Growth Stoppers

The following are what can stop you from continuously growing muscles.

• Injury
• Illness
• Over-training
• Bad nutrition
• Stress
• Stagnation
• Lack of rest

Let’s address each one in turn and see how you can have constant muscle gains without any down-time.

Injury

This can happen at any time and can quite literally set you back months. Injury can happen whether you are doing push-ups at home or heavy squats in the gym. You must avoid it at ALL costs. The golden rule is if you think there is a problem, STOP.

• Always make sure you warm up.
• If you don’t feel up to it or feel weak, don’t push it.
• Stretch in between sets.
• If you do get injured, don’t rush back into training. Make sure you rest and only start training when you are 100% normal. To speed up injury healing you can take Creatine and protein.

Illness

A cold or flu is a sign that your body needs to rest. Never ignore this. If you are not feeling well, there is no point in going to the gym. Colds are direct signs from your body that you have been pushing too hard and you need to rest. Ignoring it will only mean putting off the inevitable. If you are ill, rest. You will make more progress when you hit the gym again feeling 100%.

Over-training

This is probably the number 1 reason why you don’t make as much gains as possible in the gym. 80% of newbie weight trainers over-train. For most of them, this is OK in the first few weeks but constant overt-training will mean three steps forward and two steps back.

Follow a sensible training regime where you are training each body-part NO MORE than once every 5-7 days.

This means something like:

• Monday: Chest & Triceps
• Tuesday: Rest
• Wednesday: Back & Biceps
• Friday: Rest
• Sat or Sunday: Legs

Bad nutrition

Bad nutrition means eating like a normal person (or worse) and not like a weight-lifter or someone wanting to build muscles. The quickest way to change bad nutrition to good nutrition is to follow the guidelines below:

• Cut out all junk foods.
• Make sure your plate has 50% good carbs: potatoes, rice, pasta.
• Make sure you eat 1-1.5g of high quality protein per lb of bodyweight every day.
• Supplement with a high quality whey protein drink like LA Whey after each training session and before sleep.
• Drink lots of water during the day: no fizzy drinks.
• Supplement with Omega Acids.
• Eat 5 portions of fruits and/or vegetables every day.
• Eat more often but less. You can eat as much as 7 times a day but much smaller meals.
• Don’t drink alcohol. Alcohol produces female hormones and kills off male hormones.

Stress

When you get stressed, your body goes into a panic state and releases the hormone cortisol. This hormone goes round your body, breaks muscle tissue down to be used as emergency fuel and tells your body to store more food as fat!

Try not to get stressed and find effective ways to reduce your stress levels. This can do wonders for you. Try: Yoga, meditation, relaxation, walks, listening to calming music. You can also take Sculpt which is a Patented supplement suitable for blocking off your muscles from Cortisol, so even when you get stressed, Cortisol won’t reach them to break them down!

Stagnation

To Stagnate means to “stop developing”. One of the surest ways to stop developing is to do the same thing all the time. You MUST ensure that you increase your weights and/or reps on every exercise EVERY week. This can 100% be done if you follow the other points in this article. Do the same thing = get the same results.

Lack of rest

You must sleep at least 8 hours every night. It is during sleep that your body produces hormones that build muscle and reduce fat. It is also during sleep that your body rebuilds and repairs muscle tissue. Can you see how bad sleep deprivation can be? If you don’t sleep enough, you basically won’t grow muscles!

Stick to the above guidelines and you will see more muscle growth coming on in as little as one week.