Being fit, strong, and healthy is hard work. You work hard at the gym, lift heavy, and run hard.
It would be such a shame to have the gains from all of that hard work robbed from you.
And you might be doing just that with these bad habits. Here are 3 things that could be killing your gains at the gym.
1. Not getting enough sleep
If there is anything that will almost immediately undo your hard work at the gym and completely sap your body of its performance, it’s sleep deprivation.
I’ve written at length about the benefits of a good night’s sleep and the detriments of sleep deprivation in previous posts, but it will always bear repeating. Literally every aspect of you health will get better or worse with sleep.
Sleep is the critical time that repairs, resets, and replenishes your entire body. Your brain literally cleans itself out during sleep. In fact, poor sleep quality has been linked to the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia later in life.
Your body secretes all of the necessary hormones to repair your muscles from your gym workouts. Sleep deprivation can give you the testosterone levels of someone ten years your senior. Not good!
If you have been neglecting your sleep and you generally feel tired, irritable, have difficulty concentrating, feel physical vulnerable or weak, fatigued, and unmotivated, it’s a critical time to focus on your sleeping habits. Here are some recommendations to get you started.
- Go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday.
- Get to bed by 10pm. The hours of sleep before midnight are more effective than the hours after.
- Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep.
- Make your room as quiet, dark, and cool as possible.
- Shut off bright lights and screens at least 2 hours before bedtime.
- Complete any intense exercise 3 hours before bedtime.
Read more about sleep at these previous posts:
2. Not paying any mind to your nutrition
I once heard a trainer say that he doesn’t have any of his clients pay attention to nutrition. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t train any high level athletes.
You cannot out-train a bad diet. Read that again.
Whether you are trying to lose weight or gain muscle, you cannot sustain an intense training program without paying some mind to your nutrition. If you are not supplying your body with the right caloric balance and nutrients for your goals, then you will never reach them.
Attaining a certain body composition, losing fat, or gaining muscle are all simple games in thermodynamics. If you are not paying attention to your caloric balance (caloric deficit for fat loss, caloric surplus for muscle gain), then you are relying on chance to take the reigns of your progress.
If you are not supplying your body with the right macronutrients, then you are putting your body under unnecessary stress to make certain metabolic processes happen. Protein synthesis cannot happen in the absence of adequate protein intake and certain amino acids.
If you are trying to get jacked and you aren’t giving your body the right supplies to make it happen, it won’t happen.
Here are two very simple guidelines to get you in the right direction.
- Figure out how many calories you tend to eat during a typical day of eating. You don’t need to meticulously track every meal for the rest of your life. Use an app like My Fitness Pal to track your meals for about a week then make the big, obvious changes to your nutrition.
- Prioritize your protein intake. Whether you are trying to lose fat or build muscle, optimizing your protein intake will only have positive effects. In order for muscle protein synthesis to occur, you need to consume about 30 grams of protein for the protein synthesis switch to turn on.
3. The weights you’re lifting aren’t heavy enough
The human body is an incredibly adaptable organism that will change in response to certain stresses. The problem is that those stressors need to cross a certain threshold of intensity in order to force that adaptation.
Strength training is an incredible form of exercise that will improve strength (duh), increase muscle mass, burn fat, improve bone density, and make the entire body more resilient, but most people don’t lift weights at the appropriate intensity.
It takes hard work to get strong. If you aren’t straining or feel like you did some heavy work, then you may need to push the intensity a little bit more. You should have to concentrate on maintaining tension throughout your body during each set. It should be challenging to maintain your technique.
Remember that the aim of strength training is to lift progressively heavier weights over time. Here are some guidelines to keep you on track:
- Focus on gradual progress, even if it’s just 5 pounds heavier or lifting for one extra rep. Over time, those 5 pound increases will become 15, 20, even 50 pounds.
- Maintain tension throughout the body. Grip the bar as hard as possible, brace the abs, squeeze the glutes, and control the range of motion throughout the entire movement. This is going to be more important as you lift heavier and heavier weights. You can’t lift 400 pounds of the squat while being loose and unstable.
- Get mentally tough. Most people have never actually pushed themselves close to their limit.
Take that sh*t back
Looking back on my own journey of strength and fitness, I wish I can go back in time and slap my past self silly for these habits. I think of where I could potentially be if I didn’t make these stupid mistakes. How much stronger would I be? Would I have won that race against my friend to a 315 pound bench press? Would I be… jacked-er??
I get really mad about the gains I robbed of myself. So stop shooting yourself in the foot and quite these bad habits.
