Words: Alex Woodhall
You’re a month, maybe two down the line with a new workout routine, having taken out a gym membership with nothing but good intentions. Whether it was a last late push for that summer body (or for an upcoming tropical winter getaway) or a spur of motivation after having one takeaway too many during a notably boozy weekend, the hard work, however, isn’t quite paying off as you’d envisaged. Muscle-bound you are not, that’s despite the countless bicep curls, bench presses and squats, so what’s going wrong?
FOOD
There’s an old adage that muscle is built in the kitchen, not the gym – this couldn’t be closer to the truth. Diet is crucial if you’re going to achieve that dream physique. No matter how many kilograms you push, press or pull, that rock-hard muscle isn’t going to be arriving anytime soon, unless you’re eating enough and enough of the right stuff for your body to build it.
Nutrition, or lack thereof, is the number one culprit for stunting muscle growth among new gym goers. We addressed the issue in our muscle building series – here. In essence you need to be eating more calories than your body needs in a day to build muscle after exercising, in other words a calorific surplus. You also ideally need to be hitting macronutrient targets, ensuring your protein, fat and carbohydrate intake is at the required level, this again is explained in enough detail in our previous article on muscle building nutrition.
ROUTINE
If you’ve been doing the same routine week after week for two months, it’s about time to start mixing things up. Muscle building workouts aren’t an exact science and whether you’re doing a 5×5, a 3×8 or 4×12, your body will eventually get used to that routine. Change it up around the 8-week mark, even if that’s just the rep and set numbers, to shock your body and start stimulating some muscle growth and hypertrophy.
PATIENCE AND CONSISTENCY
If you’re doing all the right things in and out of the gym, have a little patience. You won’t pack on muscle over night – no matter what those sidebar adverts are telling you – and sticking with it with a little consistency is the only way to get there. Getting in the gym every other day is hard, so is avoiding sweet treats, alcohol and pizza. It’s easy to slip into old habits after a big weekend, but add a healthy dose of consistency to a mostly clean diet and regular resistance workouts and you will build muscle, science says so.
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