Are You Making These 3 Common Muscle Building Mistakes?

Aside from weight loss, muscle building is one of the top fitness goals I see with my clients. Having a strong physique is not only attractive, it also plays an important role in your overall health.

Increasing your muscle mass is beneficial for several reasons. Along with improving your posture and balance, it boosts your metabolism and strengthens your bones.

If the muscles in your core, back, and hips are strong, it keeps your body properly aligned and takes the pressure off your joints and bones. Correct posture helps you maintain the right form while exercising, and prevents injuries as a result.

Good balance is essential since it affects even the most simple daily movements: getting out of bed, walking down the stairs, picking up a package, and so on. If your body is out of balance, these tasks would be challenging.

Strength training increases bone density because it puts stress on the bones attached to muscles, causing them to rebuild and become stronger. As you age, protecting your bone health is especially important to reduce your risk of osteoporosis.

Also, more muscle mass leads to an increase in your resting metabolism. In other words, you’ll burn more calories when your body is at rest. Even if you’re sitting or sleeping your body is hard at work keeping you in top shape! This can be incredibly helpful for people who are having a hard time shedding those extra pounds.

However, muscle growth is a process. You need to take numerous factors into account: your diet – what and when to eat, how often you train, what muscles to focus on during each session, and so on.

To maximize results and make the most of your workout, here are three common mistakes to avoid:

Overtraining

One of the biggest issues I see with my personal training clients is training too hard and not giving their bodies enough time to recuperate. In most cases, their goal is muscle growth, but they mistakenly think that the more they train, the better. This is why the phrase “no pain, no gain!” is actually counterproductive.

Here’s the main problem with overtraining: you are continuously breaking down the muscles, but missing an important part of the equation: rest. If you don’t rest, the muscles won’t have time to repair and grow.

Using the same repetition ranges

Another common mistake is training with the same number of reps. To build more muscle, you need to incorporate a variety of repetition ranges into your workout.

Why? Each repetition range affects your muscles differently. For example, a rep range of 1 to 6 helps increase strength whereas 6 to 12 reps will increase muscle size. If your goal is both muscle growth and strength, mixing up your reps is essential.

Doing the same workouts and/or using the same amount of weight

Similar to the same rep ranges, it’s important to have variety in your workouts and target different muscles.

Thanks to muscle memory, our muscles naturally adapt to exercise. The more often you do an exercise, the more your muscles learn how to repeat those movements and use less energy. This is one of the main reasons people plateau during training.

To achieve muscle growth, you need to “shock” the system and find new ways to challenge your body.

Also, as your strength increases using the same amount of weight won’t help you build muscle. During your workouts, always remember to listen to your body. You know your limits and whether you are pushing too hard or not enough. Feeling sore the following day is a sign your muscles are responding. Once the soreness stops, you’ll know it’s time to increase the amount of weight you’re lifting.

The bottom line is this: knowing what not to do will help you stay on track with your muscle-building goals. And keep in mind, building muscle doesn’t happen overnight. Muscle growth can only be achieved through hard work, commitment, and the right strategy.

Feeling exhausted just reading this? You might want to check out our recent article 4 Surprising Reasons You’re Tired All The Time to see if these factors might be lowering your energy levels.