Reasons you are not gaining muscles
One of the most horrifying scenarios is where you look at yourself in the mirror after weeks of working out and dieting and you end up asking yourself the notorious question: “Why am I not gaining muscle?”
1: You Don’t Eat Enough
If you can’t build muscle and are not seeing results, the first place you should look at is your diet. Diet, or nutrition, plays a crucial role in muscle growth.
It requires the right amount, and type, of nutrients in order to grow – this includes carbs, protein and fats.
You can lift weights all you want at the gym, you can gain immense strength, do reps until you turn blue, but until you have your diet in check you’re not really going to see any improvements.
Your goal needs to be a small caloric surplus. Enough to create an anabolic effect and elevate muscle hypertrophy but not too much to make you gain fat, which can be disadvantageous both hormonally and psychologically.
2: You Have Bad Form
Cant gain muscle no matter what
Good form doesn’t just prevent injury. It also make sure that you are maximizing your muscle’s potential. As a result it will help boost muscle growth.
Also, good form is not just limited to keeping your chest out, feet at shoulder width and your back straight. It goes beyond that.
Insufficient range of motion, bad lifting tempo, no attention to contraction. Those elements play an extremely important role in muscle building.
If you are using sloppy form, then that could explain why you can’t build muscle.
3. You Might Be Over-Training
Cant build muscle
Rober DiMaggio from Bodybuilding.com put it really nicely
“Overtrain if you don’t want to gain!”
Over-training leads to an overproduction of Cortisol. I have shown how bad Cortisol is for muscle building in more detail down below.
When released in excess, Cortisol can do some nasty damage to our muscle progress. It is catabolic, which means that they encourage the breakdown of non-essential tissues. Muscle and bone are not considred to be as vital to the body’s survival as organ functions, respiration and brain function.
Pretty scary stuff,right?
Now that we know what are the consequences of over-training, how do we avoid it?
There are two main culprits that lead to over-training: frequency and volume.
How do we solve frequency: The main issue with training frequency is giving our muscles enough time to rest. As I mentioned previously, you need to give your muscles about 48 hours of rest before exercising them again. If you don’t do so and you just keep increasing the frequency of your workouts, you are running the risk of over-training.
How to solve volume: When you’re at the gym and you are exercising you are already catabolic. That’s when muscle breakdown happens. Don’t worry, it’s the good type of breakdown that you need to build muscle. You don’t need to stay at the gym for 2 hours. Maintaining this level of physical stress for so long will lead to over-training. The optimal time to leave the gym is about 45-60 minutes.
4. You’re Lifting Too Heavy
why am I not gaining muscle
There is a condition that all of us guys suffer from when at the gym, it’s known as “ego lifting”.
You’ve probably heard of it before:
It’s when guys go to the gym with the intentions of having a good and productive workout. But as soon as they lie down on the bench or curl up the first dumbbell they start lifting heavier and heavier, until they reach to the point where the weight is too heavy for them to manage with proper form and range of motion rendering the whole exercise meaningless.
Some do it because they want to impress.
Others do it because they believe that the heavier they lift the better the gains.
And third do it because it feels good – a sense of self-achievement if you will.
Whatever the case might be, lifting too heavy is never a good thing!
5.No Compound Exercises
not seeing muscle gains
Look Curls, quad extensions, lateral raises, and pull downs are all great exercises but are not going to really change your muscle building game as much as you are hoping.
Compound exercises are the staple to a great physique!
They help build physiological symmetry and proportionality, burn calories like crazy, and help build muscle in areas that you’ve not even heard of.
Compound exercises are also great for improving testosterone and HGH production, which are hormones linked with muscle growth.
Furthermore, they are great for building strength, which will help you out with your other exercises.
For example:-By improving your pull-ups you are essentially improving your pulling strength and thus will be able to increase the lifting load on your curls;
Improving your dips (chest or triceps) improves your pushing mobility thus helps you enhance your bench, push-ups, and other push-related-exercises.
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