I have made quite a few muscle building mistakes over the years that I regret, and today I'm sharing them with you. I'm going to discuss my 16 greatest regrets I made both in the gym and in the kitchen, when it came to my pursuit of building muscle and getting ripped.
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I started my journey of no longer wanting to be a skinny kid when I was about 13 years old. I trained alongside my older brother and tried to copy the exercises and workouts that he was doing. Along the way, I missed some important lessons and wound up paying the price.
Today, I'm going to share with you some of those that I really wish I could go back and change. If I could have had this video available to me as a young teenager and into my twenties, I feel like I'd have a much different physique these days and one that was less rife with physical issues that came from poor training and education.
As a physical therapist, it starts with being able to take my knowledge now and forgive myself for simply not knowing what I do today. For instance, when I first started working out, I would open up the muscle building magazines and try to follow the 30-40 set routines and workouts of bodybuilders like Shawn Ray.
Along the way, I would experience pain and joint discomfort from performing the exercises incorrectly and doing them with incredible amounts of what would be junk volume. Not being enhanced like the models were, led me to experience much different results than what I expected from looking at their pictures alone and not knowing the whole story.
I also was quite naive when it came to nutrition and supplementation. I thought, for instance, that all oats were created equal. This couldn't be any further from the truth. My early days of eating Quaker Maple Brown Sugar oatmeal in the packets led to lots of consumption of sugar with little benefit. The regular slow cook oats had zero grams of sugar. Only with education was I able to identify that and make the change that would lead to lower levels of body fat and a more ripped physique.
I also had many mistakes when it came to performing exercises I probably should not have. Years of damage were done in a short period of time by performing strength based exercises without properly addressing my flat feet. The poor biomechanics and form on the exercises led to a quick breakdown of my knees which still plague me to this day.
I often overlooked the benefits of progressive overload in my training. This was particularly true of my bodyweight and calisthenic exercises. Instead of opting for more overload in the form of a harder variation of the common exercise, I would just try to build more muscle by adding on more and more reps. This was a mistake I'd come to learn later in life but has paid big dividends since fixing.
Nutrition has always been a struggle for me. I went from not caring enough to caring way too much and becoming almost obsessive about what I put in my mouth. In previous videos I discussed how I became fat phobic and avoided almost all dietary fats. Here I talk about the inflexibility I had when working in professional baseball and found myself on the road with very few options for healthy nutrition at my disposal - at least not cheaply.
I also discuss my oversight when it came to the value of eccentrics, particularly on pulling exercises. It's not hard to remember to slow down the rep on the way down in a pushing exercise like the bench press. This is often an automatic built-in body protection mechanism that keeps you safe under heavy loads. In pulling exercises however, the weight tends to fall away from you. It's easy to forget about lowering it slowly and because of that, you forego one of the greatest stimuli for muscle growth and gains.
Speaking of lost gains, it's easy to do when you are training in pain. I made the mistake of trying to workout with pain rather than around it. There is a big distinction between the two. If you want to keep building muscle fast then you have to respect when things aren't right in your body and find a way to keep training without continuing to aggravate the inflammation in your joints or injury to your muscles.
My personal battle with a shoulder injury took longer than I would have liked because I originally tried to keep performing the very exercises that were leading to pain and discomfort when performing them.
For this and other muscle building mistakes I regret making, be sure to watch the entire video. If you haven't done so, remember to subscribe to our channel via the link below.
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