Muscle Building Mistakes You Should Avoid

Exercise has long proven to improve your mood and make you feel better. It also strengthens your immune system and lowers your risk from many prevalent diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure, and the like.

Muscle building is tightly attached to exercise since building muscles require specific exercise programs. Building muscles can be achieved by staying active and performing the right exercise.

Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced trainee who desires to pack on slabs of new muscle, you need to understand first that the best way to improve muscle mass is to maintain an exercise or workout program that suits your abilities and lifestyle.

Performing your exercises the wrong way can bring injury to your body. Consider the following muscle building mistakes that are considerable no-nos when doing your exercise or workout:

Faulty Lifestyle Habits 

Not Eating Enough

There is no way you can go around in providing your body with the right amount and quality of “fuel” for it to be able to synthesize new muscle tissue. There is no magic to where your body can get its resources to create new muscle.

Your body needs excess energy from the food that you consume to construct new tissue muscles. Changing your physique will require changing your nutritional approach as well so that you can reach your goal. Plan your diet as you plan your workout. 

• Calorie Intake. Make sure you get a calorie surplus for adequate muscle building and growth. To get a rough idea of how many calories you need a day to build muscle, multiply your weight in pounds by 15 to 17.
• Protein Intake is also essential in ‘muscle protein synthesis’, breaking down muscle fibers so they can repair and build back more prominent, increasing muscle mass. An adequate protein supply would be 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight.
• Carbohydrate Intake. Choose clean carb intake with complex carbohydrates like sweet potatoes, steel-cut oats, and wild rice. Carbs will give you enough glucose that converts to the energy that you need to lift more weights, leading to mass muscle gain.

Improper Hydration

Two-thirds of the water in your body is found in your muscle, so if you want to gain muscle mass, you need to increase your water intake. If you are exercising, replace water loss immediately to prevent the buildup of lactic acid in your muscles, causing muscle cramps. An excellent accurate guideline for your water intake is to drink half your weight in ounces of water every day.

Relying on Supplements

Do not sell yourself short by taking supplements to build muscle. Focus instead on your diet and training regimen.

Improper Workout Techniques

Many people who aim to gain mass muscle struggle to add size. Here are workout techniques that do not add to your goal of building muscle, according to Brad Schoenfeld, MS, CSCS, author of The MAX Muscle Plan:

• Training in the Same Rep Range – moderate reps are the best for gaining size since the higher tension from your ability to use heavier weights beginning from a lower rep range, will spur better muscle cell growth.

A 2010 study concluded that training with lower loads with more repetitions could be more beneficial for muscle building than using higher loads with fewer repetitions.

• Doing the Same Exercises Every Day – Moving out of your exercise comfort zone will facilitate increased muscle growth because exercise variety ensures optimal stimulation of all muscle fibers. Your muscles need a type for optimal growth. If your workouts are not challenging you, increase the intensity. 
• Over- or Under-Isolating your Muscles – Multi-joint exercises are highly efficient for packing on muscle mass because these exercises involve large amounts of muscle.

Personal Trainer Chric Bathke commented that if you want to build serious muscle, you need to make compound movements that work across more than one joint like the deadlift, pull-up, squat, and press-up staples of your training.

Integrate a mix of performing the “big lifts” like squats, presses, and rows; and working on the “isolating” muscles with single-joint exercises like flys, curls, and extensions.

• Always Following the Straight and Narrow Sets – Mix up typical resistance training with specialized techniques for a muscle mass building routine. Take your muscle growth to new heights by not limiting your practice to the first approach.  

Advanced lifters need to “shock” their body to spur more significant muscle growth by incorporating specialized techniques like supersets, drop sets, and heavy negatives to their routine.

• Doing Too Many Cardio Workouts – Overdoing the addition of aerobic training to a muscle-building routine will bring muscle growth to a disappointing halt.  

Too many Cardio workouts can be detrimental to muscle growth because it burns calories. It is generally best to incorporate one day of cardio per week if you are focused on gaining muscle mass.

Improper or Poor Form

You will be at risk for back and shoulder injury like rotator cuff tear if you exercise with slouched posture and rounded shoulders. Fix it by keeping your shoulders down and keeping your back straight when you do your exercises or workouts.

The two main reasons why you should learn proper form to build loads of muscle are:

1.  A correct way engages your targeted muscle groups to do the work more effectively. It will lead to increased muscle protein synthesis and, therefore, muscle growth.
2. The proper form keeps you from staying on the strength plateau, which means that you turn on the stimulus for your body to synthesize new muscle tissue.

Stick to your Muscle Building Training Programme

Your commitment to your training regimen and your diet will determine how you can maximize the benefits and reach your goal to build those muscles.

You will get nowhere if you do not fix the muscle-building mistakes you may have committed early on. Work hard and smart towards engaging in a program that is tailored to your needs and lifestyle so that you can enjoy constant progress.