All right what is going on everyone, I am going to share with you guys the top 7 things that I wish I knew when I started lifting because if someone had just told me these things I would have either gotten results a lot faster or would have saved a lot of time or wasted energy.
Now for the record, I started lifting when I was 17 years old I’m 28 now so that is over a decade in the gym. So I’m gonna share my learnings of consistent training. It is like a biographical version of a common person who invests his prime mental capabilities to his goal of achieving their love.
Somethings about the natural way
I wish someone had told me early on that I shouldn’t let others influence my own training so easily. I see this manifest in a few ways in new lifters and I’d say it’s most common in young lifters. Probably the most dangerous form of this is lifting to impress your friends or other people in the gym.
Usually, this results in loading on more weight than you can handle with good form and so you end up doing things like not squatting to full depth, not touching the bar to your chest on the bench press, or having your spotter curl the weight up for you and trust me as an experienced lifter I can say that no one really cares how much weight you can move, if it’s not done with good form.
Personally, when I see a new lifter in the gym I’m way more impressed if they have a really nice technique than if they’re just throwing a bunch of weight around. So even though it can be very frustrating to see people getting stronger than you, faster than you. I think it’s important to keep in mind that ideally, this is going to be a lifelong journey for you and the downside of encoding bad lifting habits early on that then need to be unprogrammed down the road is far worse than just having your buddies getting slightly ahead of you in the beginning.
I also say this, Form is basically just copying exactly what it is your favorite bodybuilder or influencer is doing. I actually fell for this one pretty hard early on in my career whoever was the biggest and strongest guy at my gym I just take everything he said and run with it and if I wasn’t so easily influenced by others, I might have been able to find out what works better for me through a combination of self-experimentation and healthy skepticism.
Building muscle and losing fat is actually pretty simple
I think a lot of YouTubers and influencers sometimes make the process sound much more complicated than it actually is and because you have so many different influencers doing so many things, it can be difficult to figure out what it is that actually matters.
You’ve got all this stuff at the very tip of the iceberg being thrown at you all the time. So it’s hard to decipher what it is that’s actually driving progress. There is a saying that “if you can’t explain it in a single tweet then you probably don’t understand. So on two hundred and eighty characters here I come to that fact.
Progressive Overload
Now I would probably add a progressive overload to that which is kind of captured in the be consistent and train hard part but it is important that you’re not only consistently showing up to the gym but also consistently progressing with what you’re doing. but the bottom line is that while it can be fun to try out different workouts and use fancy training techniques, in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with doing that. It’s important to keep in mind these main things that are driving the majority of your progress forward especially as a beginner.
Genetics
I wish I realized just how much genetics matter. When I say this, a lot of people get discouraged because they assume maybe they don’t have the best genetics for building muscle and so there’s no real point in even trying.
But that isn’t the case it simply means that like almost anything we’re not all starting on an even playing field which means you should only compare your current physique to your starting place and not anyone else’s current physique. So you can use other people as motivation but it’s important to recognize that even if you copy exactly what your favorite bodybuilder or influencer does it’s still possible that you’ll never attain their level of physique development because of differences in genetics and also the fact that the social media platforms tend to select for the genetically elite, anyway setting an unrealistic standard for most people.
When I had a look at a study from “whoball and colleagues” which had subjects train their biceps and triceps for 12 weeks. Despite everyone being on the exact same training program, there was a huge range of muscle growth that the subjects saw. The best responder gained 59 percent and a few people actually lost muscle, maybe that was due to overtraining or poor nutrition.
It is very important to self-experiment and try different training styles to figure out what best fits your needs. However, this doesn’t mean that you should always be hopping around from program to program. you need to give it time to see if it actually works
In a blog post on genetics, Greggknuckles argued you need to train consistently for at least four months or you can have a reasonable idea of how well you respond to a particular training program. If you don’t put in at least a year of consistent challenging training with a good attitude you probably aren’t justified and confidently claiming that you have bad genetics for lifting. Also quickly on the topic of genetics while you can make a Muscle bigger or smaller and that can kind of change how your body looks. You can’t really change the shape of a muscle itself much so things like AB symmetry and bicep insertion distance from the elbow can’t be modified with training. So don’t be fooled by people who claim to have some special trick for this!
Judging your progress early
I wish I knew when I started that your physique is gonna look very different based on lighting, your level of pump, the time of the day, etc. I remember when I first started lifting I’d look at my physique in my bathroom and then I go and look at my physique in my bedroom notice that they looked very different in the bathroom. I’d look much more muscular in my bedroom I’d look much less muscular.
Now from my experience of being a Fashion Model and knowledge of Optics of mirrors, it’s obvious that it was just a difference in lighting but I think the lesson here is that you shouldn’t judge your progress on an hour-to-hour basis or even a day-to-day basis because you may actually find that discouraging or destabilizing.
I think the key is to gauge your progress over a longer timescale and use more objective means to track your progress. so you can make progress once or twice a month, use average body weight trends and most importantly make sure you’re getting progressively stronger in the gym . These things are going to be a much better indicator of whether or not you’re making progress than just constantly checking yourself in a mirror !
Tracking Macros
So kind of piggybacking off the last one I think is very analytical about your training and nutrition. You should have some kind of workout logbook or app where you track your weights and reps from week to week. I also think that tracking macros or at least tracking your food intake is the best way to know exactly what you’re putting in your body and how you can regulate that to best suit your goals and following a meal plan can also work fine as long as the macros are well suited to your needs.
Quick tip
Setup a more flexible approach so you don’t become a slave to that particular meal plan and you’ll be able to be more flexible with your approach over time, as your goals and needs change and eventually you’ll be able to understand your body It’s nutritional needs so that you don’t really need to track or follow a strict plan at all anymore and this way you have full control on how your body looks and behaves.
Of course, this doesn’t imply that you need to track every single set that you ever do or every single bite that you ever eat but having a log of what you’re doing for future reference and to see if you’re making progress is extremely valuable, Even if there is some ballpark estimation to the specific numbers.
Steroids
You don’t need steroids to build an impressive physique. A lot of early lifters get so convinced that in order to build any muscle or have a lean physique at all then you need to use steroids and this simply isn’t true.
I think ,”steroid use especially when you’re still new to the gym can set up a slippery slope for serious mental and physical health issues down the road . Especially when you cycle off and lose most of the size you had put on which can then perpetuate the problem over time.”
Johnny Bravo !!
I’d been told when I started lifting that when you’re new to training you are by far the most primed for growth, so during this time you really want to take advantage by getting serious about your Training. It’s common for me to see guys having an unequal grip, bad posture, hitting excessive weights, working only on the Upper Body, and forgetting the lower body like Johnny Bravo !! and then end up with an unbalanced disproportionate physique with Injuries that might then take another couple years of following a Focused workout regime to fix the mess.
Conclusion
So while you’re still in the newbie stage you want to be intelligent and thoughtful about how you’re training because this is the time that you’re probably gonna make the best gains of your life and unfortunately there isn’t ever going to be a time that you can get that newbie period back unless you completely de-train again.
That isn’t to say there’s any real urgency to the journey. If you don’t get everything perfect during your newbie phase that’s fine. I don’t think anyone ever actually does and as long as you’re consistent and balanced with your training, Over the coming years things will eventually balance out as you near your natural genetic limitation.
if you’re looking to implement all information above towards the dream of having a Healthy and Aesthetically pleasing body, click here.
Anyway, that was a brief overview of my journey, keep working hard, and see you on the other side.