Jason Ferruggia Tips!

[I'M A MAN]

Okei,jeg har lest på nettet.. så fant jeg noe om de vanligeste feilene når du skal bygge muskler, tenkte det kunne være interessant.


Muscle Building Mistake # 1:
Training Too Often

The number one mistake I see hardgainers making is that they train too often. I was once the exact same way and used to go to the gym six days per week in the hopes that it would help me grow faster. Sadly, the only thing it did was make me smaller and weaker.

There is absolutely no need for anyone to spend more than four days per week in the gym. In fact, three days actually delivers the best results in most cases. Too many people are still obsessed with the “more is better” attitude, yet those are the ones that never seem to get anywhere in their quest for a more muscular physique. Week after week, month after month, year after year they look exactly same and are still lifting the exact same weights.

Training too often only leads to a state of overtraining, and overtraining leads to losses in size and strength. Remember, you don’t grow when you’re training; you grow when you’re recovering.

Furthermore, after a brutal workout, it’s not just your muscles that need to recover, but also your central nervous system. Your CNS typically takes significantly longer than your muscles to recover.

Also, when you train too often, it can be hard to keep your motivation up from one workout to the next. It’s very refreshing and beneficial to have a day off between sessions to ensure full physical and mental recovery. That way you will be fully prepared for battle next time you enter the gym.

For all of these reasons I recommend that you limit your training days to no more than three per week.

Muscle Building Mistake # 2:
Training for Too Long

Many times I go to a public gym and finish my entire workout before others even finish their first exercise of the day. When new clients come to train with me for the first time, they are absolutely shocked at how short their workouts are and by the fact that they are getting significantly better results in half the time.

Spending too much time in the gym is another thing that leads to overtraining. When you first start your workout your body begins to increase its release of testosterone. This peaks at 27 minutes. At the 45 minute mark your testosterone levels return to baseline.

If you train longer than that your testosterone levels will slowly start to drop below baseline and your cortisol (the stress hormone that eats muscle and increases body-fat storage) levels will slowly creep up. By the one hour mark your cortisol levels will be higher than your testosterone levels. Obviously this is the worst possible scenario.

That is why I never allow my clients to train for longer than 45 minutes and would strongly suggest that you don’t either. You will be shocked at how much faster you will grow.

Muscle Building Mistake # 3:
Doing Too Many Sets per Workout

If I had to take a guess I would say that most people do somewhere between 20 and 30 sets every time they go to the gym. The question is why? Why would you possibly want to do that many sets? Why would you want to abuse your joints with that much volume? Despite what you may have heard or read, and despite what the big guy at the gym tells you, there is absolutely no need to ever do that many sets.

When you do a large number of sets it’s impossible to put the required amount of focus or energy into each one of them. With fewer sets your workout has a greater sense of purpose and urgency. Knowing that you have 25 more sets to go after you first set of the day is a bit daunting. But if you only have a limited number of sets to complete you will go all out and do your best to make sure each one really counts. And that’s exactly the kind of effort required to get big and strong.

That is why I recommend a grand total of only 10-16 sets per workout! This is a far cry from the norm, but then again normal training only produces normal results. We want extraordinary results. And the way to get them is not by doing what everyone else does.

So start training three days per week, cut your workouts down to 45 minutes and don’t do more than 10-16 sets at any one session. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the results.

Muscle Building Mistake #4:
Not Training Each Muscle Group or
Body Part Often Enough


Most bodybuilding programs tell you to train each body part once per week. You do chest, shoulders and triceps on Monday, legs on Wednesday and back and biceps on Friday. This system is all but useless to skinny hardgainers who want to pack on the most muscle in the shortest time possible.

One of the most important keys to stimulating muscle growth is training frequency. You must train a muscle more often than once per week or your gains will come at a snails pace. If you were learning to surf of play the guitar surely you would do it more frequently than once every seven days. So why should your weight training be any different? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Hardgainers should be hitting each muscle group at least twice per week, and in most cases three times will be more beneficial. Think about it logically for a second…

Do you think your chest will grow faster if it gets trained 52 times per year or 104 times? Or what about 156 times?

The answer is obvious.

Ditch the once per week routines, switch to three times per week and you will immediately jump start your progress.

Muscle Building Mistake #5:
Not Lifting Heavy Weights

If you want to get massive, you have to lift massive weights; it’s as simple as that. Yes, some genetically gifted and juiced to the gills bodybuilders can grow with lighter weights. That doesn’t mean you can, though. Getting big is hard work and requires a lot of discipline, desire and dedication, all of which are needed to move big iron.

Heavy lifting stimulates the type IIB muscle fibers which are the ones with the greatest potential for growth. Now this doesn’t mean that you should ever use weights you can’t handle with good form or that you have to be doing only singles and one rep max attempts in your training. Far from it. But whatever rep range you are training in you had better be sure that the weight is heavy and you are busting your ass. You can’t pussyfoot around with light weights and ever expect to build an ounce of muscle.

Like 8 time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman said, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but don’t nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights.”

He called you out. Now you gotta step up.

[I'M A MAN]

How to Improve Your Chin Ups By Jason Ferruggia.


Franco+Columbo How to Improve Your Chin UpsThe last post I wrote about how to improve your chin ups detailed how to get from zero to one. Once you get to one you will, in time, work your way up to sets of five or even ten reps. But again, you will hit a wall at some point and be unable to make any more improvements. So today I am going to offer a very easy, completely unscientific method that will help you add more reps to your chins.

One of the major problems is that for most average guys a set of chins is a five rep max. Therefore it is true CNS draining Max Effort work. And they repeatedly do this time after time, workout after workout. There is no other exercise that you would continually max out on and take to near death failure like you do with chin ups. You would know better than to do that with squats and deads. But everyone is fine with doing it on chins. And I truly believe that to be one of the major reasons why more people don’t improve on their chins with any regularity.

The other problem is that there isn’t enough variety in the rep ranges and when you continually do those five rep max sets you are never doing anything to improve your endurance in that movement pattern. To get better on the 225 pound bench test you would do things like strap pushups, ascending board presses or pushups, high rep dumbbell presses, etc. on one day to build your endurance and some heavy pressing on another day to build your strength. But most people don’t take this approach with their chins; they only work on the lower end of the rep scale trying to improve strength, but do nothing to improve endurance. And obviously this doesn’t always work too well.

So the simple solution is to throw in more high rep work; which would again involve the use of the bands. The bands got you from zero chins to one and now they can help get you from your current plateau up to a new PR.

Exactly how, you ask…

Any way you want. Simply using more variety will be enough to do the trick and help you break out of a rut. Some workouts you can use the light band, some workouts you can use the mini bands, some you can use the average bands, some you can do with bodyweight, and some you can do weighted. Just mix it up each program and keep getting stronger on each variety of chins you do.

But remember not to go to failure and let your form break down. Again, most people are smart enough not to let their squat turn into a good morning, but everyone is ok with climbing up the invisible ladder, swinging, rest-pausing, severely protracting their shoulders and doing whatever else they can to make their final reps on chin ups look as ugly as possible. Don’t do this if you want to get stronger.

Below is a video from this past summer that we shot at Renegade Gym of Jen doing chin ups. She bangs out 13 picture perfect reps with no band. That’s something that most guys can’t do. In the video in the previous post about how to improve your chin ups she did 15 WITH the band. That was less than eight months earlier. The way she made such dramatic improvements was through variety and building up her endurance in that movement pattern with higher reps sets. She always did a variety of different grips and we varied her reps from 3-20. Some months she did chins twice per week (one day heavy, one day light), others only once. This is another way to boost your chins. Hit them 2-5 times per week for a month and then cut back to only once per week for the next month. The supercompensation effect from the reduced loading will often lead to improved performance in the second month.

[I'M A MAN]

Muscle Building Mistake #7:
Training Strictly for the Pump

We already know that you need to lift heavy weights, but what about getting a pump? After decades of debate many people still don’t know if you should be training for a pump or not. I’m here to tell you that the answer is a resounding no. For those that don’t know, a pump is nothing more than blood rushing to the muscle while working out which causes it to swell. There is nothing inherently magical about it.

But that’s not to say that a pump is completely useless; just that it should never be the focus of your workouts. Everyone knows that you can get a pump from doing 50 pushups or going for a swim, but neither of those activities is going to build massive amounts of muscle.

Lifting heavy and beating your previous numbers should always be your main goal at each and every training session. However, some trainers ardently insist that getting a good pump is a necessary part of the growth process.

While there are no scientific studies proving this theory to be true there are some possible benefits to be gained from getting a pump.

For one, a good pump may be able to stretch the fascia, which is the sheath that encases your muscles. If it is tight it will be difficult for the muscle to grow. This is just theory but may hold some validity.

A pump also brings growth inducing and healing nutrients into the muscle and enhances amino acid uptake.

Finally, the ability to get a good pump with ease is a sign that you are well fed, well hydrated and well rested and are in an anabolic state and ready to grow. By the time you finish your first few sets you should have some kind of pump going, otherwise you probably shouldn’t be training that day.

So while there are some benefits to getting a pump you should never, ever chase the pump or be training with the sole purpose of getting a pump. Going heavy should be your focus, and if you can get a good pump with heavy weights, watch out, because you’re primed to grow!

Muscle Building Mistake #8:
Using the Wrong Exercises

If you are wasting time doing triceps kickbacks, lateral raises, leg extensions, cable crossovers and Smith machine squats you can forget about ever getting big and strong. Machine training should make up a very, very small portion of your overall workout volume (if at all) and isolation exercises an even smaller percentage. In fact, isolation exercises should rarely be used by anyone with less than two years of training experience and even then they should be used sparingly.

Big muscle groups such as the back, chest, shoulders and legs should rarely be trained with any isolation movements whatsoever.

The way to get big is by using big, badass compound exercises that allow you to use a lot of weight and pile the plates on.

These exercises are squats, deadlifts, cleans, bent over rows, chin ups, dips, dumbbell presses, military presses, weighted pushups and barbell curls.

Mistake #9:
Trying to Build Muscle & Lose
Fat Simultaneously

This is a very common mistake that I see people making all the time. Despite what the muscle mags and over hyped supplement ads may tell you, it’s physiologically impossible to gain large amounts of muscle and lose body fat at the same time. They are two contradictory goals.

To build muscle you have to eat more calories than you burn. To lose fat you have to burn more calories than you eat. While there are some other factors to consider and it’s not always that simple, that pretty much sums it up. So to get huge you know that you have to be eating a ton of food. And that’s never conducive to getting shredded. To get lean you have to diet strictly and do cardio, and that’s never conducive to getting big.

Now, that’s not to say that you can’t gain some muscle and lose some body fat at the same time, because you can. But neither one will be maximized. So if your main goal is to gain twenty pounds of mass you should put the quest for a six pack on the back shelf for a few months and just focus on getting jacked.

The only people who can gain a decent amount of muscle and get ripped at the same time are beginners, genetic freaks and steroid users. Everyone else should pick one goal or the other. My recommendation is to eat and train for size first, while doing as little cardio as is needed to keep your body fat in check without compromising your size and strength gains, then switch over to fat loss phase later.

Muscle Building Mistake #10:
Not Eating Enough of the RIGHT
Foods to Build Muscle

To gain muscle you need to eat a surplus of calories. Studies have shown that sumo wrestlers actually have more muscle per square inch than competitive bodybuilders do. And most sumo wrestlers don’t even lift weights! That right there goes to show you just how powerfully anabolic (muscle building) eating is. But of course, you don’t want to end up looking like a sumo wrestler. That is why you have to eat intelligently and make smart food choices.

To gain muscle while minimizing fat gain you need to eat several small meals per day. You also need to time your carbohydrate intake so that you ingest the majority of you carbs during the two critical windows of opportunity each day when your insulin sensitivity is highest and when your body is primed to grow. These two times are first thing in the morning and right after your workouts. That’s not to say that you can’t eat carbs at other times, as you should, but that you should consume the bulk of them during those two windows.

Be sure that you eat every two to three hours and have protein, fat and carbs at every meal before 6pm. At night your insulin sensitivity decreases, meaning that you should avoid starchy carbs if you don’t want to get fat.

It would also be a wise decision to eat organic foods whenever possible seeing that the majority of our food is polluted with chemicals and artificial poisons these days.

But whatever you do, make sure you eat big and eat often. Without the proper fuel for growth all the hard training you do will be a complete waste of time.

[I'M A MAN]

Muscle Building Mistake #11:
Falling For the High Protein Scam

High protein diets are a scam that have been pushed on the bodybuilding public for decades. The first food pyramids were actually paid for by the meat and dairy industry. This explains why the recommended intakes of these foods were so high. Later, when protein powders were first created, marketers with dollar signs in their eyes began to over-hype the value of protein in the muscle building process. They couldn’t push carb powders because most people can easily shovel down enough rice and pasta on a daily basis. So they ran with the protein powders and began to promote them like they were the greatest muscle builders since steroids. Eventually many companies toned down the hype surrounding their product but not the hype about high protein diets and their positive effect on building muscle.

Friends, this is simply not true. I hate to tell you this, but you’ve been lied to. It’s all part of the scam perpetrated by big business designed to make money. Like bodybuilding legend Mike Mentzer said, “High protein diets are nonsense. Muscles are 70% water. If they could sell you a bottle of water of forty bucks they would!”

To this point, I bring up prisoners in state or federal penitentiaries who lift weights regularly. There are always tons of incredibly jacked guys in there who get no more than 50-75 grams of low quality protein per day yet still possess massive amounts of muscle.

They are not slugging down some fancy ion exchange whey shakes all day but they sure are growing. Regardless of what anyone tells you, gaining weight still does come down to calories in versus calories out; no matter how rudimentary that formula may be considered these days.

Recently a researcher named Tarnopolsky performed a study in which weight trained individuals consumed a drink containing either: 5, 10, 20 or 40 grams of protein immediately after their workout. Each of the groups increased protein synthesis, but their results were dose dependant.
Up to 20 grams, that is. While the 20 gram group significantly increased protein synthesis over the 10 gram group, the 40 gram group did not significantly increase protein synthesis over the 20 gram group.

So any more than 20-30 grams of protein at one sitting isn’t necessarily going to benefit you in any significant way.

The conclusion to be drawn from this most recent study is what I have been saying all along… You don’t need all that protein. In fact, eating too much will force your body to burn protein instead of fat for energy and can make getting leaner a more difficult process.

If you want to get huge, focus on carbohydrates and stop taking out a loan to pay the butcher and wasting money on all the fancy protein powders you don’t need.

Now that your diet’s on track it’s time to address the one thing that will save you boatloads of money in your quest for more muscle.

Muscle Building Mistake #12:
Getting Your Advice from Bodybuilding Magazines

Bodybuilding magazines are filled with misinformation about training and nutrition. Much of this is due to the fact that many of the writers are steroid using, genetically gifted bodybuilders themselves. Those who aren’t are still in the habit of writing articles geared toward those types of people. Most of us don’t use steroids and don’t have anywhere close to the amazing muscle building genetics that most pro bodybuilders have.

For this reason, we can absolutely not afford to take the advice of those pro bodybuilders. The volume recommended in those articles is often far above and beyond anything a natural lifter or bodybuilder could recover from.

Most of what you read in the large majority of muscle mags is aimed at the guy who either has great muscle building genetics or is using steroids. All of the top bodybuilders you see in the magazines are all using upwards of $100,000 year worth of muscle building drugs. And the workouts are purposely written to overtrain you so that you get fed up and eventually feel like you need to buy their supplements.

Also, you have to understand that writers don’t necessarily get paid to tell the truth, but only to write compelling articles which will help sell more magazines. They can only rehash the same advice so many times so they have to continually keep coming up with more nonsense to sell you. Much of that nonsense includes ridiculous programs that will only lead to overtraining and injuries.

The truth is that many bodybuilding authors who write for magazines and websites are actually paid to write training programs that don’t work and lead to a state of over training. You know why that is? It’s because nearly every major muscle magazine owns a supplement company.

Muscle Media owns EAS.

IronMan owns Muscle-Linc.

Muscle & Fitness and Flex own Weider.

Muscle Mag International owns Muscle Tech.

Muscular Development owns Twinlab.

Shocking, right? It’s quite a disgusting web of lies that thousands of guys fall prey to on a regular basis.

They give you training programs that don’t work which will hopefully lead to you getting frustrated and thinking that the only answer and hope for you is to buy their newest miracle supplement. It’s a lowdown dirty business.

Muscle Building Mistake #13:
Wasting Your Money on Overhyped, Bogus Supplements

If you’re like me you want to get big as fast as humanly possible and you’ve considered using supplements to help you do so. Many of you have probably used quite a few of them, in fact. And many of you, like me, probably wish you had that money back, don’t you?

The supplement industry is a billion dollar business these days and it’s run by crooks, ex-cons and soulless scam artists who will do whatever it takes to separate you from your money.

When I was younger and trying to get as big as possible I was forever trying every new miracle pill that came out. Over the course of several years I wasted close to $60,000.00 (not a misprint) on so called muscle building supplements like:

Supplements

    *
      Glutamine
    *
      Growth Hormone Boosters
    *
      HMB
    *
      Vanadyl Sulfate
    *
      Ribose
    *
      Methoxy
    *
      Pro Hormones
    *
      Amino Acid Pills
    *
      Creatine Booster Formulas
    *
      Weight Gain Powders


And too many others to count…

I routinely took all of the pills that I was told to, handful after handful. And I choked down all the mixtures and drinks that would supposedly give me the physique I was after… but none of it ever did a damn thing to help me build muscle.

Eventually I got incredibly sick from the supplements I was using and ended up in the hospital on more than one occasion. I have Utah Senator Orrin Hatch to thank for that as he is the one who chose not to regulate the supplement industry so that companies can put anything they want in the bottle without FDA approval!

Many of you are probably using some of those products right now and flushing your money down the toilet while you wait for the gains that never seem to come.

The honest, no BS truth is this…
97% of the Bodybuilding Supplements on the
Market Today Are Completely Useless!

Not only that, but all of those supplements you are taking might actually be robbing your body of precious muscle growth. In fact they can actually:

    * Damage your health
    * Lower your testosterone production
    * Elevate your estrogen levels
    * Reduce your thyroid output
    * Burn out your adrenal glands


Now, just because most supplements suck, that’s not to say they all do. Creatine is proven in multiple studies to work and has shown great results in real world cases. Omega 3 fish oil has countless benefits and should be taken by everyone interested in building muscle, losing fat and improving their overall health.

And one of the most underrated but most effective supplements are digestive enzymes. You’ll never hear much about digestive enzymes because they aren’t some high tech muscle building potion but the reality is that they may do more for you than anything else out there. As you age your enzyme pool decreases. When you don’t have enough enzymes your body can not regenerate itself as rapidly nor can you properly digest and assimilate the food you eat. This leads to less muscle and more fat.

There are a few other rarely discussed supplements that I cover in my exclusive supplement report that can make a big difference, but for now I hope that you realize the majority of supplements are a total waste of your money.

In Muscle Gaining Secrets I dish the dirt and reveal all the supplement industry’s dirty little secrets and lies. I even go so far as to name names. I have already pissed a lot of people off and gotten myself banned from certain websites and magazines but it was worth it to me in order to lift this shroud and expose these con artists for who they really are.

Muscle Building Mistake #14:
Ignoring the Importance of Proper Recovery

One thing many people fail to realize is that you don’t build muscle while you are in the gym. You build muscle after your workout, while you are recovering. The workout is simply the stimulus, after that you need to provide your body with adequate nutrition and ample rest otherwise you will never experience an ounce of muscle growth.

Many people overlook this and never give it a second thought. But if you want to build massive muscle in the least amount of time possible, then you are going to have to pay more attention to proper recovery methods. Immediately after training you need to consume an easily digestible mixture of carbohydrates and protein and should get some rest. Ideally a nap would be best here.

The worst possible scenario would be to skip eating and head out for a late night of drinking. In fact, if you want to make rapid gains over the next 12-16 weeks you should seriously consider laying off the booze entirely.

Some other ways to boost your recovery are meditation, massage, foam rolling and stretching; all of which should be incorporated into your weekly schedule if you really want to maximize your rate of progress.

Muscle Building Mistake #15:
Not Getting Enough Sleep

This goes hand in hand with number 12 and is really the most important recovery method there is. Without ample sleep you’ll never see significant muscle growth. The majority of your size gains come while you’re sleeping. That’s when your body heals and repairs the damage that has been inflicted upon it during your workout and the course of your other waking hours.

To maximize your growth potential you need between eight and ten hours of sleep per day. This can be achieved with a long slumber at night or with a shorter sleep and a nap during the day. As long as you get the required eight to ten hours it really doesn’t make a difference.

Lack of sleep will lower your testosterone levels and increase your cortisol levels.

For those that may have forgotten, testosterone is the hormone that builds muscle and cortisol is the hormone that eats muscle tissue and increases body fat. You do not want to screw up that ratio if you want to build a head turning physique.

Sleep deprivation also decreases your insulin sensitivity, meaning that your body’s ability to tolerate and process carbohydrates without getting fat will be severely compromised.

Without sufficient sleep you will never build the big, strong, lean physique you spend so much time working to achieve. Don’t negate all the hard work you put in at the gym by staying up all night. More sleep equals more muscle.

Starting tonight you should make a conscious effort to get to bed earlier and eliminate all the distractions that screw up your ability to get a good nights sleep. Keep your room as dark as possible and always try to go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day.

[I'M A MAN]

Muscle Building Mistake #16:
Not Maximizing Your Body’s Natural Testosterone Production

Did you know that men today have an average testosterone level that is 50% lower than males from 50 years ago?

Infertility rates are higher than ever and countless men suffer from impotence. (Which seems hard to believe with girls like the one pictured around, but it’s true.)

And it’s continually getting worse. This is due to countless factors too numerous to list here but needless to say this is a major epidemic and we need to do something about it immediately!

If you want to grow like the bodybuilders who are juiced to the gills on steroids and become the real alpha male type that drives women crazy, you have to turn yourself into a natural testosterone and growth-hormone producing machine.

We’ve already discussed a few ways to do this such as using exercises with a high level of neuromuscular activation, which have been scientifically proven to trigger testosterone production.

Next, you have to be sure you never exceed 45 minutes during your workouts.

We just discussed the importance of sleep. Another thing to remember is that alcohol and drugs will reduce your testosterone levels and need to be eliminated from your muscle building plan.

Stress is another testosterone killer and has to be reduced.

You should also know that if you are eating the wrong foods at the wrong time you may be in for a devastating hormone crash that will cause rapid loses in muscle mass and the unwanted accumulation of body fat.

In fact, many of the foods you are consuming on a daily basis are pumping your body full of estrogen and slowly turning you into a weak, soft, girly man of the first degree. Unless you eliminate these foods from your diet right now you will never have a ripped muscular physique and might even be getting fitted for a bra (or Mansierrre to Seinfeld fans) sooner than later.

Some of these foods are saturated fat, soy and non organic meat and produce that are pumped full of hormones.

Instead you should be focusing on testosterone boosting foods like wild catch, fatty fish, nuts and seeds and anti estrogenic foods like citrus fruits and cruciferous vegetables.

Finally, you should know that having sex on a regular basis has been shown to boost testosterone levels!

Muscle Building Mistake # 17:
Not Having a Plan

Back in the 80’s the “Instinctive Training Principle” was popular amongst a great deal of professional bodybuilders. They advised that in order to “keep your muscles guessing” and to prevent your body from ever adapting to your workouts you should do something completely different every time you entered the gym.

This would supposedly prevent stagnation and put you on the path to incredible muscle growth. The reality is that training like this leads you absolutely nowhere but to disappointment and frustration.

Unfortunately this is what the large majority of gym goers do on a regular basis and is one of the primary reasons why most people never make any progress at all. Simply going to the gym and doing whatever you feel like doing on that particular day is the worst approach to building muscle that you could possibly take.

Like the old cliche goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.

In order to induce rapid muscle growth you must follow a scientifically mapped out plan which allows you to make progress at each and every workout and can be easily tracked on a daily basis in a training journal.

You have to know exactly what you’re going to do at every workout, long before you ever get to the gym.

And each workout has to have a specific, measureable goal that needs to be focused on and achieved in order to ensure continual progress and head turning size gains.

You simply can’t just walk into the gym and wing it if you ever expect to get great results. Without a program to follow you are basically doing just that and hoping for the best. There is also no way to quantify your progress when you take this approach.

If you decided that you wanted to become a world class guitar player you wouldn’t just randomly do whatever you felt like doing when you picked up the guitar each day in hopes that it would somehow turn you into the next Jimi Hendrix. On the contrary, you would go for lessons or buy a CD or book that teaches you exactly what to do each and every time you practice.

In other words, you would have a plan to help you achieve success no matter the endeavor that you chose to pursue. For some reason, weight training is the only activity in the world where the majority of participants don’t have a well thought out, fully detailed plan. This is a large part of the reason why so few people ever achieve the muscular physique they’re after.

For an easy to follow, step by step plan I, of course, recommend the Maximum Mass workouts that are part of the Muscle Gaining Secrets system.

But if you choose not to use them I would highly recommend that you at least write out your workouts at the beginning of each month, follow them to the letter and record them all in a training journal.


Muscle Building Mistake #18:
Not Cycling Your Workouts Properly

By now you know that you need to train three days per week, with each workout lasting 45 minutes and consisting of no more than 10-16 total sets. You know you need to lift heavy and strive to get stronger at every workout.

But one thing that we haven’t covered yet is the absolute necessity to cycle your workouts properly. There are three different types of muscle fibers and all of them must be trained and fully stimulated. Therefore you need to use a few specific rep ranges in every program otherwise you will leave some fibers completely dormant and untapped.

Some experts claim that training volume is the most important factor for muscle growth. Others say that it’s intensity.

So who is right?

They both are… to an extent.
The Secret to Achieving Rapid Muscle Growth Without
 Plateaus is to Combine These Two Scientific Components into
One Synergistic Muscle Building System

That means that some days you are focusing on volume and other days you are focusing on intensity. You can not do both all of the time. If you do, you will overtrain in no time.

Overzealous skinny guys love to work themselves into the ground. They figure the harder they work the quicker the gains will come. The problem is that when you constantly train to failure you will eventually burn out your central nervous system and this will greatly slow down your recovery and thus the rate at which you build muscle. If you want to make long lasting gains you have to back off once in a while and give your body a break. After a period of reduced intensity you can ramp back up again and repeat the cycle.

The same can be said for volume.

Through many years of painstaking research I have discovered a very unique way to combine these factors into a carefully planned muscle building program that will help you avoid both overtraining and undertraining, and assure that you always remain in the optimal training zone.

When I first employed this system I was utterly astounded at the results. All of my gym members, myself included, started building muscle faster than ever before.

If you want to experience explosive and limitless muscle growth you must capitalize on these findings and begin to plan your workouts in this precise manner ASAP!

Start writing out your workouts and planning them properly and I’ll be back to tell you what you absolutely must do every two months in order to insure long term, consistent progress… and the most overlooked factor in your overall training success.

Muscle Building Mistake #19:
Not Taking a Complete Week Off
Every 8-12 Weeks

After several weeks of hard training your body will demand a break. Giving it the time off that it’s in desperate need of will help you avoid burnout and injuries. It will also help your body to recover and continue growing at an optimal rate. Many people fear taking a week off because they think they will shrink, however, nothing could be further from the truth.

If you need proof of why this isn’t so, you need look no further than competitive athletes who only have a few months of the year to train seriously. Football players enter camp in August and often times play until mid January. After the season they are so beat up that they need one to three months off from any physical activity whatsoever. So let’s say that they don’t pick up a weight until March or April. That leaves them with only four or five months of serious training. After that they basically go on a maintenance program throughout the season.

Yet how much muscle do you see these guys losing from one year to the next? Absolutely zero. In fact, most guys continue to build more muscle and get stronger each and every year.

The body is simply not meant to go full speed and lift heavy weights for 52 weeks straight. Twelve weeks is the longest you should ever train hard for without taking a complete week off. Many hardgainers and lifters over 35 years old will actually get even better results by taking a week off every 6-8 weeks. Others choose to take a half a week off every six weeks and a full week off every twelve. Experiment to see which option works best for you, but never go longer than twelve weeks without a full week off.

Muscle Building Mistake #20:
Doubting or Not Believing in
Yourself and Your Program

Let’s be honest. Everyone wants to improve their physical appearance in some way. I don’t know of too many guys that don’t want to build more muscle. It’s just human nature. You want to appeal to the opposite sex, boost your self confidence and command respect from you peers.

But wanting and doing are two entirely different things. How many people do you know that actually get off their asses and do what they say they’re going to do? Or what they say they want to do?

Very few.

And do you know why?

Because they don’t have the right mindset. Change your mindset and you will change your body. With the right mindset you can make gains in as little as 12 weeks that other guys don’t even make in 12 years!

People who have made unbelievable physical transformations first accepted the fact that it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park and they were willing to work for it and do whatever it took. That’s not to say that it takes an incredible amount of time. You don’t have to spend every waking hour in the gym. You can progress incredibly well in just a few short hours per week. But if you don’t possess the proper mindset and the determination to do whatever it takes during those three or four weekly hours of training you will never get anywhere.

We all have commitments and time restraints that prevent us from working out as much as we would like to. But lack of time never was and never will be an acceptable excuse. If you search hard enough and cut out the wasted hours of TV time and other useless nonsense, you will find that we all have two or three hours per week to dedicate to our health and to transforming our bodies. After all, what is more important in life than your health and your body? Very little if you ask me.

Guys like Arthur Saxon, Dorian Yates, Arnold, Bill Pearl, George Hackenshmidt and Ed Coan all had the never-say-die, take-no-prisoners attitude that is an absolute prerequisite to massive physical transformation. Bill Pearl found that he was so busy that he had to wake up at 4am every day just to get his workouts in. But that’s what it took, so he did it happily.

It doesn’t require fancy machinery and a high tech gym, it doesn’t take a lot of time each week, it doesn’t take any over hyped, over priced supplements; but it does take hard work, dedication and a burning desire to succeed. If you think you’re going to half ass your way through your workouts and still make dramatic progress you’re just lying to yourself.

Will be this be the day when you finally make the mindset change necessary to achieve greatness or will you just keep putting it off ‘til tomorrow?


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