grow
in a four to five day span (sarcasm).
Bill wants to get bigger, so he's decided to boost his
heaviest set up to 75 pounds. He figures this will really
"shock" his biceps into growth. His sets on this workout
look like this: 50 pounds/8 reps, 55 pounds/8 reps, 65
pounds/6 reps, 75 pounds/6 reps, 55 pounds/6 reps, 50
pounds/5 reps.
Wow... Bill got a little assistance from Joe and managed to
use five pounds more weight on his two heaviest sets. That
extra intensity caused him to fall short a couple reps on
his final, lighter sets. But that's okay, right? Bill is
increasing the poundage and getting stronger and bigger,
isn't he?
Hell no! ... Bill is deceiving himself. If you add up the
total volume he moved in the approximate twenty minute time
period during the first workout, it was 2,305 pounds. Five
days later, he moved 2,260 pounds in the same time frame.
His volume of lifted weight went down. Now he's counting on
moving forward after having possibly over-trained in this
most recent workout. Yet he's not even aware of what he's
doing.
Until Bill straightens this out, it won't matter how many
stomach-stretching meals he piles down. And all the nifty
powdered supplements made by smart looking guys in cute
little lab coats won't help much either. He'll just be
peeing all that into the toilet and wasting time to boot.
That is, unless and until he gets his bodybuilding strategy
on track. Nice, huh?
----------------------------------------------------
Scott Abbett is the author of HardBody Success: 28
Principles to Create Your Ultimate Body and Shape Your Mind
for Incredible Success. He is a certified fitness trainer
and a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP. To see his
personal transformation, visit http://
http://www.hardbodysuccess.com
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