Reason 1 – Copying someone else’s workout plan 

Maybe you saw your favorite influencer on Instagram or you see some jacked bodybuilder in the gym and think:

“I’m just going to do exactly what they’re doing because I’m going to wind up looking just like them.”

That is just not the case. 

First of all, you are your own person with your own genetics and your own body. The best you can ever hope to become is a better version of yourself. You’re never gonna look like someone else. You’re never gonna have a different shaped bicep or different shaped quads. 

They can only really just get bigger.

Cool? 

Also, what might work really well for the person at your gym might not work very well for you. 

Maybe that exercise that they do that gives them crazy bicep pumps actually just kind of hurts your shoulders. 

And maybe while they only need to do two sets a week of squats to really grow their legs, maybe you need six.

You’re welcome to start with a template that makes sense to you, and tweak it over time until it gets you the results you’re after. 

Reason 2 – Lacking consistency 

You need to be consistent. 

Across the board you need to be consistent with everything we’re talking about here. With showing up to the gym regularly, giving a consistent effort on all the lifestyle interventions you’re making, giving a consistent effort on all your diet and training efforts. It’s not just about doing it once. 

It’s about repeating it time after time. 

Provide a reliable and consistent signal to your body that it’s time to grow more muscle. 

These changes take time and you need to slowly encourage your body to continue making the adaptations that you want week after week. Month after month. Year after year..

Besides, you’re never gonna know what’s working or what’s not working if you don’t just keep giving that same consistent signal over and over. 

How can you ever expect to know what’s working and what’s not working if you’re always doing something random?

Reason 3 – You’re not training hard enough. 

This is both the simplest thing you can fix with your training program and also one of the hardest. 

You have to push hard to grow more muscle. How hard specifically? Well, when you’re doing your curls and you stop when you could have done five or ten more reps…You’re not going to grow very big biceps from that.

You need to keep on doing reps, even though it gets uncomfortable. 

Even though your biceps are starting to burn, get pumped, you keep on pulling that weight until you feel like you could only do one, two, or maybe no more reps.

The point in the set where you’re very close to failure is robustly stimulative of muscle growth. That’s what makes you bigger. So you need to get at least close to that point of failing if you really want to grow more muscle. 

If you keep phoning it in and just giving it a half sack effort, you’re never going to grow the muscle you want.

Watch this set for an example… 

Reason 4 – You need to do more

What do I mean by more? 

And how do you know if you should do more? 

By more, I mean literally more work in the gym. You need to do more sets to grow more muscle. We know that volume, or how many good hard sets you do in the gym, has a dose- response relationship with how much muscle you grow.

Which means the more sets you do, the more muscle you grow, up until a point where it’s not productive anymore. 

But you might be the person who should add more sets if you go to the gym and you never really get any pumps, disruption, soreness or weakness in the muscles you’re trying to grow. 

If, week after week, you’re never able to add any reps or any load to the bar and you’re really just not making any progress on your performance, AND you’re fresh and recovered every time you lift… that’s probably a sign that you can add some more sets. 

I’m sorry to all the guys who love Mike Mentzer and the low volume training stuff out there, but the evidence is becoming increasingly clear…

Doing more total work leads to more total gains.

Reason 5 – Do less, if you should

This is literally just the exact opposite of what we talked about.

If you find that you are so sore when you go to the gym from your last session that you can’t give it a good effort… you might be training too much.

If you do that chronically for weeks, months, and years – you’re just not matching your performance every single week, guess what, you’re chronically crushing yourself with fatigue and never are actually at the point where you’re fresh enough to give a solid enough effort to send a clear signal to grow more muscle.

Maybe it’s time to dial things back and do fewer sets so that you can actually adapt to and recover from your workouts. 

Reason 6 – You need to pick better exercises

If you are doing exercises that are highly unstable, like squatting on a BOSU ball, you’re going to limit your ability to generate force. And you’re going to directly limit your ability to grow new muscle because your ability to produce force directly influences how much muscle you’re going to grow.

Additionally, if you pick exercises that are combo exercises, for example, where you see people in the gym doing a squat and curl at the same time…

Do you really think that the same amount of weight that you can squat and curl is really challenging your quads? 

Or is it just enough weight for your quads, but it’s going to rip your bicep off your arm?

Select exercises that are stable.

Creating an environment where the muscle that you are trying to target is actually the limiting factor is of chief importance for muscle growth.

One of the best ways you can go about this is getting into the gym and finding out what works best for you. 

What exercises feel good for your joints and which exercises really target the muscles that you want to train?

Start with the basics, and work from there. 

Reason 7 – You need better technique

Even if you have the best exercises in the world…

If you’re using a technique that is bothersome on your joints or doesn’t target the muscle you want to train – you’re throttling the amount of muscle that you can grow.

I can only do so much close grip bench press with bad technique that hurts my shoulders. 

By the time my shoulder is so sore that I need to leave the gym, my pecs haven’t even been bothered.

So, take your time with your technique, and focus on the muscle that you are trying to grow.

Ask yourself:

• Am I really loading up the target muscle as best that I can? 
• Am I going as deep as I can comfortably under control?
• Am I avoiding swinging and cheating with other parts of my body?

You can always play around with your technique:

• taking a narrower grip
• taking a wider grip.
• using a narrower or wider foot stance
• turning one toe out 
• or putting one foot forward

Just find out what works best for you.

There’s no way that I can tell you exclusively what’s going to work best for you.

But I can tell you that if you go into the gym and use a technique that destroys the muscle that you are targeting while keeping your joints happy and healthy…  and it doesn’t bother any other peripheral part of your body, that’s probably a really good technique for you.

This is the case for muscle growth technique. 

 Reason 8 – you don’t sleep well

If you’re training hard in the gym, you’re getting your food in order, and taking this seriously…

Bro, you’re putting in all the hard work already. Sleeping is the easiest thing you’ll do. You pull this nice warm blanket over you, you get your little sleep mask out, you get your little lavender essential oil sprayed on the pillow, you cozy up, just close your eyes and let the dream world take you under.

This is a critical element of building muscle:

Sleeping at least seven to nine hours a night. 

I know the real hard part isn’t just closing your eyes, it’s the practical element of getting in bed at the right time each night and actually making time for sleep. 

So set a bedtime and aim to get seven to nine hours a night.

Sleep is when you go from Clark Kent to Superman. 

 Reason 9 – You’re too stressed

Think about this:

When you go to the gym and train hard, you are applying stress to your body. It’s good stress, eustress, that you will adapt to and recover from, but your ability to recover from that workout is drawing from a finite capacity to recover.

Your capacity to recover from stress is shared between all the stressors in your life. 

Work stress, life stress, financial stress, relationships, all are dealt with in the same place. 

So, if you’re super stressed about work all the time, your body’s just straight up gonna build less muscle and you’re not going to get as strong.

Manage your stress firstly by avoiding stressful situations whenever possible. 

If you have too much on your plate at work and it’s not going to hurt your career capital by saying no to projects when you’re overwhelmed, say no to them. 

Don’t go to events that aren’t going to make you happy that are just going to make you stressed out.

Secondly, find a way to actually relieve stress. 

I have these reclining chairs in my room. They’re comfortable. I sit there, close my eyes,I take deep breaths before bed and just chill out. 

You can read a book. You can write and journal. You can listen to music, paint pictures, listen to podcasts, spend time with your pets or your loved ones.

Find a way to manage the current and existing stress that you have in your life that’s unavoidable.

You will make better progress.

You’ll build more muscle.

Reason 10 – You need to eat more protein 

Again, one of those dead easy things that doesn’t require you grinding in the gym.

It’s so easy. You literally just put some beef, chicken, or greek yogurt in your mouth a few times a day. That’s it.

I know. 

Getting into the routine of having it prepared and easy is the real pain in the ass, but you can make it convenient.

• Use high protein milk, like FairLife. 
• Use whey protein powder. 
• Use Greek yogurt.
• Use pre-cooked sliced chicken breasts you get at Walmart 

You can literally buy a kilo of pre-grilled, Cajun seasoned beef from Walmart that’s fucking delicious and it’s $5 a package. Set yourself up for the entire week. 

Protein is one of those things that makes a huge difference. 

Even for someone who’s bedridden, they’ve shown in the scientific literature, Mildred, who has a fused together spine, and she’s laying in her hospital bed… 

They start feeding her more protein intravenously, and she grows more muscle.

That effect size is gonna be even bigger for you if you’re young, healthy, and weight training.

So get your protein intake in check. 

Anything over 0. 6 grams per pound of your body weight is a really great place to start. 

If you’re exceptionally heavy, you can use your height in centimeters as a protein goal too, and that’ll be a pretty good place to start.

Reason 11 – you are not gaining any weight

Do you need to gain weight to grow new muscle? No. 

It’s not an exclusive situation where if you’re not gaining any weight, you’re not gaining any muscle. But look, if you’ve checked out the other 32 things on this list… and you’re thinking:

• I got my training dialed. 
• I got my sleep in check. 
• I got all this other stuff going for me. 
• But I’m just not building the muscle I want… 

A hypercaloric diet, or a diet that causes you to gain weight over time, is a powerful tool for helping you grow more muscle. 

Not only are you literally providing the resources that your body needs to actually physically construct new tissue, you’re also creating an environment, through hormonal signaling, that is highly conducive to anabolism or new tissue growth in your body.

So you’re giving your body the literal building blocks for muscle AND you’re telling it, hey, look at all this stuff that’s coming in, you’re free to grow more muscle. Go ahead and grow. Go ahead and sleep. Go ahead and recover from all your workouts faster. 

It creates this hormonal milieu that’s just chef’s kiss for building more muscle.

I personally never grew the muscle I really wanted until I gained weight… for what it’s worth. 

Try doing a muscle gain diet for 12-20 weeks if you’re not seeing the growth you want.

Reason 12 – You are training too heavy

Training heavy, meaning fewer than five reps per set on average is probably going to be excessively fatiguing for how much muscle growth it generates. 

We know that sets of one rep all the way up to even probably a hundred reps can grow you more muscle as long as they’re taken sufficiently close to failure. 

But, that doesn’t mean that doing only heavy singles, one rep maxes, right near failure, is a good way to grow muscle. 

Why? 

Because very heavy training is also very fatiguing, both physiologically, meaning it beats up your joints and your connective tissue… 

And additionally, it’s very psychologically fatiguing to train very heavy all the time. So keep it more in the 5 to 20 rep range. It gives you a better stimulus to fatigue ratio. Shout out to Dr. Mike Israetel for coining that term. 

You can just get more high quality work done that stimulates muscle growth while reducing the fatigue side of the equation. 

Make sure that the majority of your sets are north of five reps on average, otherwise you’re just doing more hard grinding work than you really have to.

Reason 13 – you’re not tracking your workout performance

If I don’t track my workout performance, how can I know what to do next week?

How can I know if I’m getting stronger week after week?

Tracking keeps you honest. You can use a notebook or you can use a spreadsheet to keep track. 

If I do a set of squats at 10 reps x 45 pounds, I’ll write down, okay, I did squats, I did 10 reps x 45 pounds. That way next week when I come back, I know to do my set of 10 reps now with a little bit of extra weight.

There’s just no way that you can keep track of all the different exercises, all the different weights you do, and all the different reps you do week after week.. 

(if you have a human brain)

Reason 14 – You’re always switching up your workouts

I get that you want some variety… but you will struggle to make meaningful progress if you’re always switching your workouts every single week. 

Write a novel instead of haikus. 

Repeat your workouts week after week after week.

Yes, you definitely need to add reps, load. or sets or some combination of the three over time…

But you in order to do that to any great degree, you need to stick with a few basic exercises for a while.

Get really good at them, get stronger on them, and progress on them before you switch things. 

Don’t just change it up just for the sake of changing it.

You’re just shooting yourself in the foot.

Reason 15 – You need overload

If you’re logging your workouts and repeating exercises, that’s a good start… but it’s not enough. 

You need to improve your performance over time. If you can do bicep curls with 10 pounds for 15 reps today… Next session should be 10 pounds for 16 reps. Or it could be 15 pounds for 12 reps. 

You need to be pushing for progress. It’s called progressive overload. I’m sure you’ve heard of that, but it’s a fundamental pillar of training for muscle growth. 

You don’t need to add 10 pounds to the bar every single week, but you need to be adding a rep here or there where you can or adding some weight here or there where you can or some combination of the two in order to get the most out of your training. 

If you train with 10 pounds and you do your 10 reps this week and you do it again next week, guess what?

You’re actually a little bit stronger next week. Training got easier. If you do that again the week after, training got easier again. 

Do the same stuff for long enough, and you’ll stay stuck. 

Be sure you’re pushing things in the right direction week after week.

Reason 16 – Lack of variety

I love Smith Machine skullcrushers. 

My triceps just feel like they’re going to burst, I feel a huge amount of tension. The pumps feel like my triceps literally are gonna pop. It feels like someone’s inserted a bicycle pump in there and every tme I do a rep. My triceps get destroyed, it’s amazing. 

And it’s been amazing for 16 or 20 weeks, but I know there is going to come a day where it just doesn’t feel that good, and it starts bothering my elbow a little bit maybe, or maybe I just don’t get that very good pumps, and maybe my rep progress and my performance starts to kind of level off, and all of a sudden it just starts bothering my shoulder and things just don’t feel the same as they always did.

I would be a fool to continue trying to jam that square peg into a round hole after the 16 or 20 or 24 or 46 weeks that I’ve been blessed with amazing progress and amazing sensations and crazy pumps and crazy soreness on that smith machine skull crusher. 

At a certain point, you need to have some variety in your training plan. 

And when things are no longer working, whether that’s an exercise, or a rep range, or a certain amount of sets, or a certain amount of days per week that you’re training a muscle, you need to adapt. 

You need to tweak it, and you need to improve on it and do something else.

Sometimes, changing that variable can ignite new growth. 

For example, I had always trained my biceps once a week and I wondered why they were so small. 

It wasn’t until I was like, you know what, fuck it. I’m going to do a little bit more work. I started training them twice a week. 

They got even better results. For once I was actually seeing the growth that I wanted. 

A TINY bit of variety goes a long way.

Just don’t do it when things are working. 

Reason 17 – infrequent or bro-split style training

If you’re training a muscle once a week, you are not going to be growing as much muscle as you possibly could by draining it more frequently. 

You might be wondering who the hell trains just once a week. 

I’m not talking about going to the gym once a week.

I mean, you’re training a specific muscle once a week. 

I see this at my gym a lot: 

• A guy goes in on Monday and they train their chest. 
• Tuesday they train their shoulders and their arms. 
• Wednesday they train back. 
• Thursday they train legs.
• Friday is abs and cardio.

They don’t train their chest again until next Monday. 

So, each muscle is really only getting trained once a week. And what’s going on for the rest of the time after it’s recovered, after the first two days? You guessed it, not much.

Be sure that if you want to grow a muscle, you’re training it in the gym at least twice a week, and maybe even more frequently if you feel like that muscle could benefit from it.

Reason 18 – Lack of focus

I see this all the time, too.

There’s a lack of micro focus and a lack of macro focus. 

A lack of micro focus looks like this. You walk in the gym. You just show up to your workout. Do a bunch of random shit with a half-assed effort. Not caring what you’re doing at all. 

And then go home. 

I get it man. You don’t want to train hard. I know. It’s difficult. But switch your brain on for a second to the task that is in front of you.

I guarantee if you just focus on what you’re doing while you’re in the gym, you’re going to get way better results and you’ll probably enjoy the process a lot more. 

On a macro scale, you may be phoning in sessions like that regularly. Or maybe you go to the gym consistently for a number of weeks and then you just fall off for a few weeks and you forget that your bigger goal is to build a bunch of muscle this year.

And if you really want to get as much out of this as you can, you need to stay focused on the lever moving activities regularly, week after week, month after month and year after year. 

Of course, going on vacation, getting busy, all that stuff that’s going to happen. 

You’re a human being. 

But for the most part, you don’t want to stray too far from the post and you need to stay focused on your bigger goals.

Reason 19 – You are building muscle, you’re just not tracking it 

You’re not aware of how to tell. 

You might be expecting a massive, crazy, significant change where you’re super jacked.

But it can come in smaller increments before you actually see that wild transformation. 

Here’s how to keep tabs on it:

Firstly, you can get a DEXA scan, which stands for dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. 

It’s basically an x ray scan of your body that checks how much muscle and fat you have. It can tell you this to a high degree of accuracy. It’s pretty much the gold standard of body composition analysis.

You can get one of those today and get another one in six months. If you see that you went from 15 percent body fat at 180 pounds to 10 percent body fat at 180 pounds… , you built some solid muscle there, right? . 

Another way you can do it is by using a measuring tape, a flexible measuring tape, around let’s say your chest, right around the nipple line.

If you notice that your chest measurement is increasing and your relative body fat level is staying the same, well that’s a pretty good indicator as well that things might be improving for your chest growth.

Next, you can use progress pictures. You shouldn’t have to squint for it. If it’s happening, you’ll see it. 

And lastly, is your rep performance in the gym.

Especially for multiple sets and multiple reps across different exercises and rep ranges. 

If I can dumbbell press the 50s for a set of 10 today, but in 6 months I can dumbbell press the 70s for a set of 15… that’s a good sign. There’s only so much motor learning and neural adaptations that can occur to improve my performance. And at a certain point, I just need more cross sectional area. I need more contractile tissue that can contribute to that rep performance. 

Maybe not only do I improve my dumbbell bench, but at the same time, my incline barbell bench press goes up and my cable flies go up, despite me not even having them in that training block… oh boy.

Now we’re looking at a very convincing reason that I have indeed gotten bigger pecs. 

You got better rep strength, you got bigger measurements, your pictures look good, and you got a DEXA scan to check it out. 

Be sure to stay on track with this stuff because it can be very motivating to track your progress.

That’s what I call ‘The Awareness Advantage’. 

Reason 20 – You’re just being impatient

I know, this is a platitude you’ve probably heard on every blog post and in every video, but muscle growth does take time. 

If you do a 16 or 20 week training block with a muscle growth diet attached to it, you’re going to gain some muscle.

You’re probably not going to be a completely different human being (depending on where you’re at with your genetics and your advancement level).

But if we take that 20 week muscle growth diet and we double it…

Now it’s convincing. Now you can really start to see it in the clothes, and people might start making comments about how much muscle you’ve built. 

If you double that one year muscle growth phase, and you take it to two years…

Now, it’s just unreasonable that you shouldn’t be seeing all kinds of muscle growth, and look at your arm and think, fuck, whose arm is that?

Just take your time with this. 

If it’s been three weeks, or even three months, and you’re not seeing the growth you want,, don’t beat yourself up over it.

Keep moving in the right direction, but just know that it may take some more time.

Reason 21 – not emphasizing the eccentric portion of your reps

What is the eccentric portion? It’s the lowering portion of each rep. 

Concentric = the actual lifting, pulling, or pressing portion

Eccentric = lowering it down. 

We know from the scientific literature that that eccentric or lowering portion of the lift is at least as growth-promoting, but maybe even more growth-promoting than the actual concentric or lifting portion.

So, in order to maximize the hypertrophic response or the muscle building signal you send while lifting, you want to lower the weights under control. 

Something like 3 to 5 seconds of slow and controlled lowering seems to pretty much maximize how much we get out of every single rep.

Don’t just let the weights drop really quickly and not actually control it. 

You’re being lazy and you’re leaving gains on the table.

Reason 22 – you lack specificity

Training for muscle growth is a specific style of training.

If you muddy the waters by doing too many other types of training, that will take away from the amount of muscle that you’re building.

What do I mean by that? 

Well, maybe when you go to the gym, you’re doing lots of mobility work. You’re doing lots of ‘functional training’,  and speed/power/agility drills. Or training primarily for strength. Or maybe you’re doing mostly sport training drills. 

You’re just not doing as much training for muscle growth as you could be, which means you’re not going to be building as much muscle as you could be.

If growing muscle is your primary goal… you should probably shift the majority of your training to really focus on hypertrophy training.

At least for a little while. 

 Reason 23 – Ice baths after workouts 

This blunts the hypertrophy response or the muscle growth response from your training.

Yeah, it’s good for recovery, but recovery just means that you’re going to be ready to do another session sooner, getting ready to do another session sooner can actually interrupt the processes that build you more muscle.

Don’t do this. Dumb idea.

Reason 24 – Avoiding lengthened positions in training

What is a lengthened position?

It’s just a fancy term for when the muscle is stretched out during your workouts, especially under load. 

If you’re doing machine flies and you stop the rep when your hands are still out in front of you… You can do reps there for sure, but you would build more muscle if you brought your chest into a big stretch where your hands come all the way out to your sides, and slightly behind you. 

That stretched position under load is robustly stimulates muscle growth. 

Some people train almost exclusively in a lengthened position and do lengthened partial reps where they stay primarily in that stretched position because they know just how advantageous it can be to train there.

So be sure that you’re including deep, full range of motion training, because not only do you get to use less weight and incur less fatigue on your joints and all that stuff, it actually directly promotes more growth. 

Don’t avoid the stretch.

 Reason 26 – Majoring in the minors 

A lot of people get so caught up in all the tiny little details about their diet and their training that they lose sight of all the bigger picture fundamentals. 

For example, I see a lot of guys get convinced that their supplement lineup has to be perfect:

• Bro, I gotta have my L carnitine, bro. 
• I gotta have my beta alanine. 
• I got my pump booster, bro. 

And yet, these are some of the guys who aren’t even consistently training in the gym.

Or people who are worried about nutrient timing, micronutrients, and mineral intake, even though they don’t know how many calories they’re eating.

It pays to think of things in a hierarchical structure. 

You want to focus on the biggest priority items first, the things that move the needle in the biggest way for you, before we get all caught up in all the tiny little details.

Nail all the basics down first.

Reason 27 – Low testosterone

This is a clinically diagnosable condition (hypogonadism) in which your testicles don’t produce enough testosterone.

This can affect how much muscle you build, how much fat you carry, and have a number of other nasty symptoms. 

The only way to know for sure, is to speak to your doctor and get a blood test done. 

If you have symptoms of low testosterone, like low sex drive, depression, anxiety, sleep interruptions, hair loss, or lack of muscle building, speak to your doctor about it.

They can tell you very definitively if you are within the normal reference range.

This is the real deal, and can make a huge difference. 

Reason 28 –  Eating a low carb diet

There’s no direct literature saying that low carb diets cause less muscle growth.

But we know that low carb diets can have an impact on training performance, specifically for higher training volumes.

And we know that insulin might help us to grow more muscle by shuttling more nutrients into our muscle cells. Eating more carbs helps our body to produce more insulin.

We also know that we can train harder and probably recover faster from training when we eat more carbs… which means that we’re able to do more training and adapt to more training.

Again, not a 100 percent conclusive one, but I encourage you to experiment with a higher carb diet, especially if you are someone who’s eating a keto diet or a low carb diet, and you find your training quality is in the dumps. 

At least for a week, two weeks, or a month, try eating some more carbohydrates.

• You might feel that your performance in the gym goes way up. 
• You might find that your ability to last throughout sessions goes way up. 
• You might find that you get crazier pumps in the muscles, like skin splitting pumps. 
• You might find that you bounce back from your training way faster, and you’re ready to get back into it, you know, multiple days sooner.

If you have a lot of those boxes getting ticked, maybe the low carb diet just isn’t for you.

Reason 29 – Avoiding soreness

I’ve heard of lots of people who go to the gym and do some dumbbell bench press on the Monday and on Tuesday they’re like, oh my pecs are so sore, I guess I overdid it. 

Maybe they’ll wait a week before they come back in and they’ll go easier next week.

Delayed onset muscle soreness is not a sign that you did too much.

Consistent, overlapping soreness between sessions is probably a sign that you might be doing too much.

But a little bit of soreness along the way as you’re pushing for progressively better performance in the gym is to be expected. 

It might even be a good proxy that you are doing the things that are driving muscle growth.

Things like producing a ton of tension, producing a ton of metabolites, taking sets near failure, and training in deep ranges of motion – those are all things that make you sore. 

Those things also sound like the type of things that we need to do to grow more muscle.

Reason 30 – Hyperfocusing on sensations 

You’ll see guys in the gym get in their own head about what they can feel in their muscles. 

We’ve got this guy who goes to the same gym as me and you can see him doing these little rows he’s doing with the machine and he’s moving it just 1 inch back and forth… squeezing his back and flexing it.

Or you’ll see this with women who are training their glutes in the gym, and just focusing on the sensation of squeezing the muscle they’re trying to work. 

That feeling doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re causing muscle growth. instead of hyper focusing on what it feels like… start first by controlling the eccentrics, training through a full range of motion, and giving a good hard effort near failure.

I guarantee you, you’re going to feel that muscle. 

A mind-muscle connection is going to be the last thing you’re going to be worried about.

Don’t worry if you can’t feel things right away – just give a solid effort with good technique.

After a couple of weeks, there’s going to be no guesswork.

Reason 31 – Avoiding certain types of equipment

Your boy is a powerlifter at heart. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love barbell training. I love squatting, bench pressing, and deadlifting. 

But, if I were to be completely honest, it would be unwise for me to exclusively train with a barbell if I wanted to get more jacked. 

• Squats can build my quads, for sure.
• Deadlifts grow my glutes, my hamstrings, and my back.
• Bench pressing is great for my chest. 

But I don’t need to be dogmatic and say that barbells are the best for growth.

There’s nothing wrong with training with dumbbells. 

There’s nothing wrong with machines.

Varying your training and using different pieces of equipment can have huge benefits. 

Also, using only a barbell can cause a higher degree of fatigue for every single rep that you do. Let’s say I’m doing squats to build my quads. My quads are definitely getting trained, but it’s also going to fatigue my lower back a bit.

If I were using the leg press, for example, the only thing I feel is my quads just ripping in half when I’m leg pressing, which means I can do an overall higher amount of work throughout the week and probably do more volume and grow more.

Or, let’s say I’m only doing my pressing with a barbell.

This is a real life example that’s happened to me, btw. 

All of a sudden, my left shoulder is just bothering me every time I bench.. I feel it. 

What are my options? 

Do incline barbell pressing? Do wide grip? Do narrow grip barbell pressing? That’s it. 

If I’m not competing in powerlifting, I don’t need to bench with a barbell. 

Load is load and how I use it is really just up to me. I can use dumbbells, I can use machines, I can use cables, and I can still train my pecs without bothering my shoulder.

That means I can stay in the game longer and train harder in many different ways.

You don’t have to stick with barbells or even free weights, in general.

Reason 32 – Not resting long enough between sets 

If you are jumping directly back into your next set, while your arms are still fried, you’re still out of breath, you’re still woozy and out of it from your first set, you’re not going to be able to give as good of an effort on that next set. 

In most cases, resting longer is better than resting shorter for muscle growth. 

Rest as long as you need. 

When you are ready and your muscle is no longer burning, you’re no longer out of breath, and you’re mentally ready to push hard again, then pick the weights back up and go for it.

Don’t just stick to some arbitrary number like 30, seconds, and think that you’re gonna be ready even though your head’s still spinning, you still feel like you’re underwater after the leg press, and you can barely walk. 

You’re not ready for your next set.

Just rest until you’re ready, and then go for it.

Reason 33 – You’re not a constant learner. 

I’m sure that by the virtue of the fact that you’re reading this article right now and you made it to the 7000 word mark, or whatever this is, you’re learning more about muscle growth and how to actually drive progress for yourself.

That’s fantastic. Never stop that process. 

Because building muscle and getting stronger in the gym are definitely physical processes, but this whole game is also very much a psychological one and a mental one.

Improving the quality of your inputs with building more muscle improves the quality of your results. 

If you can learn about how muscle growth works, learn how to train harder, learn how to train smarter, recover smarter, and be better with your diet… you’re going to make better progress.

The way to ensure that process is always capped out at its maximum limit is just to continually iterate, improve, and learn.

Keep a file, if you have to, or a notebook, or some kind of journal where you keep notes about all the things you learn. 

If you’re relatively new to this stuff, just start by writing down all the things that you see people write about and talk about. 

‘Training close to failure seems like a good idea’

‘Doing sets of 5 to 25 reps roughly, seems like most people talk about that for muscle growth’

Write this stuff down and keep a running log.

Document your training results and just be a student of the game. 

The more you learn, the more you’ll be able to apply and the better progress you’ll make.

Here are 4 of the first fitness books you should read… if you want to dive deeper. 

All in all… 

Be consistent, stay focused, and work hard at the fundamentals.

With a little patience, you’ll succeed. 

A little update on what’s going on in my world – I’m finishing up the last bit of fat loss I wanted to accomplish, then we’re going into basically a year-long bulk! 

I’m continuing to put out all the best free information that I can for you all every single week. 

If you’d like support, accountability, and a streamlined process to implement all this info – shoot me an email to matteo@marrastrength.com with the word ‘accountable‘ in the subject line. 

It would be great to have you in our accountability group for guys who want to get in shape. 

Just email me, and I’ll get you all the details!