7 Habits That Are Killing Your Gains
If you've hit a plateau with your fitness, it's probably because you're making one of the 7 mistakes listed below.
-
Stress: You will greatly limit you’re muscle building potential if your body is constantly under stress. The hormone cortisol will be sky high on a much more consistent basis, and your results will plateau. Try to find a way to get some relief (in a healthy way!)
-
Poor Nutrition: You know this by now. If you always eat crap, you’re going to look like it. Start with eliminating obvious junk, then move to improved consistency with high levels of protein and more water intake.
-
Self-Sabotage Mindset: The reason you may not be maximizing your growth could be YOU. You have a minor setback like quarantine, can’t go to the gym and workout EXACTLY like you want to...so you completely stop eating healthy and get zero exercise for 3 months straight. Sound familiar? Promise yourself you’ll never do that again.
-
Fear of a REAL gym: I get it, it can be intimidating to go into a gym and appear weak in front of people. So you run to planet fitness or a gym like it. How many people in there are training HARD? Very few. That’s because that gym environment promotes mediocrity. You need to surround yourself with people bigger and stronger than you, and that will only happen at a real gym that has heavy weights, squat racks, and people grunting from straining so hard (GASP! Imagine that). Stay away from planet fitness, just trust me on that.
-
Undisciplined Peer Group: You have to surround yourself with others who are striving for greatness. If the core group of people you hang out with go to the gym, you’re going to likely be there too. If your friend group only does destructive things to their body, it’s going to be extremely easy to turn down healthy behaviors that would improve your physique.
-
Boredom: I want you to enjoy your time in the gym. If you hate back squats, and every single program you do revolves around back squats, you aren’t going to stick with that program for long. Find an exercise variation that’s fun. Even a slight change of the angle of an exercise is enough to give you a new stimulus and keep things interesting. Try high intensity, yoga, running, swimming, Olympic lifts, etc. there’s something out there for everyone.
- Not Thinking Long-Term: Plan on training for the rest of your life. Seem like a long time? Well hopefully it is, but what else were you planning on doing during that time? When you realize you could workout consistently for the next 40 years, that’s gives you better perspective to not get discouraged by not getting results “fast enough”. Keep going, you’re probably just a couple tweaks to your routine away from real progress.
Find out how skinny guys can make consistent progress in the gym to build an additional 5-10lbs of muscle to their frame here:
