Your Questions Answered: I train hard and struggle to gain muscle.

Is there anything I can do?

Answer:
Hi there. First things first, you are not alone. There are many many people who struggle to gain muscle and get big, despite training hard, really hard in the gym. Lots of these people eventually lose hope and give up weight training entirely so congratulate yourself for not being like those people - you know you need help and aren't too proud to go searching for the answers. Actually seeking to improve your knowledge and understanding is the biggest hurdle to overcome, so you are well on your way to getting big!

So, the big question is, why aren't you growing if you are training really hard in the gym?

Without more information it really could be any number of things so what I'm going to do is detail the most common causes and what you can do to correct these mistakes.

Mistake One: Training too much

You probably won't like this, but if you are training naturally (i.e. not using anabolic steroids) then you are odds-on likely to be training way too hard, for too long, and too often.

You probably think your workouts are pretty good - you've read lots of magazines and surfed the net loads and spoken to people at the gym. Problem is, most training advice has become tainted through steroid related training regimes becoming more common and gradually over the years this sort of training has become accepted as 'best practice'. Sadly this is far from the truth.

Weight training is an incredibly demanding activity. It is very easy to do so much training that it can take your body many days or even a weak to recover from a workout. Steroids massively increase your body's ability to recover from each workout and so most steroid users end up doing long, intense and frequent workouts as they recover quite quickly from them and presume that they will grow even quicker by training so much.

Sadly this isn't exactly true as for maximum gain you should train the minimum amount possible required for the maximum results. Finding this level is the truly difficult part but for steroid users it's easier to ignore this need and just train like a freak and take tons of gear and hey presto - muscle gains.

Natural bodybuilders don't have this easy option - you must learn that you can train too hard, too often and for too long each workout. If you think you might be training too much then try this:

Take a week off. This will allow you to recover from you previous training excesses and be ready to train again. Cut your previous training volume in half - do half the sets you previously did and in half the time. Eliminate any high intensity advanced weight training techniques such as forced reps, drop sets etc. Monitor your progress for the next month.

If you start growing then great stuff, you've figured out what you were doing wrong - you were training too much! If you start to lose strength or get smaller then up the intensity of your training or up the amount of sets your doing - but only by a small amount. This is quite a good position to be in as you know that you aren't training too much and can step by step increase your training until you reach the optimum amount of training for you.

Remember that it might not simply be your training that is to blame, so please read on...

Poor Diet

Unfortunately for some, bodybuilding isn't just about training hard down at the gym. Other factors in your life can have a dramatic impact on how quickly you grow, or indeed whether you grow at all.

Diet is one of those areas that many weight trainers do badly in. Too much focus can be put on exotic supplements (not blaming anybody though - all that tempting advertising and hype is enough to drag anyone into believing just taking a few supplements is all you need to worry about) and not enough attention is given to your actual diet - the foods that you eat.

Let me state things simply - if you aren't getting enough calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat and all the vitamins and minerals then you are affecting your growth, or even stunting it completely. Scary thought, isn't it? Just by not eating correctly all that effort down the gym week in, week out might be for nothing. Not just scary, horrifying!

You need to monitor your diet daily - keep a journal of some sort and work out how many calories and how much protein, carbs and fat you consume each day. After a week or two you should have a good idea of your average intake. Aim for a gram of protein per pound of your bodyweight per day and a starting figure of 15 x your bodyweight in pounds for calorie intake.

Once you are at this level, and training consistently, monitor your results for a month. Alter your diet accordingly - if you still aren't gaining weight, muscle and strength then increase both calories and protein by 10% a week until you start gaining weight and size. Monitor your fat levels and body weight fortnightly to ensure you don't gain too much fat too quickly. If you are gaining too much fat then reduce calories by 10% a week until your fat gains are more acceptible. Try and keep your protein intake high.

Try to ensure you are consuming adequate vitamins and minerals by taking a mega-multi vitamin-mineral tablet each day. Try to avoid as much processed food as possible - eating food cooked from scratch from whole foods. Processed foods contain incredibly high levels of sugar and salt and neither of these are beneficial in high amounts. Finally, try to follow the gist of the old saying 'Eat breakfast like a King, lunch like a Prince and dinner like a pauper' - try to consume most of your daily allowance of food before the evening as in the evening most of the energy in your food may be converted to fat.

Rest and Sleep

Even if your diet and training are spot on you could still struggle to gain muscle if you aren't getting enough rest and sleep (and not doing too much of other activities such as sport and hard labour) - afterall, your body needs to recover from your workouts before it can even begin to think about growing.

There are two general rules for sleep: the first is that you shouldn't need an alarm to wake you up in the mornings and second that each hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after. Stick with these rules and you should be getting enough good quality sleep that will allow you to grow.

As for rest you need to keep activity outside of your weight training to a reasonable minimum if you are to grow as quickly as you desire. Reason being that your body only has so much recuperative ability and if this is having to be shared with recuperating from other activity then you aren't going to recover as quickly or as well from your weight training as is necessary.

Last, but not least, water intake

Strange as it may seem, being thirsty is a complete growth killer - when you are dehydrated you will not be growing one iota. This is because your body is incredibly sensitive to your hyrdation levels - how much water is in your body - and when it gets low your body chemistry is negatively affected... it just doesn't work as well. Because of this your body concentrates on the important things like surviving and things like hypertrophy (muscle growth) are very much put on the back-burner.

In light of this it's obvious to see that drinking plenty of water every day is absolutely critical to your bodybuilding success and if you still aren't growing despite all the other above errors then look to your drinking and make sure you are drinking lots and lots of fluids every single day. Sure you might have to go to the toilet lots but that's a small price to pay for getting big.

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