Gains, gains you say?
Gains I say, what are gains you say? A measurement of success I say,
not just in the gym, in all aspects of life.
There's many reasons
and also many excuses as to why people lack gains. This will be a
series of articles addressing many of the common mistakes people
unwittingly find themselves making when it comes to the gym.
Lack of consistency
By
consistency, I mean going to the gym 3-5 times/week and very rarely
missing more than a consecutive week or two throughout the year. Even
following the most horribly designed program and nutrition, someone
consistently pounding away at the gym will be able to make some form
of progress over the guy who goes once or twice a month.
The
most common issue with inconsistency is lack of patience, adaptation
is a slow gradual progress. You are not going to achieve your
idealistic Tyler Durden body overnight, a year of consistent lifting
with a good program however? More than possible! When people complain
about the lack of progress after a few weeks with a program and then
hop to another program, not only does it fuel anger for my squats,
but it's probably one of the biggest reason why gyms these days are
full of physiques that look like they haven't touched a weight in
their lives.
The
other issue with consistency is lack of a goal, just going to the gym
and lifting weights is great and all, but your program should be
designed with a goal in mind and a time in which that goal is
achievable. This can be applied to many aspects of life, want to save
£1000 by Christmas? Bench 100kg by the new year? Don't talk about
it, plan to make it
happen. Not only does this allow much more focused programming it's
also a lot more motivating to come into the gym with a goal in mind.
Goals
can be missed, which is why I like setting small achievable goals
under time constraints and just keep the big goals in mind, if you
set a time constraint on big goals then you're far more likely to
rush them near the end. A nice example of this is weight loss, a lot
of people set arbitrary dates regarding this and end up trying to
rush it when they don't look like they're going to hit that date,
crash dieting is obviously never ever good and comes with a lot of
complications. If you need to hit a certain weight for something
important like a contest/holiday then it needs to be planned well in
advance, but setting an arbitrary date is more than likely going to
do more long-term harm than good.
Ultimately,
being motivated and having both a long term and a short term goal
that contributes to said long term goal will increase your
consistency in all aspects of life.
Tracking macros
Eyeing things up
is not acceptable, swaying from macro targets constantly because of lack of will
power is not acceptable.
This
is also a matter of consistency. How is one meant to make progress
when one is eating an extra 250 calories from what they are
prescribed due to lazy tracking? (This is easy to consume in just
cooking oil alone) That's an extra 1750 calories a week which works
out to half a pound of fat per week that could have been burnt just
from pure laziness when it comes to tracking. One cannot simply
disobey the laws of thermodynamics. Track wrongly for a few weeks and
suddenly that half a pound is several pounds, you wonder why you're
not making progress, your motivation is down, was it really worth
eyeing things up instead of taking the extra 30 seconds to weigh and
measure things?
The
same goes in reverse for bulking, while some may advocate the
eat-everything-in-sight bulk method it's not advisable for health
reasons, excess fat gained while bulking is also fat that will need
to be burnt at some point. As anyone who has ever cut to a low
percentage of body fat knows, the longer you're in a choleric
deficit, the more people are going to want to avoid you.
The
point is, track everything, to the gram/ml! For the extra 5 minutes a
day you're saving yourself a lot of time wasted trying to cut/bulk,
http://www.myfitnesspal.com
is a great resource for this.
Programming
and supplements shall be covered in part 2, if anyone is looking for
a program for the New Year please drop by our Facebook page from the
link on the side as we would be happy to help.
