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Those who choose to pursue the quest of building a muscular body often fall into the same traps which ensures that there goal of building muscle never materialises. Here we will try to uncover those common traps that prevent so many people from achieving there goals. So, here we go with the unveiling of the traps:
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1) Buying and reading glossy magazines. You may think that this sounds like a rather odd piece of advice but trust me when I say that they will do you more harm than good. Whilst educating yourself about the muscle building process is essential for long term muscle building success, you need to do so from the right sources. You have to remember here that the magazines over riding goal is to make money and not to educate you. People unfortunately however tend to believe anything that they read in print which is not wise at all. Many of these bodybuilding magazines are in fact owned by the same companies that are promoting the supplements inside of them, it is therefore their main goal to persuade you to buy these even though they are in no way essential for bodybuilding success. These magazines are full of misleading or cleverly worded articles and advertisements all designed to make you think that you need to buy these ‘miracle’ products. Also these magazines are full of advice from professional bodybuilders and strength athletes, they are paid to endorse these products and their weight training routines featured in the magazines are in no way appropriate to you as a beginner or even an intermediate trainer, they will not work for you! Rather than buying these magazines try your local library and pick up a few books and read a variety of independent sources and journals to get your information, don’t buy into the glossy magazine trap!
2) More is better. This is one of the longest held muscle building traps, more is most defiantly not better, in fact the reverse is true for most people. If your training sessions last too long the balance of muscle building hormones alters completely so that in the end the balance of hormones in your body actually becomes detrimental to the muscle building process and your muscles will not grow and may even get smaller than before you trained. To avoid this ensure your workouts last no longer than 45-50 minutes. This is the ideal length of time to workout for, any longer and you will be sabotaging your own muscular development!
3) Poor form. This might seem obvious but how often have you walked around a gym and cringed at that person swinging the dumb bell up and down or the person doing squats without a straight back or someone wriggling around on the bench-press searching for that extra piece of energy. All of these are very common mistakes that illustrate poor form i.e. incorrect technique. If your technique is bad you are putting yourself at risk of injury and you will not be working the muscles you wish to target correctly. If you are not targeting the muscle correctly then you are using surrounding muscle to aid the lift and are therefore unlikely to be triggering growth in that desired muscle group. What you need to do is forget about how much weight you are lifting (leave that to the posers) and focus on correct technique. If you use the same technique each time then you can monitor your progress effectively and make good progress.
So, in brief make sure you are not making any of the above mistakes you are going to be a lot further ahead when it comes to creating real muscle mass.
