6 Roadblocks to Building Muscle

Take a good, long look in the mirror at your physique. Are you truly satisfied with it? If not, have you been seeing steady improvements at least? For many of you, I am going to guess the answer is no. My next question is, why not? What has been holding you back? Chances are that one or more of the following situations are responsible.

Lack of Clear Goals

First and foremost, most people who have not made any improvements to their physiques in a long time simply lack specific goals. “I want to get bigger” or “I’d like to be leaner” are just too vague. How much bigger do you want to get? Quantify it in terms of precise weight and/or measurement goals. You can do the same thing with a goal of losing body fat. First, think of exactly what you want to accomplish, and then write it down. Next, give yourself a deadline. Without a set deadline, there is no sense of urgency to get anything done. As a writer, I am intimately familiar with this! Tell me to write something but leave it up to me as to when to get it done, and look out. I might be collecting Social Security by the time I do it. Once you have your goals down in writing and have established a firm deadline, develop a plan to accomplish them. A very useful tool you can utilize is body fat testing. By taking body fat measurements along with your bodyweight, you’re able to determine your exact body composition. Let’s say you are 200 pounds and your body fat is 20 percent, and you decide you want to gain 10 pounds of muscle in 10 weeks. That means you have 160 pounds of lean mass. Two weeks in, you weigh 203 pounds, and your body fat is still at 20 percent. You have gained 3 pounds of pure muscle mass already! No changes need to made to your training or diet, since you are making good progress. But if you were 204 pounds with 22 percent body fat, that would mean you had lost almost a pound of muscle; and gained over 4 pounds of fat! But the main point is, set some very clear goals for yourself, set a deadline for them and get to work. Your chances at success are so much greater this way than merely going through the motions at the gym and hoping something good happens.

Excuses

I’m sure you’ve heard that old saying, “Excuses are like a**holes, everyone’s got one.” That’s especially true when it comes to working out and eating right. Most people have a roster of excuses, ready to run down for anyone who cares to listen. The most common excuse is, “I don’t have the time.” We all have the same 24 hours in a day. There is a misconception that being in your best shape requires hours and hours of training every day. That’s just not true. If one is focused and works hard, you could easily be in fantastic physical condition with about 45-60 minutes, four or five times a week. Usually, when people balk that they don’t even have that much time, I ask how much TV they watch, and how much time they spend glued to their iPhones checking their social media and watching videos of cats. It’s all about priority. If you really want to improve your physique, to gain muscle and/or lose fat, you will make time for it. You will make time to either get to the gym, or train at home with some basic free weights, if you genuinely can’t make it to a gym at all. You will find time to prepare healthy meals in quantity once or twice a week, so that you have clean meals to eat every day instead of fast food or snacking on junk. The bottom line is, if you really want to improve your physique, nothing will stand in your way. You will find a way to do what needs to be done.

Improper Rest

Recovery is critical no matter what your goals are— yet it’s an oft-neglected factor in the big picture. You can be training like a beast and eating like a horse, but deprive your body of sleep, and your results will be close to nil. Being sleep-deprived increases your body’s production of the stress hormone cortisol, which is notoriously catabolic. It’s the death knell for both muscle gain and fat loss, and your best defense against it is a solid eight hours of sleep a night, or the most you can manage. Again, it’s all about priories. We all have to work, and we may have other duties such as family and school, but sleep is something many people just don’t deem important enough. When it comes to looking and feeling better, proper rest is a must.

Inadequate Nutrition

Just like sleep, proper nutrition is an essential component to achieving any type of physique goal. Food provides the basic building blocks we need to synthesize new muscle tissue, or to preserve muscle mass while losing body fat. The frequent meal schedule of bodybuilders is vastly superior to the standard three square meals that “regular” people eat a day, if they even have those. Often, it’s more like two meals and a bunch of nutritionally void snacks. If you’re not fueling your machine, you can’t expect it to perform correctly. Eat every two to three hours like you know you are supposed to. Use quality supplements to boost your nutrients and help meet your daily requirements for protein, carbohydrates, fats and overall calories.

Inadequate Intensity

Everyone thinks they train hard. But be honest. Do you truly put out full effort every time you hit the gym? Do you attack the weights with brutal ferocity, or do you hold back? Coaxing additional muscle growth out of your body becomes increasingly difficult the longer you have been training consistently. Half efforts won’t yield any results once you have passed the beginner and intermediate stages. You must push the envelope and take your sets to failure, and some beyond failure. Muscles don’t want to grow. You have to force them! If you aren’t training to your utmost ability, don’t expect to see changes in your physique. You get what you give.

Self-doubt

Finally, I saved the best for last. Your mind and your attitude control everything you do. Most of us face a daily battle to remain confident and believe that we can achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. It’s human nature to doubt yourself and put yourself down. The two most damaging words we can ever say to ourselves are “I can’t.” The late Henry Ford’s famous quote still holds up as pure wisdom a century after he said it:

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

If you believe you can improve your physique, that attitude will facilitate doing all the right things necessary to make it happen, to the best of your ability. You will train harder, eat better and get your rest. You are confident that your hard work and efforts will pay off. If instead you doubt you can get any better no matter how hard you try, you won’t put the effort out like you should. Why bother, right? So no matter what else is or isn’t standing in the way of your progress, above all else; believe that you can succeed. With a powerful belief in yourself and a strong drive to reach your goals, there is nothing that can stop you.

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