Six Novice Mistakes That Prevent You From Gaining Muscle Mass

One: Injury

Injury sidelines most people at some point.

Minor injuries are usually no big deal: you stub your toe or pinch your hand during a bench press, that sort of thing. Eternal optimists happily use minor injuries as an excuse to take a few days off for some much-need rest and recovery.

More serious injuries are another matter entirely. Heavy lifting can damage inflexible joints, pull inadequately-prepared muscles, and aggravate pre-existing health problems. Real injuries like this are nothing to sneeze at. Thankfully, these sorts of injuries are usually preventable. Don’t neglect adequate warm-up, decent flexibility training, or medical clearance.

Obviously, it’s important to let your injuries heal. If you re-injure the same spot, odds are you’ll never be the same. Some injuries sneak up on you: weeks of repetitive stress can suddenly explode into an overuse injury. With experience, you’ll know when it’s time to deload for a bit so you can come back stronger.

If you do get injured, don’t drag out the convalescence process too long. Days turn to weeks, and weeks turn to months, and before you realize it, six months have gone by since you tweaked your lower back or wrenched your shoulder. You could have resumed training months earlier, with no ill-effects.

Two: Losing interest too quickly

It’s easy to get excited about a new workout routine. The first few weeks are fueled by enthusiasm and lofty dreams. Then, the tedium of hard workouts and the lack of observable results cause you to run out of gas.

Lots of folks quit after a month.

As a novice, it will take at least six weeks of heavy lifting before you notice significant muscle growth. Before six weeks, a portion of your strength gains comes from neural adaptation instead of hypertrophy. You need to pass through this first month and a half before you can really pack on the pounds.

Stick with it for the long haul. If you want to switch things up, do it after you stop making progress, not before.

Three: Useless workouts

Are your hammer curls and deltoid lateral raises wearing you out with no discernable benefits? Have leg extensions put exactly zero inches on your thighs? If so, make sure you’re not squandering your efforts on exercises that don’t bring you any closer to your goals.

Many skinny guys lift for months or years without using the most effective bulking movements: squats, pull-ups, overhead presses, deadlifts, and bench presses. To bulk up, you should use these general-purpose compound movements instead of the more specific isolation exercises. Avoid any exercises that teach specificity. Train movements not muscles.

Some of the most popular exercise videos on YouTube feature famous athletes going through their workouts. Not surprisingly, skinny guys copy the workout regimens of their athletic idols without realizing that the stars’ goals are very different than theirs.

Don’t try to work out like a superstar if you want to succeed in something basic like bulking up. Those superstars didn’t skip the basics and neither should you. High intensity plyometric workouts and sport-specific training protocols are fine for a world-class athlete at the top of his game, but for skinny guys who want to bulk up, they’re worse than useless. Stick to a basic bulking workout until you have achieved some success and you’re ready to begin specializing.

Four: Not enough rest

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s easy to let your enthusiasm get the better of you, but working out is only part of the bulking process. Rest is also an essential part of the recipe for muscle mass.

You can’t lift at 100% every time you go to the gym

You can’t lift at 100% capacity every time you set foot in the gym. Even the pros have off-seasons when they let their bodies rest and recover from the rigors of training and competition. If you constantly push yourself to the max, eventually you’ll break.

Don’t be afraid to take a week off now and again. Do something else to refresh your body and your mind. Mix it up a bit; remember that specificity is anathema to general, full-body progress.

Five: Not eating enough

If you are a skinny guy who is medically cleared to work out, but you can’t seem to build any muscle, it is almost certain that you are not eating enough.

Unless you gain a pound of body weight per week, all the lifting in the world won’t make you very much stronger. It certainly won’t build any muscle mass, no matter how hard you work in the gym. For skinny guys, muscles are made in the kitchen.

You’ll find reams of bodybuilding and bulking diet information all over the ‘net. Most of it goes into such esoteric detail about minor points that it almost seems designed to confuse rather than illuminate the issues. If you are a 200-pound, ripped-to shreds natural bodybuilder, then you can start worrying about which foods trigger your insulin response and obsessing about the amino acid profile of your protein sources. But as a skinny novice, those details won’t help you.

It’s really very simple. If you are underweight, and you want to add muscle, you have to gain weight. There are skinny guys in every gym who talk non-stop about being an ectomorph, or a “hard-gainer”, or “suffering” from a “high metabolism”. These guys weigh the same as they did a year ago. If you are underweight, you can’t put on 10 pounds of muscle unless you gain at least 10 pounds of body weight.

Six: Failing to keep accurate records

How much weight have you gained in the last month? Are you gaining at a faster rate than normal? Are you getting close to stalling on one of your major lifts?

If you have problems bulking up, you probably don’t know the answer to those questions.

Unless and until you keep accurate records of your diet and the results of your workouts, progress will be a hit-or-miss proposition. You won’t know if you take in enough calories, enough protein, or too much saturated fat. Nor will you realize it when it’s time for a change of pace in your lifting program.

Use a spreadsheet, a dedicated diet/fitness tracking program, or a web service to keep accurate records of where you’ve been. Without these data, you won’t be able to adjust things to get the results you want.