If you’re about to embark on a new bodybuilding program to create a more muscular physique, you may want to take a moment and learn how to avoid some common mistakes that could cause you pain and delay your progress down the road. Sure, you’ve developed some major enthusiasm and you may be afraid that any delay could just lead to more procrastination and eventually abandoning your goal. Rest assured that taking a little time now to learn some of the basics can launch your progress since you’ll be training more safely and more efficiently. Rushing ahead with misinformation can not only impede your progress in a strength training program, but it can also lead to injury and illness if care is not taken in the beginning.
First, be sure to correct any weaknesses before tackling a more difficult program. Now is the time to correct any sports injuries, repetitive strain injuries, or any other nagging injury that could become much more serious when you begin strength training. Check with your doctor to obtain a proper diagnosis, but you should also consider working with alternative healthcare professionals such as chiropractors and massage therapists. This so called alternative therapy is becoming more common and can offer recovery options that simply are not available in a doctor’s office. The important point to keep in mind is that these injuries should be dealt with before they become a more severe problem. Remember that an injury like tendonitis can hamper your ability to train and delay your progress significantly.
One important component which many beginners do not know about or don’t really pay attention to is the recovery phase. Many beginners try to spend all of their time in the gym and think this extra effort will pay off in the long run. When they don’t experience any gains, or if they stop making progress shortly after some initial muscle-growth, the temptation is to increase the intensity or frequency of their strength training routines. Their logic is simple: more is better. While this may be a simple concept, it is inherently flawed because it ignores the basic principles of muscle-growth. The goal of a strength training workout in the gym is to challenge the muscle beyond its previous limits and create small tears in the muscle. The body will adapt to this new stress by rebuilding the muscle in a larger size (hypertrophy). However, the growth of the muscle itself will occur during the recovery phase, not during the actual workout in the gym. Allowing the body to heal before the next workout is critical to long-term success, and many experts only recommend as few as 3 hours of training per week! With this in mind, fewer workouts and a good night’s sleep are important tools in your body building arsenal. Remember that your muscles are not the only parts of your body that need to recover. Your central nervous system and immune system can be heavily taxed during a stressful work out and need plenty of time to recover. 8 hours of quality sleep is recommended for most, though some people have slightly different needs. Note the word quality ‘growth hormone levels increase after an hour of deep sleep, so it is important to get the best sleep possible.
A word of caution should be said here about getting all of your advice from a gym. If you hear some information that contradicts anything in this article, you may want to think twice before succumbing to peer pressure. If you want to be one of the guys that gains huge amounts of muscle in the shortest time possible, you would be wise to take these tips to heart and ignore the bodybuilding masses. Your goal should not be to copy everyone else; rather, you should aim to be extraordinary and achieve the most spectacular results possible. This doesn’t just mean gaining the most amount of muscle and becoming incredibly huge. What it really means in this case is that you should accomplish whatever muscle building goal you’ve set for yourself as safely and efficiently as possible.
