Why You're Not Building Muscle (Even Though You're Working Out)
You've been going to the gym for months. You work hard. You really want to see a change in your body, but your efforts aren't leading to any noticeable muscle growth. What's going on?
Having trained hundreds of people over the last decade - as well as making these same mistakes myself - I'm going to pinpoint the most common mistakes I see and how to fix them so you can finally start seeing results.
1. Not training close enough to failure
Many people start an exercise with a number of reps they intend to do. You sit down on the leg press machine and do your 3 sets of 10. Rinse and repeat with another few exercises, and you're done. Sure, you're sweating by the end, feel your muscles working, and probably feel a lot better than when you walked into the gym. This is all great. It's certainly a good place to start, and by all means better than no workout.
But if you've been at this for a while and really want to see changes in your muscles, you need to push your sets closer to failure.
"Failure" in the fitness world refers to the point when you're doing an exercise and try your absolute hardest to get another rep without sacrificing form and can't get it. You get 7 reps on leg press, let's say, and on the 8th rep you're pressing as hard as you can and the machine doesn't budge. You're doing bicep curls and your arm gives out when you're almost to the top. You physically can't do another rep.
The more a muscle is stimulated, the more it will grow, and by pushing yourself on a set until you can't get any more out of it, you're maximizing the growth stimulus to that muscle.
Not all of your sets need to look like this. (In fact, I highly advise against that. Taking every set to failure is not only mentally taxing, but the excessive fatigue will negatively impact your ability to recover and get back to training that muscle again later in the week. At the extreme level, it can actually hinder your progress.) But it's a good idea to make it a regular part of your training.
Maybe you pick 1-2 exercises per workout that you'll take to failure, or maybe you take just the last set of each exercise to failure. All in all, if you finish an exercise and deep down know you could have easily done another 5 reps, you're probably not challenging your muscles enough - and muscles grow when they're challenged regularly.
2. Not using progressive overload
That brings us to the next point. When muscles are challenged regularly, they grow and get stronger. Which means they'll be able to lift more weight and/or do more reps. As you progress with your workouts and continue challenging your muscles by taking them close to or to failure on a regular basis, you need to gradually make the workouts harder.
I still remember when I started weightlifting in college at the campus gym. I don't know how many months on end I did the exact same squat routine: 3 sets of 8 at 135 lbs. Every. Single. Time. I didn't know any better at the time. I thought I just had to keep it up and I would see progress. I saw a change in my body when I first started, but because I never made it any harder, my body didn't have any reason to keep changing.
Typically when I train clients now, progressive overload involves increasing the weight from week to week. An example would be having a client do 3 sets of 10 Romanian deadlifts for 3 weeks in a row. The first week, they do 65 lbs, the second week they do 70 lbs, and the third they do 75 lbs. Other ways to progress are adding reps, slowing down the eccentric part of the movement, and reducing rest time.
It's not a hard-and-fast rule that you have to make your workouts harder every single week. Some weeks you probably won't be able to. But to really see muscle growth, there should be consistent progression over time.
3. Not eating enough protein and/or total food
Your muscles need food to grow, especially protein and carbs. If you're trying to build significant muscle while in an extreme calorie deficit, it just isn't going to happen.
Bodybuilders typically do "bulking" phases (a calorie surplus to build muscle) and "cutting" phases (a calorie deficit to lose fat) because it's much harder to do both at the same time. You don't need to do official nutrition phases like this, but you do need to make sure you're prioritizing enough food overall - ideally 3-4 meals a day with a mix of carbs, protein, and fats to best support the hard work you're doing in the gym.
I like to use this analogy with my clients: Think of it like constructing a building. Your workouts are the construction workers, and your food is the material you give them. It doesn't matter how hard your construction workers work if you don't give them enough to build with.
4. Focusing too much on fatiguing compound lifts
Heavy compound lifts (like squats, bench press, deadlifts, overhead press, and even dips and pull-ups) are popular exercises for a reason. But they're also very fatiguing because they involve so many muscle groups, including your core, to maintain control and alignment.
Building muscle involves balancing what's called the stimulus-to-fatigue ratio. Essentially, this means looking at an exercise and asking:
How much stimulus is the muscle getting? (How much is the exercise contributing to growth?)
How much fatigue does it cause to the entire body?
If an exercise is very fatiguing, it will negatively impact not only your performance on subsequent lifts in that workout, but also how long it takes to recover between workouts so you're ready to hit that muscle group again.
Heavy, fatiguing lifts like squats and deadlifts absolutely have their place in muscle growth, but they should be balanced with less-fatiguing exercises that work the same muscles (think lunges, leg presses, seated hamstring curls, etc.).
For muscle growth, we want to maximize muscle stimulus while minimizing unnecessary fatigue so we can get the most possible growth each week.
5. Not prioritizing the muscles you want to grow
It may seem obvious, but if you want to grow a certain muscle group more than others, you should probably be doing more total sets per week for that muscle.
It's hard to grow everything all at once unless you're a beginner, so typically if you want to really focus on a certain area, you'll have to put other areas more on a "maintenance" regimen. Meaning, you'll maintain those muscles but not grow them as much as the main muscle you're focusing on.
In addition, you should probably be working that target muscle first in the workout.
As a personal example, I've always struggled to build muscle in my arms, but for so long I was stuck on the notion that you have to work the bigger muscles like back and chest first because those exercises are the most fatiguing and require the most energy. While that is true, that mostly matters if I'm training for strength - not so much hypertrophy/aesthetics.
When I finally stopped doing a chest press, overhead press, pull-up, or row variation first and started doing biceps and triceps first, I started noticing a difference in my arms. They were no longer just something I tacked onto the end of my workouts - they became a major focus.
Not only are you able to perform better on exercises when you're fresh, but some research suggests that by working one muscle first, that muscle then works harder during every subsequent exercise that involves it.
6. Switching workouts too often instead of following a structured plan with multi-week phases
Random, unstructured workouts may lead to some positive changes as a beginner, but the best way to build muscle and change your body is to follow a structured program.
This means if you work out 3 days a week, for example, you're doing the same 3 workouts for 3-4 weeks before switching to a different set of workouts. This allows you to focus on progressing those specific exercises (progressive overload) over the course of a few weeks instead of changing things up so often that your muscles can't progress.
In addition, it allows you to have specific intentions with each phase, like targeting a certain muscle group more heavily or adjusting training volume.
This is not to say there shouldn't be any repeat exercises from phase to phase. I pretty much always have a squat variation in my program, but the sets, reps, and exact type of squat may vary.
While switching things up too often isn't ideal, doing the same handful of exercises over and over for too long also isn't great. Your muscles start to adapt and can hit what's known as a plateau if you never change anything.
3-4 weeks seems to be the sweet spot that allows for focused progression while avoiding plateaus. In short, this type of phase-by-phase programming is intentional and focused, which is necessary for maximizing progress.
7. Having an all-or-nothing mindset
The reality of life is that some days, weeks, and months will be better than others, and you're not always going to progress with your workouts in a perfectly linear fashion. Sometimes it will just feel harder, and that's okay.
Oftentimes when we're so focused on being perfect, we think:
"Well, if I'm not as strong today, I'm not even going to try," or "I don't have a full hour today so I'm not going to work out."
It's cliché, but more often than not, something is better than nothing.
Over the course of a year, let's say that 20% of your workout days are "meh" or shorter than you'd like. If you work out 3 days a week and skip every workout that isn't under ideal circumstances, that's 156 workouts you missed.
If instead you modify where necessary (lighter weights, cutting out some exercises or sets, etc.) and still do something, the compound effect of that over the course of a year is huge.
Lifting weights can be such a mental game. The less hard we are on ourselves and the more we can focus on simply showing up and doing the best we can, the better. When it comes down to it, consistency over the long haul matters more than short bursts of intensity.
8. Sleep and/or stress is out of whack
This is a big one, and often ignored. Sleep is critical for brain function, recovery, and performance in everything we do. If you're in a period of sleep deprivation or aren't regularly getting quality sleep, your workouts will likely suffer.
Your muscles require sufficient sleep to repair and rebuild after being broken down during training. Similarly, if you're going through a high-stress season of life, your workouts and muscle gain will likely take a hit. Sometimes it's hard to push yourself or add more stress to your body when you're already carrying so much stress mentally and emotionally.
When your sleep improves and/or your stress becomes more manageable, you'll probably find it much easier to make progress again.
