You workout like a beast, train for hours, hit all the muscles and eat like a king but when you see yourself in the mirror, you observe no or little muscle growth. Relatable? Well, you are not the only one struggling with this problem.
There are many who aspire to become muscular but lack of guidance or lack of proper diet prevents them from achieving their goals. Building muscle might sound an easy task while looking at all those videos of fitness enthusiasts or following the social media posts of your favourite athletes but it is not. Bodybuilding requires consistency, dedication, hard work and patience. Lack of any of these four factors might frustrate you and hamper your progress.
When you shift to a healthy diet and a healthy lifestyle, you adapt to a lot of new changes. Changes that might or might not work for your individual goals. A key factor of achieving success is figuring out the changes that are actually working for your body. You might try a certain diet and it might not work for you in the long run.
This puts all your efforts into vain. In such cases, you need to do smart work. Your trainer might guide you towards your goal but it is you who eventually has to put in all the hard work. But if you feel that you are working as hard as it takes and are taking the necessary diet as well, these might be the 8 mistakes that might be hampering your progress.
Not Eating Enough Protein
Protein is what fuels your muscles. Protein contains amino acids that are critical in building muscles and repairing muscle tissues. Workout leads to the breaking of older muscle tissues and when you don’t consume enough protein, your body doesn’t get amino acid that is essential for the recovery of your muscle tissues. You need to consume 1.5 to 1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
You don’t need to consume meat to get your protein. Foods like soyabean, paneer, nuts, almonds and apples have rich amounts of protein as well.
Drinking Habit
Grabbing a glass of beer or wine once in a while is ok but if you are habitual of ending your day with several glasses of hard drink, bodybuilding is not for you if speaking frankly. You need to drop one of the two habits. When you consume a lot of alcohol, the antioxidants that are critical for muscle growth are used for metabolising the alcohol. The muscle growth may be hampered in this case.
You need to restrict or limit your alcohol consumption to a few glasses a month if you want to see your muscles grow.
Doing Too Much Cardio
A little cardio is ok to open up or warm up the body and burn the extra calories but overdoing anything is not good and cardio is no different. Doing too much cardio can take you from burning calories to burning muscles literally. You may lose all your pump. If you are someone who aims to grow bigger and wider in size, weight training must occupy the major timeshare of your workout routine. A little cardio session before or after the weight training is OK.
Also Read, Tiger Shroff’s Exercise Regime & Special Diet
Overtraining
Just like doing too much cardio, overtraining might hamper your muscle growth. With overtraining, comes the risk of injury or workout boredom. ‘Go hard or Go home’ works only to a certain extent. You need to give your body enough time to recover before you hit the gym once again. Assess the amount of tension your body can bear and instead of going berserk, try a progressive approach and increase the intensity of your workout after a few weeks.
Dehydration
Over 70 percent of our body is water and no matter how much protein or carbs you consume, your body needs 6-8 litres of water per day. Keeping yourself is critical for proper digestion of the protein and carbs. It is also important for preventing your muscles from getting dried up.
Drinking plenty of water fuels your body provides it with the essential energy for workout, helps in dissolving the essential nutrients and also promotes muscle growth. Whenever you feel you are thirsty, drink one to two glasses of water.
Ditching Carbs
If you intend to grow bigger and wider, you need to consume plenty of carbs just like plenty of protein. You need to make sure that your diet does not contain a lot of food items that lack carbs. Carbs contain glycogen that is essential for lifting enough and make your muscles grow. Carbs are also a great source of energy that prevent you from feeling tired during the workout. Lack of carbs in your diet not only hampers your training but also affects muscle growth.
Taking Too Much Stress
Taking stress is neither good for the mind nor for the body. Stress increases the level of cortisol in the body- the hormone that increases the appetite and storage of fat. Apart from this, taking too much stress also prevents the body cells from using glucose. This may lead to the breaking down of muscle proteins. This process may slow down muscle growth. If you want to grow bigger and muscular, try to keep stress at bay.
Insufficient Sleep
Sleep is one of the three most important factors of bodybuilding apart from workout and diet. Quality sleep is key for growing muscles and if you don’t get enough sleep, your muscles won’t grow. When you don’t get enough sleep, your muscles don’t get enough rest to recover. It also increases the level of cortisol that affects the body’s human growth hormone and prevents the body from storing glycogen. All these things affect the body negatively and prevent your muscles from growing.
