You deserve to feel intellectually satisfied and accomplished if you follow a Focused program for working out. Still, more importantly, you deserve to see and feel progress in your physical fitness.
Even with a healthy diet and regular exercise, if you feel like something is keeping you from reaching your goals or you’re just not seeing the results you feel you should, it’s possible that your post-workout routines are to blame.
What Kills Your Gains? | Top 7 Reasons
1. Not Being Consistent
Continually failing to carry out your aim and plan will not cause any muscle growth, building on the prior point. Whether you will have any major muscular hypertrophy or not will likely depend on this, which is the biggest deciding factor.
You can have the greatest effective routine in terms of science, but it won’t help a thing if you don’t follow it consistently. To accurately gauge your improvement, choose a reliable training plan and stick with it for at least 6 to 8 weeks.
2. You Do Not Follow the Law Of Progressive Overload
Progressive overload occurs when you steadily increase the weight, frequency, or number of repetitions in your strength training program. Your body will be put to the test, as a result, strengthening your musculoskeletal system.
Although progressive overload is typically utilized in strength training, the same concept may be applied to any sort of exercise, including cardiovascular endurance exercises like running.
You may prevent plateauing, which occurs when your body becomes accustomed to the type of exercise you’re performing, by mixing up your exercises and increasing the strain in your muscles. You might feel stronger and more fit after a progressive overload.
3. Using The Same Routine
The same workout every day has some negative effects on both our physical and mental health. You run the danger of getting bored with the routine and losing interest in training if you perform the same activity every day.
The same daily habit can cause excessive discomfort or strain. When the same muscle groups are used repeatedly, there is no time for your muscles to recover or grow. Without enough rest, excessive exercise of any kind increases the chance of pain or damage.
You may stop noticing improvements if the exercise gets too simple for you. Getting in shape is all about feeling and seeing physical benefits for many people.
When you have consistently, as your physical fitness improves and your body becomes accustomed to the activity, the odds are that if you’ve been continuously repeating the same program, it will start to get simpler.
4. Not Training Using A Sufficient Level Of Intensity
Probably the most crucial aspect of your workout is intensity. You’ll notice changes in your weight, body fat percentage, endurance, and strength when you exercise vigorously enough to make your body stronger. Low, moderate, or intense are standard terms used to characterize exercise intensity.
Low-intensity exercise slightly increases your heart rate before maintaining it—your heart rate increases during a moderately intense workout. You’ll be moving more quickly, perspiring more heavily, and sweating. Exercise of a vigorous intensity raises your heart rate, gets your blood circulating, and makes you breathe heavily.
Your workouts will benefit greatly if you increase their power. Regular, brisk exercise is beneficial for your health. According to a small study that involved ten male participants, 45 minutes of strenuous exercise increased calorie expenditure and led to a 14-hour post-workout energy expenditure.
5. Not Recovering From Injuries
Putting a lot of stress on your muscles, joints, and connective tissue will stimulate muscle growth. Because of this, according to simple principles to maintain the strength of your joints and connective tissue will protect you from injuries, which are the absolute last thing you want to happen.
A decent warm-up is essential to lubricate your joints, transport blood to the nearby connective tissue, and prepare your body for a new workout. Additionally, you should always perform exercises with good form and technique, but heavy lifts require it the most.
6. Not Tracking Your Progress
According to research, the constancy of the everyday actions required to achieve your objective is improved by merely recording your fitness progress. It also enables you to determine what has to be changed in order to achieve your goals and what is currently working.
The issue is that a lot of us make the error of either not tracking anything, tracking the incorrect things, or concentrating only on one component of progress.
Afterward, we soon lose motivation if we don’t see progress in that area. One of the greatest methods to monitor your progress is to keep tabs on how fit and strong you are becoming both inside and outside of the gym.
7. Not Following A Prior Diet
The main priorities on which you should concentrate are meeting your daily macronutrient objectives and calorie requirements. In the end, it doesn’t matter how many calories you consume after working out if you don’t consume enough to meet your daily caloric demands.
You must have a positive energy balance, meaning that you consume more calories from food and liquids than you expend via exercise and other activities to gain weight.
In order to lose weight, you must have a negative energy balance, meaning that you must burn more calories than you take in. Establishing your calorie needs is the first step in gaining weight.
Foods To Avoid When Trying To Gain Muscle
1. Alcohol
While consuming alcohol in moderation or on rare occasions is unlikely to have an impact on your ability to gain muscle, doing so can surely slow down the process.
A small study found that even when they consumed protein, people who drank alcohol after working out saw slower rates of muscle growth. Instead of wasting those calories on alcohol, which doesn’t contain any healthy nutrients, you’re better off utilizing them on foods that do.
2. Low-Carb Diets
When you follow a low-carb diet, you consume more protein and fat and fewer carbohydrates. White bread, white rice, and anything else derived from refined grains all have low carbohydrate content.
Low-carbohydrate diets can cause blood sugar levels to rise more quickly, which may slow down protein synthesis. In comparison to whole grains, refined grains have lower levels of protein and other nutrients that are good for building muscle.
3. Foods High In Caffeine
Stay away from caffeine in sugary beverages and stick to coffee or tea, but watch your intake, especially if you use a fat burner or pre-workout supplements like origin, finaflex, pro supp’s. Overall, caffeine is not necessary to experience weight loss or observe improvement in your physique.
4. Deep-Fried Foods
You should probably eat before you go to the gym if you want to work out there for a long time so that you don’t get hungry.
In order to avoid stomach upset, it is better to avoid deep-fried foods because they take longer to digest. The inability to work out as hard as you would like due to an unsettled stomach can have an effect on your ability to grow muscle.
Tips For Muscle Growth
1. Have Protein Rich Diet
Protein is the most important nutrient when it comes to muscular growth. According to recent studies, people who are trying to grow muscle through exercise should consume 0.72 grams of protein per pound (1.6 grams per kilogram) of body weight each day. However, your best bet is usually to eat a range of protein sources.
2. Follow A Proper Workout Regime
There isn’t a secret muscle-building recipe that can give you immediate results. But if you make reasonable goals and stick to them, you will see results.
The most difficult element of any lifestyle change is often getting started. You can position yourself for success by developing muscle-building habits. It won’t happen overnight for you to develop into Hercules. Results come with time. Avoid getting sucked into what the scale says.
3. Get Enough Sleep
To grow muscle, you also need to get enough sleep. While you sleep, a number of things occur, including muscle growth and restoration. Your body releases catabolic hormones like cortisol when you don’t get enough sleep, which inhibits the creation of new muscles. Adults should get 7-9 hours of sleep every night.
However, Pearce advises aiming for at least eight hours of sleep when exercising to gain muscle. Getting enough sleep keeps anabolic hormone levels high, promoting muscular growth and recuperation.
4. Drink Plenty Of Water
Before, after, and throughout your workouts, drink a tonne of water. Dehydration can slow down protein synthesis, according to a 2003 assessment of the literature.
Along with accelerating protein breakdown, it can raise your chance of injury. You shouldn’t drink a certain amount of water every day on its own. But aim to drink 16 to 20 ounces of liquid four hours before your workout.
Final Thoughts
Resistance exercise and eating the right foods are commitments that are necessary for building muscle. Compound and isolated movements with weights should make up most of a muscle-building workout plan; however, the exercises, sets, and repetitions should be changed to promote steady, long-term improvements in muscle size and strength.
In order to build muscle, you need to consume enough protein, fat, and calories to exceed your daily energy expenditure—but not by a significant amount that you wind up gaining too much weight.
Even the majority of people can achieve significant improvements in muscle mass with months to years of diligent exercise. In order to achieve your muscle-building objectives, you must lift heavy, eat healthily, and practice consistency.
