Keeping motivated and not giving up when building muscle can be hard at times. Here are 5 tricks that will help you overcome some every day hurdles you may face.

Setting yourself a number of set meals that you eat every day or often will make life a lot easier. You will know the exact calories and protein. The meals will be easy to prepare and cook – you will become efficient at making them.

This is especially useful for times like in the morning or before bed, when you can’t be bothered to think of what to eat and how much. Having a set meal you always eat or few you can choose from will prevent you from skipping meals or eating the wrong foods.

Ever missed a workout? Whatever the excuse – no time, work, no energy or just plain lazy – you must not let this one missed workout effect the rest of your training and eating.

Simple do the workout the next day. Depending on your workout routine this may affect your other training days, you must have some rest days, so just remove one of the rest days to make up for the missed workout.

Your body won’t care if the workout is a day late, it will probably be happy to have an extra day to recover. All your need to do is make sure you do it.

When eating a lot of calories it is best to split your daily meals up into smaller more manageable meals. This means eating 5-6 meals a day, usually around every 3-4 hours.

If you miss a meal this gives you no reason to binge and give up on that days meals. Your muscle won’t suddenly start catabolizing itself. Your body can still maintain the muscle tissue until the next feeding.

All you need to do is make sure you are getting enough calories and protein overall. This can be accomplished by adding the missed calories to the next meal, spreading it over the next few meals or eating an extra meal at the end of the day (for example an extra protein shake).

Track the variables in your workouts and measure your results. You must track how much weight, which exercises, the reps, sets and resting times in your workouts. Knowing the previous workouts intensity will let you know what you need to do to beat it. This is vital for progression and therefore muscle growth – which will fuel your motivation.

Measure your results – weigh yourself and measure your main body parts every month. Take before and after pictures. The simple feeling of seeing and knowing you are packing on lean muscle mass every month will give all the motivation you need.

To build more muscle mass you must progress in your workouts in some way. The intensity must increase by either lifting more weight, more reps or decreasing the resting times.

It is best to aim to increase the reps or weight, however this can be hard to accomplish with each workout – there’s nothing worse than not being able to lift more than the previous workout.

Instead try keeping the weight and reps the same but decrease the resting time. You will have effectively increased the intensity and you should be able to complete the same amount of reps.

Then in the next workout you can bring the resting time back up and increase the weight or reps. This will ensure you progress with every workout and don’t lose motivation.