5 Reasons Why You're Not Building Muscle Fast Enough And How To Make Faster Gains

5 Reasons Why You're Not Building Muscle Fast

Hello, what's going on guys? I'm on vacation in Brazil and it is absolutely amazing.

So, I want to get into five different things that I see from almost every naturally skinny guy, that they're doing wrong when they hit that plateau and they're not seeing those strengths and those lean muscle gains. So let me dive right into this list.

Unbalanced Training

1. Unbalanced Training:

First thing holding you back from lean muscle and strength gains is what I like to call unbalanced training. And this is basically when you put too much emphasis on one muscle group versus the opposing muscle group so think about these guys, so you have your chest and if all you do is develop your chest and you don't develop those back muscles to support it's going to really hold you back from increasing the muscles in your back and increasing your overall strength. So you have to think of all these opposing muscle groups and all these different groups in your body working in cohesion to each other.

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So that's why you can't just go to the gym and just work on your biceps every single day for years and years and have these monsters huge arms. You have to work the body's largest and strongest muscle groups. And you should really emphasize working on them equally so a really easy three-day training split is you can do a push/pull day. So you can do like bench incline and decline, and then you can do pull exercises like you do barbell row, seated row, you can do some dumbbell one-arm row, all that good stuff.

You know, push/pull, you're doing opposing muscle groups and then when you're doing like a leg day, make sure you're not putting too much emphasis on your quadriceps versus your hamstrings. I was actually making this mistake for a long time. And basically what was happening was my quadriceps were a lot stronger than my hamstrings so when I was running sprints and I was doing deadlift and things like that, I noticed I was pulling my hamstring.

I did it like once every three/four weeks for a while, it was really starting to bother me so I just kind of did my own research and figured out what was wrong. And I just noticed it once I focused on developing the strength in my hamstrings, everything just kind of went together and I started increasing my deadlift, I increased my deadlift by about 40 to 50 pounds in a month just by focusing on improving the strength of my hamstrings to catch up to my quads. So back to the three-day split, you can do a push/pull; a chest/back day. Have a leg day where you put equal emphasis on your quads and your hamstrings. And then have an arm day where your biceps/triceps and shoulders. This is a fantastic three-day training split that will give you guys that nice balance of all the best exercises so you're not overemphasizing one muscle group as opposed to another.

Training with Low Muscle Glycogen

2. Training with Low Muscle Glycogen:

The second thing holding you back from strength and lean muscle gains is training with low muscle glycogen. I actually did an experiment on this myself and I could not believe the difference it had made in my training. So I used to go on these little low-carb diet binges where I would go really low-carb and I'd go in the gym and try to go really heavy on the bench and the squat and the deadlift, so essentially I was training with really low muscle glycogen.

So when you eat carbohydrates, your body actually absorbs these carbohydrates to a point, it's called your muscle glycogen. So obviously when you eat too many carbohydrates you have a spillover effect where it turns into body fat. But you guys being naturally skinny; having that really fast metabolism, you really don't have that problem. So by eating these carbohydrates before you workout and you're filling your muscles with muscle glycogen, you will perform at your peak capacity. I started pounding carbohydrates before my workout, making sure my muscle glycogen levels were nice and full and the first week I was probably 15-20 pounds stronger on every single compound exercise. I literally felt like a beast just by eating more carbohydrates before I worked out. So I recommend eating carbs for breakfast and eating a lot of carbs right before you workout to fill up your muscle glycogen levels and make sure they're the slow digesting carbohydrates; the complex kind, like one of my favorites right now is, breakfast I'll have oatmeal with honey and then pre-workout I'll do a bunch of brown rice. Those are two carbohydrates that have really worked well for me. So pick carbohydrates that you respond well to and fill up your muscle glycogen and you guys will increase your strength, a bunch.

Dehydration

3. Dehydration:

The third thing that I see holding people back from strength and lean muscle gains is dehydration. Guys, you have got to drink so much water.

Think of your body as a machine and think of the water as this fuel that's going to help your body operate like a true machine, at its peak strength and its peak capacity. So you want to be drinking at least eight to ten gallons of water. The easiest thing that you can do is you fill up one of these gallon jugs and bring this big gallon jug with you everywhere you go and make sure that you finish it by the time you go to bed. And one gallon is the bare minimum. If you guys are training for an hour and a half or two hours in the gym, you want to be drinking like a gallon and a half to two gallons of water. And another little experiment I did is with the bench press, and I remember one day I bench pressed and I knew I was really dehydrated. I went to the beach and I hadn't drank a lot of water that day and it was later in the day and I maybe had liked one glass of water by like 4 pm and I tried to do a workout and I was so weak on the bench, I felt like my strength levels were 15-20 percent lower than they normally were. And then four days later I made sure I was super hydrated, I had carbs in my system, had probably about a gallon of water in my system before I bench pressed and I did like 25 pounds more, at ease.

So you will not believe the effect that dehydration has on your training unless you really compare and contrast being fully hydrated and being really dehydrated. So if you guys aren't seeing strength and lean muscle gains, it might be as simple as drinking more water.

Creatine

4. Creatine:

The fourth thing is creatine guys. Creatine has helped me so much. It's one of the few scientifically-proven supplements that actually helps you increase you strength. It's going to increase the energy output of your muscle fibers so when you're more explosive and you have more force to exert you guys are going to naturally get stronger and you're going to be able to push more weight on these compound exercises. And by increasing your strength, what are you going to do? You're going to build more lean muscle mass guys.

So increasing strength and increasing muscle mass - they go hand-in-hand. You guys aren't going to get huge unless you increase your strength levels by a lot. Creatine is my favorite supplement for naturally skinny guys to elevate your strength levels and pack on lean muscle mass. So I cannot recommend creatine enough.

Lack Of Sleep

5. Lack Of Sleep:

The last thing holding me back from strength and lean muscle gains is lack of sleep. So let me just break this down in a really easy manner to understand because this is so important. You could be doing everything else on point and if you forget this crucial element you guys will not see strength and lean muscle gains. So you break down your muscle tissue when you're in the gym so you're putting your body in a catabolic state when you exert all this force and output on your muscles and they break down and these little micro-tears occur. So what happens is your body needs to naturally repair itself and it only does this when you're sleeping. When you're sleeping all these hormones are secreting optimal levels like your HGH and your testosterone, all these amino acids are transported; your protein synthesis is occurring and you're repairing and you're growing lean muscle tissue.

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When you're not sleeping enough, you're just messing up this process and you're going in the gym the next day and you're breaking down more lean muscle tissue, you're continuing to go into a catabolic state, which is a muscle-wasting state and then you don't sleep again and you see the compound effect this could have over the course of time where you have three/four shitty nights of sleep, and you guys are working out and your over-training and you have school and you have work and your body is run down, how in the world are you going to gain lean muscle mass, guys? I know it's tough, it’s going to take some time management; it's going to take some discipline but if you guys are serious about lean muscle gains, I cannot stress enough the importance of at least seven hours of sleep.

I recommend like eight if you guys are training really hard and you're putting in a lot of effort in school and the gym and work and just all these things across the board, you're probably going to find that you're going to need eight hours of sleep to perform optimally. I know it's tough guys, I know that you guys have a lot going on and if one day you don't get a ton of sleep, don't stress out about it, don't think that your body is eating itself or anything like that. But just focus on at least five or six days a week to get really good sound sleep and you guys will maximize these lean muscle gains.

Your body is a machine and it works really hard and you need to give it some rest. So give your body some rest, you guys will see some incredible strength and lean muscle gains. And those were 5 things holding most naturally skinny guys back from those lean muscle and strength gains.

Thanks guys and stay healthy.